Pictures From Our Garden

Well it has been five months today since the tornado hit our home and I thought I would do another before and after to show you the progress we have made. It’s amazing to think we have done all this in such a short time. I didn’t realize just how much we had accomplished. Jamie and I have put every spare penny (and some that weren't spare) that we have back into our yard and with the help of a lot of very generous people this is what we have accomplished. The pictures below are reminders of what we started with the first of March this year "post bulldozer" and after some re-leveling to the yard

Here are some current shots of the garden and all we have planted since then. Phillip from Dirt Therapy encouraged me to post these pictures. The lion below is one of two that will flank the entrance to the garden when we get it built. I really need to sit down and draw out the plans to it, but you all know how it is. You can’t do everything at once no matter how hard you try; time and money just won’t let you.

This is a small bed in the front right corner as you face the backyard. Eventually it will be incorporated into a bed that runs the perimeter of the garden. That bed is half way completed and you will see pictures of it later in this post. The tree in the bed is a ‘Glowing Embers’ Japanese maple.

This is an island bed on the right side of the yard that will also be included in the large bed I was discussing. If you look in the very back corner you’ll see a fairly large ‘Crimson Queen’ Japanese maple that survived the storm. I was so thankful it did, we lost all the other trees except it. We liked the way this looked before the storm so we replanted it the same way. We did get Eastern Redbuds this time by mistake instead of the Texas Redbuds that were there previously.

This is part of the bed that I was saying would run the entire perimeter of the yard. I love our little Venus statue. See the mermaid sitting on the rock in the birdbath? She was a great clearance find.

Here is more of the same bed moving into what we like to call the tropical section.

Here’s another lion posing in the far back left corner. It may sound crazy but I want to fill the garden with them. There are three more I would like to have. I want two holding the shields with their paws and I want one lying down and looking to the side. This one got a little beat up in the storm and will eventually need to be replaced with a similar one in the same pose.

Here is our arbor which was a gift from one the pharmacist Jamie works with. We started a new bed this week and have transplanted grass in all the bare spots. I hope it takes off and fills in well. I despise all those bare spots. The grass has really grown in pretty fast though so I shouldn’t complain. We have about five different types, but by George at least it’s grass. Some one asked me not so long ago why I was so eager for it to grow back when I was just going to turn around and dig it up.

This is one of my beautiful rocks. We have a pretty good collection of them. If we are driving some where and I see one on the side of the road in the middle of no where it’s going home with me. Before we got my truck we would haul so many rocks home in the trunk Jamie’s car the tires would almost scrub.

There was such a huge mess in the middle of the back yard, I decided the best way to get rid of it was to cover it up with a flower bed, so we did and it was a big one. To make matters worse, as we were cleaning out the tree roots from the Poplar, Pear and the Maple we realizes the stumps were still there and had only been ground down to a certain point. So what did we do? We dug them up and drug them out. We are talking about forty year old trees here people. I’m not even going to tell you how hard that was to do. Anyway, here is the end result of our efforts. It will need some tweaking over the years, but for now it gives us color.