One fun thing about a new house is wondering what will bloom in the spring. When we moved in here the yard was atrocious. I seriously considered calling the guy from Desperate Landscapes on the DIY channel to help. I didn’t even know where to start. There was a monstrous rose bush that had thorns so huge it looked like it should have been one of a phalanx surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. At some point it must have started growing sideways because someone had put a rope around it and tied it to the porch. It had been that way a looooong time. How do I know? The paint on our porch is old and flaky, but when it had last been painted whoever did it also painted the rosebush rope. Seriously. There’s a pine tree next to our driveway that was being choked by crazy grapevines that came over the fence from next door. The so-called flower bed at the front of the house was in reality a weed bed, and the brick edging was broken and partially missing. Oh, and there were random maple trees that had been allowed to grow all over–and I’m not talking little bitty ones. They were a good 10-12 feet tall. We couldn’t see out of our dining room windows because of them. It looked like everything had been allowed to grow wildly unchecked and unpruned for a decade at least.

Now, I’m not all that great with yardwork–I’m good with things in pots and containers, but beyond that I’m never really inspired. So what did I do, you ask? Well, I started by asking my landlady to get someone to get rid of the superfluous maple trees. Then I bought thick leather gloves and got rid of that wretched rosebush. And then I went on a rampage: trimming, pruning, weeding, digging, and finally, planting two pleasant bushes in the rehabilitated flower bed. When I was done, I was dirty and exhausted and we ate delivered pizza that night, but at least the yard was no longer an abomination!

So the yard looked good, but since we moved in at the end of August we didn’t know what spring or summer flowers we might have. I had trimmed some bushes I thought might bloom, but I really didn’t know. I knew we had hydrangeas, and I knew we had bulbs of some sort (since I had dug them up while cleaning out the flower bed–oops!), but beyond that I had no idea.

The first surprise was that we have wild violets all over the yard. They started growing before the grass did so we got to enjoy them for a couple of weeks. Then during the past two weeks there was a veritable explosion of flowers! We have pink and red peonies, which I love (we had them in Belgium), and purple irises, pink buds starting on a bush at the side of the house, and some unknown orange flowers. Unknown to me anyway. I almost chopped them down while they were growing because the weird pod things that the blooms come out of creeped me out. I finally realized it was because it reminded me of the weed from Larry-Boy and the Rumor Weed. Which probably proves I have a serious psychosis of some kind, but let’s ignore that. Here’s some pics–if anyone knows what it is, let me know.

The petals are papery–not as crepe-papery as poppies, but similar. Aren’t the pods creepy? Maybe it’s just me.

I’m going to plant some annuals now that it seems like the weather will stay warm. Normally I would grow herbs in the summer, but we’ll be gone so long it doesn’t seem likely they’d survive our absence. The only other thing I’ve done is stick a huge pot of flowers in the tree stump–there’s a tree in the backyard which had split in half about 5 feet up. One half is alive and well, all that’s left of the other half is an empty stump. The only thing people came up to do with it in the past was to stick twigs and branches into it. *rolls eyes*  I would like to think I have a little more inspiration than that! You can be the judge:

I rather like it.

Hope you are all having a lovely week! Oh, and today we are one month down in our fifteen month countdown–only fourteen to go! Hopefully they will all go as quickly as this one has gone.

~Amy~