The Gardens From The Porch Perspective

Have you ever stood in one place to take a few pictures in all the different directions of your garden? It's a great way to observe the progress of your garden from slightly different perspectives. (Click on any of the below pictures to enlarge them.)

We'll start here against the house. Up close there is a pyracantha and a young birch. The birch was planted to give a fast growing privacy screen for the back porch. Beyond those plantings is a Salvia coccinea and a Chocolate eupatorium.  The eupatorium is probably in the wrong spot as the salvia is much taller and hides the dark colored foliage of the chocolate eupatorium. The sad looking plant in the back of the picture is a red twig dogwood that needed moved form another location - it's a little shocked right now. A crape myrtle stands in front of it and blocks a bathroom window.

Here we'll move a little more to the right and you'll see the side border garden in the back of the picture. It doubles as a rain garden and absorbs a good deal of moisture from the community drainage areas. In the center of the picture is one of my favorite viburnums: arrowwood. The stepping stones would be more prominent but the grass has encroached around the edges. I meant to get the trimmer out last time I mowed to clean them up but forgot.

If we continue our rotation you can see the birdbath garden and the garden shed in the back. It looks like I need to refill the bird feeders! The bird bath garden looks like it's all foliage right now with a couple small spots of color but once the butterfly bush blooms that will change. To the left is achillea and a Burkwood viburnum (I hope you have one of these for the scent in the spring, if not put it on your "buy list"!)

From this perspective you can see the vegetable garden and the garden shed. In the middle is a nice little kids table the girls enjoy playing with. The first tree we planted in our yard is the maple tree to the right between the camera and the vegetable garden.

Patio Under Construction

Here's where I cook! You can see smoke coming from the grill that was cooking burgers when the picture was taken. I also had campfire potatoes (sweet potatoes, red potatoes, onions, rosemary, sage and of course butter wrapped in a foil pack) on the grill. I think in this case the side dish became the dinner feature! I built the patio two years ago. It's permeable which is great for drainage but the grass and weeds sometimes emerge. Weeds are always opportunistic! All I need to do is dump some boiling water on the tough ones and pull the easy ones and it's all cleaned up.

Here's the last picture for this post and it looks out across the patio toward the Japanese maple garden and the rain garden. To the right is an arborvitae which was planted to block the view of the trash can. The bushy plant in front of the Japanese maple is a sage which bloomed profusely this year. That's been great, but I really think I liked it better in my potatoes!