All I can say is WOW...What awesome beds and borders! I love the way you can walk anywhere there and you are surrounded with good hard work and beauty! Do you upkeep all of that yourself?...

Very nice. Such a feeling of accomplishment when it all comes together like that isn't it? Good eye for color complimenting, ect., too.

Great pictures. Your beds rock!! Must be so nice to have all that room to play with. Thnx for sharing....mark

I'm so awed looking at your gardens. Looks like public garden maintained by pros.

So neat and tidy, plants under control and all arranged so beautifully.

How do you keep everything so neat, healthy and looking full without being overcrowded?

If you get a chance I'd sure like to know what some of the individual plants are in each bed.

Thanks for sharing pics of what I can do only in my wildest dream...LOL.

Thanks to all of you for your kind words.

For Newbie, These beds are all about 5 yrs. old. We had many trees on this lot when we bought the place 31 yrs ago.

They were immature at the time. Who knew? We were very young. We had 2 pre-schoolers back then and little time for landscaping. I was lucky to have DH mow the lawn once a week.

As the years passed those trees (8 maples, 2 birches, a flowering crab apple, and various and assorted evergreens) grew to canopy almost the entire property. One beautiful maple covered my entire front lawn. You couldn't even see the house from the road.

5 yrs ago we decided to come out of the dark and into the light and had those trees mentioned above removed. We still have many large trees at the bottom rear of the backyard.

The fact that tree roots extended from the property line on one side to the property line on the other made it impossible to maintain any decent kind of lawn. Even weeds were unsuccessful.

I had tried many different plants, numerous rose bushes, and a sundry of shrubs. Most died. Many survived but did't thrive.

The first year following the tree removal the few shrubs and tiny hostas remaining in the landscape grew to what seemed like prehistoric proportions. They simply needed more sun.

As a result, everything you see was planted by my tiny little hands. It would seem I was trying to fulfill my lifelong desire for a colorful garden in very short order.

It is not difficult nor particularly time consuming to maintain.

The daylilies are my favorite plants and I anticipate their blooming every year, but they do require deadheading every day to keep them tidy looking. Not difficult. But early every morning, I grab my pail and have the opportunity to reaquaint myself with each and every plant while performing what might otherwise be a tedious chore.

It provides me with the information on what may need attention such as fall division, additional water, a little tender loving pruning.

I love it all.

This was originally posted so I could provide a little bit of background on the layout of the beds. I will be posting individual plant photos soon.

Thanks again,

Liz P

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. I can't say that enough -----Gorgeous!!!

Lovely yard and flowers!

The second to the last photo is intriguing...what is that lovely thing in the middle inviting me to sit under it? It is captivating!

The second to the last photo contains the image of a doublefile viburnum. It was covered with white lacecap type flowers (late May-early June) on branches that were all the way to the ground. It looked like a wedding gown. DH destroyed several of the low lying branches with the weed whacker or lawn mower. It looked horrible so I cut them back, which made the shrub look like it was tree form. The viburnum has already started to regrow those branches and now I have to decide whether to let them continue to return to their natural form or keep them trimmed. I do have 2 others in their totally natural state.

P.S. I forgot to mention that the red you see are berries (this is a relative of the cranberry bush). The birds absolutely love them and the shrub will be picked clean well before fall. DH and I have tried them. They have little to no taste and mostly consist of a hard pit. Hardly worth the trouble to eat them. But then, I'm not a bird!