gardens, before and after

I finally got around to scanning some pics I've taken of the changes we've been making in our landscaping this year. I've been meaning to post these for a couple months now, LOL! We've made relatively small changes, but they sure do make a difference in our yard.

This is the first year we've done any work in our backyard. I started by digging along the fence by the eastern gate. This area used to be all weeds and grass, plus one lonely wild rose bush and a few scraggly hostas and tiger lilies. This is how it looked when I first started digging:

This is when we were about half-finished: And this is how it looked when we were done. This pic was taken back in April ~ the garden is much fuller now. I planted a blueberry bush at the end there, plus some blue balloon flowers and several astilbe plants (different colors) which are not in this picture:
My plan is to eventually continue this garden all the way along the fence ~ that will mean a lot more digging, though!

Here is the western gate. I forgot to take a before picture, but all that was back here in the past was some dirt and a bunch of weeds. I cleared it out, added the mulch, the fern that is shown here, some lily-of-the-valley (which didn't take, unfortunately), and a bleeding heart plant. We are hoping to eventually put pavers where all that dirt is, to make a pretty walkway into the backyard:

This is George's big project, and we are all so pleased with how it turned out! The eastern side of our house used to look like this ~ yuck! (Actually, I never did get a BEFORE before pic ~ when we first moved in, there were 2 hugely overgrown bushes along here ~ you couldn't even get through this area to enter the gate!):

This spring, George started building a low stone wall along the house, for us to use as a planter. He and the kids bought me a 2nd lilac bush for Mother's Day, which you can see in the middle of the photo:
He finally finished the project last month, and it just looks awesome! The wisteria that I planted last year has now grown all the way up that lattice trellis. The flowers in the whiskey barrel (purple verbena, orange marigolds, and yellow daisies) look so pretty! And I planted some red coral bells in between the lilac bushes:

This is another project that came out great, though it might be hard to tell from the pictures. This "little" corner of land (which did not seem so little as I was digging it all out!) was another weedy area that was difficult to mow. That big rock was originally closer to the street (in that dirt spot), but over the winter, the snow plow hit it and upended it. We rolled that very heavy thing over (with help from 4 teenage boys!) so that it will not be in the way of the snow plow any more.

I just love how this garden came out ~ the rock is a favorite place to go and sit now, and the plants are all doing wonderfully there. (This pic was taken shortly after planting ~ they have all grown quite a bit since then!) We planted purple coneflowers, sage, blue festuca grass, coreopsis, and dwarf fountain grass. Our neighbors have all commented on how nice it looks:

There are a few other projects I've done, but I realized today that I hadn't taken any "after" pics yet. I did that this afternoon, so will share those when they've been developed....

Here are a couple more pics of the front of our house. When we moved in, there were big ugly bushes covering up all of the porch railing ~ I am so glad we got rid of those and turned the area into a garden instead! This pic was taken in April:
And this was taken at the end of June ~ the plants are growing like gangbusters, despite the lack of rain!:
It's all been a lot of work, but it's definitely been worth it!!