Okay, so it occurred to me that I've only got a couple of pictures of the garden posted to show what I've been doing out there, so I went and took a few more snaps today to expand on them.
In addition to the two barrels of flowers, I have two other barrels of flowers (which I wasn't able to get good shots of today because there was too much sun – heckuva deal, I have to say, given how cold and rainy it's been the last couple of weeks). I did, however, get a photo of one of the hanging baskets I did. All three of them are in ripping good health, but this one's exceptional.
The backyard itself is pretty dazzling. I have just a few photos of it but it is actually over twice the size of what you can see from these. (I'll have more photos at some point, but I have to get them early in the morning because the sun overexposes everything on the leetle cell phone digicam.) You can see part of the deck with the trunk of one of the fir trees (they're about 130' tall and there are four or five in the backyard and another three in the front yard). There are eight beds of impatiens planted around the base of the two fir trees that come through the deck itself.
Off to the left of that photo is one edge of the backyard. Some of the dwarf rhodies are still blooming. They're not my favorite flowers, but they're nice enough for low-maintenance shrubs.
One of the coolest things about the backyard is the seven-trunked maple tree. The maple tree is about 100' tall and the previous owner had very graciously wired the trunks together at the 60' level so they won't split off in high winds.
What identifies this backyard for me is that I have the man-eating clam hiding behind some ferns and at the base of Yet Another Fir Tree. The clam is something I got from my paternal grandmother's garden when she moved to Tucson to live with my father and stepmother. It had been a fixture of her garden for decades and I always had loved it. Dad very graciously snagged it for me (it weighs about 66 pounds) and I've had it in my backyards ever since. When I was married to my first wife and we had it in our backyard, she put a large plastic pearlescent ball from the handle of an old umbrella in the clam like a big pearl. It was perfect. I'll have to find something like that again.
And, just because I finally managed to get a good photo, here is a shot of Willow. She's outside and it's light out but you simply would not beLIEVE how much I had to stop the camera down until she was visible in the photo. It almost looks like it's night outside; this is not the case.
I'm on the road to Portland on Friday for a client visit, so I'm off to bed now.
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1 comment:
That's quite a clam!
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