My only excuse is that the sun finally did come out, so I was thoroughly distracted with plant life. It's funny - ever since a Lowe's opened up and expanded my nursery shopping stops to 3 in number, I've been practically frothing in ecstasy from a horticultural perspective, of course. (If I did that literally, they might ban me from the store. Suffice it to say that one discreet drool cup should keep the workers there from catching onto the fact that you're a plant junkie, just in for "one more fix", shopping in a black-out haze where two days later you'll realize you brought home some bizarre daisy thingie on discount and it looks like alien fingers on its petals. Hahaha. Ha. Ha...)
At this moment, I'm trying to get my image manipulation program to behave so that I can at least post some choice pictures for you all. (All three of you all. Err...) It kept crashing. Oh! Here we go.
So clearly, it's been a long time since I've both updated AND cleared out my digital camera. Wince! Okay, this is the bed known as "the rockery" (one side of it, anyways), chock full of tulips, verbena, hydrangea, rosemary, Japanese maples, black mondo grass, roses, a magnolia...lots and lots of plants are in there. Especially right now, a few months after this pic was taken. Like I said. Blame nursery stores and my torrid plant addiction.
The best part of these pics is that they come with a very special guarantee. I "guarantee" that if I can grow it and keep it alive in this Northwest weather that keeps getting more bizarre each year, then so can you! Trust me when I say that I'm not Super Gardener. You do not need advanced degrees or hyper-attentive work to grow the things I do. I tell people that I garden under the Darwinian principle of "survival of the fittest" - all plants that fail to meet or exceed expectations are savagely ripped from their beds and displayed before its peers in a threatening manner (in hindsight, this may not be what Darwin was thinking of and more of a Rambo principle of gardening). Too much attention to your plants may indeed spoil them - I once had about 50 roses and took great pains to meet their needs and they still died. Never again will I be fooled into thinking that tough love with your garden isn't a better idea. It must be working, too, because frankly most of them don't have the balls to die on my watch.
Here's two of the back garden beds, also known as the "geometric beds". You can't see this effect due to my vigilant weed-eating of the area around the edging just the other day, but I assure you that they are shapely and attractive. This is a garden bed that mixes up the common area into multi-functional uses, which I discovered last year make it look even more attractive. There's a plum/apple franken-tree (trees grafted together that are two different trees is so Mary Shelley that I can't think of what else to refer to it as), Lily of the Nile, Spanish Lavender, two kinds of cabbage, Alyssum, three roses, assorted Asiatic lilies, two mini hydrangeas, a peony, Salvia, pansies and more. This bed is easy to care for and the local birds love the area. That reminds me. I need to put a suet cake or at least some seed out there for them. I give a 50/50 chance that I'll remember that.
Gah! I'll have to post more photos later. The one I'm using needs to be strangled and thrown to the place where bad computer programs go when they die. Tired of it crashing on me. Have a good day, everyone.
