Gorgeous flowers! You have a lovely garden.

~ Cat

How delightful your garden is. Quite truthfully it is as pretty or more so than gardens featured in gardening magazines. You should be proud of how you planned the layout and of the good care you give your plants.
Kristi

Somebody has worked their **** off. Well worth the labor!
Very lovely.

love the lilies!!!

Absolutely stunning!!! You should send those photos to birds and bloom.
TFS
Kathi

OOoEee, pretties!! Wonderful beds & great combos of the blooms! I wish I had some rocks like yours to use in my beds.

~Rosemarie

Beautiful layout! I love the mixture of plants you've combined to make these gardens. You really have an eye!

Nancy

I should explain that these gardens are primarily my mother's.

I just started getting into gardening in a big way last year, with a vegetable garden. This summer, I did a lot of work along with my mother and father in a major expansion of the flower gardens. Most of the plants that you see in these pictures were planted in earlier years by my mom, who has been an avid gardener for over 20 years since I was a very little kid. Even with this year's gardens, mom was the one who picked most of the plants and did most of the design. I have been playing a "supporting role", albeit a fairly large one. Unfortunately, my mother isn't particularly interested in photographing or posting about her own gardens, so I have become a sort of unofficial photographer and online representative for the gardens that she is still basically in charge of.

As an additional note, when I refer to "our" gardens I am referring to my mother, father, and myself. My father has less interest in gardening than my mother or myself, but he does quite a bit of work, too.

My mother is a seasoned garden veteran who has learned by over 20 years of trial and error about how to get plants to grow well in soil that isn't the worst around, but isn't particularly great, either. I'm more into reading about gardens and plants, trying to identify plants and weeds, and photographing than my mother is. As far as actually planting and growing, I'm still definitely in the "newbie" stage.

Rosemarie - One thing that there is no shortage of in this part of Massachusetts is rocks! All of the rocks in those pictures were simply removed from the top 8-10 inches of soil at various points when the garden beds were being extended.

The large rocks, that is - the gravel was purchased.

Nice pictures.Nice garden. Wish I could grow lillies. I have some daylillies and wanted to try the other kind, til I heard that deer think they're tasty. I don't want to encourage them any more than I already have. You'd think that with all the woods chock full of vegetation they'd find enough to eat.

I would say you three make a great team! The gardens are beautiful. How wonderful you got interested soon enough for your mother to help teach you. These are memories you will have forever, to say nothing of the gardens!

gld

Your garden is exactly the look I am aiming for in my own. I have a new home so I'm starting from scratch and everything looks so young and impish right now but next year hopefully it will look better!

I wonder if you can tell me the name/variety of the round shrub on the left side of the third photo. How old is it? Does it have to be trimmed/shaped to look like that?

Thanks so much for sharing your family's garden. Beautiful!!

Laura

lioninthelake - It's actually more of my mother's garden, but I have been helping her more and more.

The shrub on the left side of the third photo is some type of Juniper, but I honestly don't remember the exact species or cultivar. It has been there for several years - I would guess about 7 years. It does require a good trimming at least once a year - if we didn't trim it, it would probably be MUCH larger - big enough to swallow up at least part of the birdbath to the right.