Here's a better picture of my tree peony in bloom. In the background is a "butterfly garden" I planted for the girls a couple of years back. Some of the plants coming up are Agastache, Monarda, and Shasta Daisy.   I keep on telling my wife, "Give me a few years, I'll really have the garden looking great." She always reassures me that it looks good now (except in mid-summer, when everything crisps up, and we studiously avoid the topic). It really isn't about the outcome, however. It's about the process. It's about making little mistakes, and sometimes big mistakes, and knowing that no matter how badly you mess it up, there'll be another opportunity the next year to make it right. Sure... I want a good looking garden. I can't wait to see the shrubs (particularly the roses I've planted over the last year or two) grow to maturity, and really put on a show. But I think the reason I'm finding this hobby so attractive is because I'm not an expert. I'm learning a lot. Every year, I try new things. Sometimes I'm rewarded with success, and other times, I augment my compost pile with failures. Left: the top half of my back yard actually gets a little shade, owing to a couple of Big Leaf Maples on the hillside. Here a young Tree Peony grows in the direction of the morning sunshine. In the background are three hot colored Rhododendrons. Right: our lower front yard goes from bare earth to quite a dense planting of perennials early in the growing season. Some of the plants in this picture are Dutch Irises, Peach-Leaved Bellflowers, Daylillies and Pasque Flower. As mentioned elsewhere on the site, the fact that we're located on a hillside creates some real challenges when the weather becomes hot and dry. Drainage is so good that even areas with a bit of shade tend to dry out too quickly. I've tried to compensate by amending the soil with compost, adding mulch to retain moisture, and by selecting plants that will tolerate a bit of drought. Still, we end up with a rather browned front yard as we hit late summer. So far, spring is our best looking season. Given our (roughly) zone 8 gardening climate, we can attempt to grow most anything. Our winters are not mild enough to leave tender bulbs like Gladiolas and Dahlias in the ground. For that reason, I don't grow either. Maybe someday. But with the amount of time and money I have available for gardening, I try to focus on plants that don't need to be replaced every year, and don't need to be dug up in the fall. That leaves the garden with a mix of plants heavily slanted towards hardy shrubs, perennials and naturalized bulbs. At this point, I've filled most of the gaps between shrubs, and so now I'm watching the plants throughout the season to see if they're the right plants, to see if they're in the right place, and to see if they need dividing, pruning or other maintenance. This Chinese Redbud 'Avondale' was hard to find when I bought it, but I later found it at Cannor - sized and priced better, I might add. I guess that's what I get for being impatient. Viburnum Plicatum 'Mariesii'. It's still a bit small, but when it matures a bit, this is a stunning viburnum. If you look closely, in some of the pictures you will actually see some lawn. My secret plan is to plant around the edges of the lawn, and advance the margins of my garden beds until there is no lawn left. It's worked pretty well so far, but I have the feeling my wife has caught on. We've negotiated away some of the more awkward patches of grass, but I'll begrudgingly admit that the kids are better of with a couple of level sections in the back yard to play on. Okay, these are the last couple of pictures of my garden in past years... I'll have more to share in a few weeks, when things begin blooming for 2007. On the left is Robinia Hispida, a beautiful, if somewhat awkward small tree which bends and breaks a bit too easily. On the right is an early ceanothus. The row of plants against the fence are a different variety of ceanothus, but they're not yet blooming in this picture. While I'm aware that this page is becoming a bit like a run-on sentence, I wanted to drop in some recent pictures of the garden (as of May 2007). We added a kit greenhouse to the yard. It took me about three times as long as the "recommended building time" but it turned out nicely, and now I've put in some tomatoes and peppers. Here's the grreenhouse on the left. I'll use it for seedlings and cuttings eventually, but right now, the tomatoes are doing great. On the right, a little bit of spring color in the "wild side" of my garden. Blue veronica in the front, with some columbines and chives behind.