Saturday, July 16, 2016

You asked and I provided

A couple of followers asked for pictures of the flower beds after we did all the work. So the sun was out and I went out and took pictures. This is the back side of my house. It is visible from the incoming road into the park we live in. We live in a manufactured home community. My house is visible from three sides so we have lots of flower beds. 

This is the south side of my garage. It has flower beds on three sides. My husband makes the birdhouses we have in out yard also. 

This is the North side of my shed. Jeff and my Grandson sided it this year to preserve the wood underneath. This is the same siding we have on our house. As the flowers were spent on several of the day lilies we cut them back and allow the leaves to regrow. So if there is a void in the flower beds it is likely that we cut the flowers back and it was easier to mulch some of the areas. 

We were given these limestone pieces several years ago and we turned an area in the yard into a flower bed. We live along the Rock River so the large rocks come from the River bed. We used some of them in the flower beds for focal points. 

This is my East side of the back of my house. We have a French door where the mini deck is. We have a couple benches on the deck and it covers the intense sunlight in the morning. We have Wisteria starting to grow up to the trellis. Many of the plants I have are starts from friends or I found them in the dumpster. Yes in the dumpsters. I then have divided and replanted a lot of them to extend all the flower beds. 

This is the south side of the house. As you can see we have voids. That is where day lilies were and they were spent. To the right of the picture we had two huge Russian Sage plants. We did cut them back. They were full of weeds down in the stems and we had to clean them out. They are starting to grow again. We cut them back every fall and they come out bushier next spring. The Cornflowers are indigenous to the prairies here in Illinois so I made sure  I had some for my flower beds. 

 This is the flower bed in front of my house on the West side.We have Red Penstemon and Blue Columbine, red Coral bell flowers and some ground cover sedums.
This is a new plant we got this year. It is called Archillea not sure if this is just a name or a variety. The flowers are all shades of pink and really unusual green foliage.

This is a lot of flower beds, but we have skirting around our house and weed whackers are hard on the vinyl skirting. so we decided to make flower beds so the solution was flower beds around all sides of the house and garage. Less trimming and the effect is striking. We, as I said, have our house visible  on three sides. So the colors against the white siding were important to me so it wasn't so boring. 

Doesn't that sound like a quilter. Color everywhere. I hope you enjoyed the yard tour. We like to keep our yard trimmed and looking in really good shape. We spend a lot of money on fertilizer and weed killer plus mulch and I think it has paid off. Chris 

2 comments:

Shepherdess55 said...

Thank you for the tour of your flower beds. Achillea is the latin genus name and Yarrow is the common name. There are several pink varieties such as Island Pink and Pink Grapefruit.

I wish my flower beds were as tidy as yours. Blooming in my garden right now are catanache, daylilies, phlox, coneflower, early chrysanthemums, astilbe, lavender and white butterfly weed.

Katie M. said...

Beautiful yard, Chris! Living in the desert would cost a fortune to maintain that much foliage :-) But I have a few plants here and there, but nothing to even come close to what you have!