Outdoor Wednesday : Garden Before and Afters

Thank you to Susan at A Southern Day Dreamer for hosting yet another wonderful Outdoor Wednesday! Make sure to find the link to her blog at the bottom of this post so that you can enjoy all of the other wonderful garden and park pictures other bloggers have shared today!

Gardening, I've found, is a process. Like an interior, designing the exterior landscape of your home is a series of fantastic ideas paired with the misfortune of "what was I thinking!?" Last week, when I featured the beautiful garden of my friends Dorothy and Dan, Dorothy and I got a chance to look back through the many photos of my garden, and it's journey from blah, to "Eh - I'll live with it for a while!"

Here, a "blah" that I was SO happy with at the time. This photo was taken at the 2008 Garden Walk, just about a year ago. All of the planting was new, including the trees. I was so excited about this "new" garden because there was absolutely nothing there before. This sort of mess, was a project that I had envisioned and completed, and even though it's not as pretty as it could have been, it helped add something to the landscape, and it allowed me to catch that elusive "Gardening Bug" which - hurled me into this year with a bigger and better plan, to add, change, and extend!

So when the snow had melted, and the gardening mafia said it was ok to start planting - I pounced, and snapped the picture above before extending the garden to include the picture below.

Quite a change, huh? Now, certainly I didn't leave it this way, but as the "summer" started to pass us, I noticed that the temperatures never really rose, it continued to feel like spring, and the rain never seemed to stop. I've heard that it's the coldest July on record, not good for the tender root systems of new perennials. And, on top of that, my tropical canna and banana are just as unhappy. Still, though it's not as established as I would prefer it to be at this time, the extension has grown (in roughly a month and a half) to be quite nice:

Here you can see the full curve of the new bed and how it meets up with the prior peninsula. Earl is right at home over there in the corner next to the banana, which is actually much larger than when this picture was taken in early July.

And the photo from the day after the garden walk, a full year from the photo at the very top of the page, I think we've accomplished a lot. It's certainly got more presence, don't you think? Again, thanks for stopping by and leaving your kind thoughts on all of these pictures in their prior posts, and make sure to head back over to Susan's blog: A Southern Day Dreamer for more inspiring outdoor landscapes!

On a separate note: Color Outside the Lines will be going through a few changes in the next few days, so if you link in and see things a bit askew, it's ok! You're in the right place! Pardon my dust while I renovate!