Something Completely Different Today

I spent the afternoon tidying up my big perennial garden - it's in the front of my house. After some hemming and hawing I decided to share a couple of photos of the garden with you. And know you'll know a LOT more about where I live and what my garden looks like (a far cry from the Japanese Garden photo a couple of days ago!).

People always think that I have an amazing garden but truth be told, I really only take photos of the plants that are interesting at any one time...it's a very tiny section of the garden really :-) In the summer parts of it look pretty good. In the winter, it's boring.  So it's in flux again - I've decided that I need some more winter interest plants, so this will be a year of substantial change. I have our landscape maintenance guy coming Wednesday to help me dig out all the plants I don't want in the garden anymore. He can do it probably 10 times faster than I can.

We built this basalt wall in 2014 - (I say "we"...well, we paid to have it built!) it's 113' long from one end to the other, and it was a grass slope before it got built. I moved in to my now-husband's house out here in the Rock Creek  neighborhood of Portland in 2013. And I needed a garden. Or two. I'll show you the back garden, completed last year, some other time.

Meanwhile, this is a work in progress. It's changed every year, as most gardens do. So it will be fun to see the progress over the months to come. You can see that the garden starts on the right property line and goes back to a wooden fence. It follows along the sidewalk and then curves elegantly around to a door in the fence that goes to the back yard. Some of it got tidied today...it's not a one-day job, but it looks better than it has, well maybe forever. 

But the best part about today is that I saw a ladybug while I was moving leaves around. That means they are coming out of hibernation! No more winter....right?