Spring Fever: Flowers on the Brain

Last night I dreamt about flowers. Beautiful hot pink geraniums, tall black eyed susans, showy ice plants, colorful columbines and hummingbirds. I think it's a sign...I've got serious spring fever. Figures. Today it has snowed about a foot.

Our backyard is amazing. We had no idea when we bought it in the middle of winter that it would be so marvelous come spring time.


Sadly we had to cut down that large cottonwood tree, but just look how beautiful this is!

I told you earlier this week about how we're tearing out overgrown trees and bushes up against the house so we can paint the exterior. I mentioned that I'm going to transplant some day lilies from Mom's house in the back where we're losing two large bushes. I think between those and what you can see going on in that picture above, the backyard will be colorful and alive. But the front...



Sorry for the fuzzy picture. It's from the MLS listing. I never took pictures with my camera because I'm embarrassed of it.

We don't have a lot of space in the front. So I feel like a little bit of work and some colorful flowers will go a long way. But there's a lot of work to do (including exterior paint) before I can start planting flowers.

There's a cottonwood stump in the middle of that brick circle thing. (I wish the previous owners would have had the stump ground when they cut it down--now we get to deal with it.) So we're planning to do that (getting rid of the brick circle and the wood chips too) plus removing all the juniper bushes and the three deciduous berry colored bushes.

We'll basically have a blank slate at that point, minus the sidewalk from the drive to the porch, which I think will have to go too. We want to "widen" the driveway where you currently see the juniper bush row. We'll do a nice paver row and the extend that up to the front door.



Love the look of this walkway. I think we could use it to extend the driveway about a foot on each side too. From Houzz.com



We'll probably just place new sod over the place where the tree stump is. Then I can start thinking about flowers.

The front of the house faces southwest and it takes a beating in the afternoon sun. PLUS we're going to be in drought restrictions again. So I need to be smart about what goes in the newly found space. After consulting Better Homes and Gardens website and magazine as well as absorbing all I can from a friend's gardening book collection, I have some pretty good ideas.

Here's the basic layout I'm going to follow with these plants. Gotta love Better Homes and Gardens! Their free garden plans provide the names of the plants, how many you need, where to plant them, etc. Sort of foolproof. (Heaven knows I could use THAT...I really know NOTHING about flower gardening) 


"Low Care Sidewalk Garden" from BHG.com. (Sounds perfect!)

I can't wait to get started on the exterior. Finally our neighbors will start to see that we really do care about our house.

~Karli