Something relatively new to me? GARDENING. I have a pretty bad case of grey-thumb concerning indoor plants. I usually just avoid those. (They gather dust and die. Why would I even go there?) I have an ongoing love affaire with orchids... But that's a subject for a whole other post in and of itself..
Basically, I have enjoyed making little flower beds for my balconies. It's usually going alright until that one super hot week where I forget to water them. But I mean, I enjoy gardening.. I think.
Enter LIVING IN THE SUBURBS. Everybody, and their mother, have lawns like they spent 48hrs worth of weekend on all four in their flowers and shrubs, every weekend of their life since before I was born. (And actually, I think they did, or hired someone to do it.) It's pretty intimidating. And overwhelming. We have a bunch of things planted from previous girlfriend owners and we're trying to figure out what we want. And.. how to get there. Baby steps. My boyfriend is actually really cool with helping me out.. He's not like super-into-it-going-to-breed-roses kinda thing, but he's pretty darn good with the shovel and likes to spend time with me and the dog outside when it's sunny. I also bribe him with cold limonade / beers and bbqs. We're only just starting to figure out the garden, but it's been really fun so far! And I'm looking forward to seeing things grow or die.
Front garden : We have a lot of tulips coming out every year. We're pretty lucky! They are the Mc Donald's
color kind ;) We have those really cute shrubs that are all red tiny leaves right now. (see top picture) I know they are not red during the summer.. more like lime green. And they make tiny grape-like bunches of pink flowers.. If anybody knows what it is, holla.
I'm a sucker for Forsythias. I had one as a gift last year when I had just moved in. (It was actually a really special gift to me, so I'm extra found of those now) We just bought him a friend last weekend, and planted it right beside. We figured, it did not die during the winter, so... capitalizing on that. :)
We are doing as much Juniper as possible. The bluish-grey types are super nice, and they seem low-maintenance and hopefully will crawl a lot within a couple years.
Last summer a nice surprise was
some Iris, and
even some tiger lilies! I did not even know these grew here!! We have a buttload of Hemerocalles (I hate those, I don't know why). Overall... that's a LOT of color.. but hey.. it's summer? And those are already there, I'm not about to kill plants, on purpose.
I received poppies as a birthday present last year, looking forward to see if they'll grow back this summer! They were all sorts of color.. yellow, red, orange and purple.
We already have a hosta in the front, we just planted two spirea, and I'll try and steel some white hydrangea from my Mom, to sort of add more white to this rainbow.
The backyard is pretty much all shade. We have more hosta there and we just planted some japanese fern. Hoping they'll come out and look healthy! Such beauty, right!?
I adore double-begonias. And we both love dusty miller. I'll probably make big flower beds out of just those two things. We
had begonias last year and they did really good all summer. My gardening mentra is: stick with whatever works ;)
The flower beds in the front are on each sides of the front door. (I use my old flower beds boxes that are made out of wood, that I painted matte black.) I like to keep things simple, and white. More dusty miller. More, more, more. Velvety goodness.
I just wrote a freakin' lot about flowers... I'm such a grown up.
