Growing a Garden of my Own

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own....

This is the story of my garden...and how it has grown.

One of the garden signs I painted on a piece of tin.  I love this one and thought it would serve as the perfect title picture! :)

My husband and I rented a cute little house during our first two years of marriage.  The inside of the house was great, but the landscaping left something to be desired.  We didn't want to put a lot of time or money into a garden that we could not keep when we decided to move.  We moved into the house in July 2009, and I got my flower fix with a couple of planted pots by the front door.  In April 2010, my parents came to the rescue!  They came down for the weekend with plants in hand (actually...in the back of the vehicle).  We picked up some landscape edging, plastic weed lining, potting soil, and mulch.  I can't find a 'before' picture...but it was pretty much four little meatball shaped shrubs (you can see them in the picture above) and nothing else.  No mulch...no border...just grass.  And weeds.  My daddy loosened the ground and my mom and I arranged the plants and gave them their new home in the earth.  We put together this flower bed that was just perfect.

This picture was taken about a month later after the plants starting filling in.  We planted a combination of annuals and perennials.  I love when everything fills in together and is in bloom.

The right end of the flowerbed was used as a veggie garden with a couple of tomato and pepper plants.  The marigolds help to keep the pests away from the vegetable plants.

These bright zinnias were grown from seeds in a pot on our back deck.

 The zinnias above as they were starting to come up...plant seeds; grow joy!

 I have grown to love bright yellow lantana... a love that was rooted in my mother's garden.  She always planted yellow lantana and purple wave petunias in the same bed.  They mingled together and the color combination was absolutely amazing.

 My bright hibiscus was a colorful welcome by the front door.

Fast forward 2 years...

We were ready and able to buy a place that we could truly call our own.

We found this great house with the help of our real estate agent. 

We fell in love with the house and saw lots of potential both inside and out.  We closed on the house at the end of April 2011 and began stripping wallpaper that same night. 

Not the best pictures of me, but it is me in action. 

We were so excited to make our new house our home!

But you aren't here to see the inside renovations...you are ready to see the yard, right?

You can see the front yard in the picture above where we are standing in front of the house.  It is a decent size, but was just overgrown and needed some TLC.  Established shrubs, overcrowded azaleas, and lots of weeds filled the beds against the front of the house and circled the pine trees in the middle of the yard.  We tackled projects inside the house before we started on the yard.  We really wanted most of the walls painted before we starting moving furniture in.  Here are the 'before' pictures of the yard.  If you haven't discovered this yet, I am sure you are coming to the quick realization that this post is filled with lots of pictures.

The right side of our house...behind the garage.

These Easter lillies are growing in random places throughout the flowerbeds.

Around the corner from the bay window area.

Around the corner to the back of the house...this is the back yard.

Backyard patio area.

Directly across from the patio.  These are blueberry trees and a grapevine.

The running grapevine.  The daughter of the previous owners gave us a lot of history behind the house and shared sweet stories with us.  This grapevine was planted when they first moved here, and the Mrs. would make stuffed grape leaves.  I will have to attempt to make them one day.

The left corner of the backyard.

This is the left side of the house.  This fig tree is humongous and produces LOTS of figs.

Figs were just starting to produce when we purchased the house.

So were the blueberries.

One of the first things we did in the backyard was to clean out around the back fence where the blueberry trees were located.

Then we moved to the front yard and started in the flower beds around the front of the house.  It was quite a chore to dig out 20 years of growth.

There were no tall shrubs in this area.  There was a low-growing groundcover type shrub and lots of briars.

We discovered that we had a turtle sharing our yard with us.  We named him Jimmie.

We planted this beautiful pale yellow Michelangelo rose in the flowerbed closest to the front door.  We also planted knock-out roses, pentas, dianthus, marigolds, and vinca.

Our Michelangelo rose in full bloom. 

 Once we had a good start on the front beds, we moved around to the right side of the house. 

Yellow trailing lantana and black-eyed susans, transplanted from our old house.

 The lyropy was already here, we just cleaned it up a bit and planted some zinnias and marigolds in for color.  We also added a few hostas and a couple of squash plants.  The squash plants were beautiful, but they never produced vegetables.  Oh well...

I love when we have garden visitors!

Okay...here's the dramatic change you've been waiting for.  This area of the yard was the most labor intensive, but in return was the most rewarding.

 Cleaning out the center flower bed in the front yard.  This was after Day 1.

 The pile of yard waste after Day 1.

 I can't remember how many days it took us to do this...

it seemed like forever!  But we took everything out except the azaleas. 

 More yard waste.  The city workers loved us I'm sure!

Much better!

If you don't feel like scrolling back up, here is a before and after:

Browning loves his new yard. 

He even found an old baseball hidden in the center flowerbed while we were working.

I hope you have enjoyed watching my garden unfold in this post.  We have made more changes, but I will share them with you in later posts.  The beauty of a garden and of nature in general is that it is always changing.  I look forward to sharing many more stories with you from my garden.