… for some garden photos.

This past weekend, I took a ton of photos of the yard so we could get an idea of when and where we had sun. We have a huge hosta, maybe 4 feet across, that keeps getting sunburned, and we had a plan for creating some shade for it. Of course I didn’t get a great picture of the hosta, but I found several other photos that I just love and I wanted to share them.

This is a close up of the spirea that line our driveway. There are four huge bushes, and Mom cuts them down to the ground once a year.

These evening primrose started out as one lonely little flower, grown from a seed that a kind bird deposited. Several years later, we have drifts of the stuff, and have transplanted it to several other locations. It’s so bright and cheery!

This peony has been in my mom’s family for at least 80 years. At one point we thought we’d lost it. We lived on my grandparents farm for a few years, and my grandmother lived with a very nice man who had a beautiful wildflower field. When we moved into town, we took the peony with us. Our new yard didn’t have enough sun, so our neighbor kindly planted it in her yard. We moved again a couple of years later, forgetting about the peony. After my grandmother died and her friend moved away, his daughter burned the wildflower garden. My mom was horrified, thinking that the peony had been there. Out of the blue, she got a phone call from the former neighbor, and we brought the poor, twig-like little peony to our current home. The next spring, it came back, small but hardy, and it had five buds. My aunt asked my mom when she thought it would bloom. Mom answered, very definitely, “June 3rd.” Why? Because that was her mother’s birthday. Sure enough, on June 3rd, five blossoms opened, one for each of her children.

And look at this close up of the bee:

Finally, I just love the look of white sheets on the line, garden in the fore- and background.