Outdoor decor...

You know how I've given you tours of the inside of my house ...well today we are going to do a tour of the outside as recently I have been spending lots of time on this. Okay, this is what my house looked like a couple of weeks ago...drab and BORING!!!

This is what it looks like today... (you can make the pictures bigger to see the details)

The window boxes were my first addition to  the outdoor decor... I'm loving how the wave petunias are filling in and spilling over! Then I got rid of 3 barberry bushes... all scratchy and sticker-y... and replaced it with this Ninebark Treeform and lots of perennials...

Then I added more flowers in pots...

Zinnas and sunflowers in the middle...

And on the end a new rose bush... now I told myself no more rose bushes as I have enough trouble keeping the deer from pruning the 3 I already have but I could not resist this one. It is called Fired Up and the blooms start out being yellow and orange striped and the as the bloom matures it turns to almost all orange. A striped rose??? If only they made a polka dot one...LOL!

Around the corner from this display are the 3 rose bushes  that I and the deer attend to regularly...

From left to right.. the first one is a David Austin English rose called Charlotte... I love how the blooms look like peonies!

And the next bush is a floribunda... I wish I remembered what the name of this one is... I vaguely remember something like Jump for Joy... if that isn't the name it is a good one...LOL...anyway, the roses start out being a peach color with tha yellow center and in real life they glow...really they do. This bush is loaded with buds. I'm going out almost every day and clipping off buds whenever they are in clusters of 2 or more so I get one bigger rose versus two smaller roses... and it never seems to stop producing buds... love it!

The last bush is another one that I don't remember the name of but it has lovely deep rose pink blooms with an English rose look... it didn't have any really good blooms to take a picture of today but it has tons of buds so maybe tomorrow. I pruned all 3 of these bushes back to about 15" tall in the Spring and they have just exploded... each one is about 3 feet in width and at least 3 feet in height. My first successful rose garden!

Now around to the front of the house... I live on a corner so I have two front yards...

This is the first window box I planted and it has a 2 week head start on the ones on the other side of the house..

Next year I'm going to mix up the colors more instead of having the white seperate from the pink...and I think I'll throw in some of the purple and white striped ones like I put in these boxes...

I've got 3 boxes like this on the front porch and they kinda mimic the windox boxes...

And on the front porch steps my geraniums and alyssum is doing well too..

Along with the pyramid of petunias by the back door...

When I moved to this house one of my biggest regrets was giving up the large garden I had at my other house...however I think I've made up for it... I don't have a bunch of large beds like I did there but I'm cramming as much as I can into the small spaces I do have. And it makes me HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY!

I've had some lovely comments from the neighbors... a lady walking her dog the other night stopped to tell me that it gets prettier every time she walks by... what a lovely thing to say! And another person told me that the yard has personality... I like that too! I do feel that I am putting my mark on the house and the yard. I was told the guy who owned the house before me was quite a character and he doted on the lawn and the yard... another neighbor said she thought he was looking down from heaven and smiling when he saw what I have done... I hope so!


Hope you enjoyed the tour... as you can see I've used every color that I could in the yard... kinda like my quilts... that is probably no coincidence...LOL!

happy gardening-
carol fun