Is it ok for me to mention just how jealous I am of all the Bloomin' Tuesday participants who live back East? I consider jealousy an undesirable trait and generally speaking I try to avoid it, but when I look at your photos with all the wooded acreage surrounding your homes and all the beautiful flowers climbing up ladders, and spilling over wood sheds, and blossoming in nooks and crannies in your gardens, it just makes me realize that, in spite of popular belief, the grass really IS greener on the other side of the fence! Gardens seem to flourish and bloom with abandon back East.Things are different in
Enough of this pity party... Today I am featuring the area surrounding my front door for my Bloomin' Tuesday post. In the month of May the nurseries in our area are filled to the brim with plants. Some of these plants are not "native" to our zone. Nurseries purchase these plants and Coloradans flock to buy them, so we can have a tropical plant in our yard, even if it's only for the summer season. We pay big bucks for these "annuals" because we all like to pretend that we live in a place where these plants grow naturally. Below is an example of this. This year I decided to buy several hibiscus plants and I placed one by our front door. It is so beautiful and its huge flowers add such a fun punch of color. When I see it I feel like throwing a lei around my neck and swinging my hips!
To the right of my front door, encircled by a walkway, lives a little rock garden. This rock garden consists mostly of perennials, but occasionally I plant a couple of annuals just to add a little color. Here are a few photos of this little rock garden...
We also have a cool little round tree in this garden area. I have no idea of it's name, but it's funky shape adds a lot of character to the area. Below the tree is my "rock cat." My mother gave this painted rock to me years ago and often people have to take a double take to figure out if it's real or not!
Much to the delight of every bird in our neighborhood, there are strawberry plants that surround this little rock garden. I imagine these strawberries taste delightful, but we rarely get to treat ourselves to one as the birds in our neighborhood seem to get to them long before we have a chance to pop one in our mouths! We may not have strawberries to eat, but we've got a lot of fat, happy birds chirping around our house!
