We don't have a garden

Today I decided that we don't have a garden. A garden is something that belongs to someone who loves digging in the dirt and playing with flowers and vegetables; someone who dreams all winter about what they'll plant and where. Nope, that's definitely not me.

What we have is landscaping. We have trees and plants and flowers because a house looks weird without trees and plants and flowers. We hired someone to tell us what to plant and where (well, for at least one bed) and we only change something when it gets over grown or dies (which happens quite a lot, actually, but less often since we put in that irrigation system - I'm terrible at remembering that plants need water). I think so little about our plants during the off-season that it was almost the middle of April before I got around to doing the spring pruning (most of which probably should have been done at least a month ago).

Ah, yes, spring pruning. That's what I did this weekend. Saturday, I spent the afternoon cleaning up the back yard beds. One of them looks pretty good (considering things are really just starting to come up) and the other looks pretty bare, but I know it'll be decent in a month or so. I spent this morning butchering the bed along the garage side of the house. When I say butchering, I mean butchering. I was nice to two of the clematises (clematii?), but I took the mini hedge-clippers to the middle one and chopped it off down to the ground. It's probably a little late for an aggressive pruning, especially considering there was green all the way up to the top of the trellis, but this particular clematis seems to want to take over the world, so I'm sure it'll be back. (I'm not kidding here - we dug the sucker up and sent it an hour away three years ago and it's still here! - If you have a tendency to kill plants, get a Sweet Autumn clematis, if you have a green thumb, stay far, far away). Then I took the hedge clippers to the lavender, whacked them all off and decided they were far too woody and crummy looking so I set the hubs on them with a shovel and he dug them all out. They've spread like wildfire and I left the blooms on last fall so I'm thinking they'll be back from the seeds and if not, we'll figure something else out.

That picture up top is the bed under our deck from last year. It needs some thinning out, but it's not a bad little flower bed. Below is my little fountain - my favorite part of the whole yard. It was a Mother's Day gift a couple of years ago.