Please take a look at my wintersown flowers... Here is a link that might be useful: front garden photos...

socks I think our coyotes are lazy here. I've seen 1 in daylight near the den and another in daylight about 50 ft from myself and the animals. It just stood there and watched and I yelled at it and waved my arms and finally it ran back a ways and watch from the hill. I kept yelling and it finally left to where I couldn't see it. You know though in three years we've never had a coyote go after any of the animals. Our ducks and chickens free range too. I think they'd have to be pretty darn hungry to do the work of jumping the fences. Luckily we have loads of wildlife on the property so they have plenty to eat. tami_ohio Yes, I've been there many times unfortuately. I've been this way since I was a kid. My middle son came home from school saying he thought he had heat stroke (was likely heat exhaustion, just heached and overheated), he's even thrown up before. Poor kids is just like me. I used it as a learning experience and said, "You know how you are feeling right now, well that's how you feel if you drink too much and get hungover." LOL He said he's never going to drink too much. Jasdip When I closed down my facebook account last year, I had so many people say how much they'd miss my stories. They all just loved laughing at my expense. Of course I was right there laughing with them at the many, many mistakes and mishaps we've endured on our city to country journey.

peren.all - yeah, the mosquitoes are out in force and hungry here too! Yesterday I did a quick foray down near the 'wet corner' to whack off fading goatsbead flowers/developing seeds. I didn't put on my bug shirt - and was immediately under attack! I did a very rough job, and was out of there within a minute! There is still one more goatsbead to deadhead - DH will do it as the mosquitoes are less fond of his blood :-) I'm also useless in the heat so, while there is deadheading etc. needed in the front garden, it's going to have to wait until mid-week when it's supposed to be cooler again. ruth and rouge - the Niobe and regal lily combination is a 'happy accident'. The lilies were planted maybe 8-10 years ago. The cursed lily beetles do less damage to the regal lilies than to other lilies, in my experience (the regal lily foliage is very narrow and somewhat coarse-textured; I think the beetles may consider it a poorer food source for the larvae perhaps.) But the lilies gradually faded away (too dry/too heavy soil maybe....?). The Niobe (and Henryi) clematises that grows on the arbour wilted badly early last summer so I wasn't expecting much from them this year. I thought dryness might be an issue, so asked DH to water the base of the arbour whenever he was watering his veggie pots nearby. Bingo! Great looking Niobe this year, and the lily on the right ride of the arbour returned from the dead! :-) Thyme - I thought you'd like to see the heptacodium :-) I just checked my records - I planted it in 2002. I couldn't find a tree-form one so bought a small shrub one that only had 3 stems. I cut off the two smallest stems and let the other one become the tree trunk. It has certainly now surpassed the size I expected it to get - but we love it! (and so do the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds when it blooms!) The past two nasty winters didn't bother it a bit, so it's obviously very hardy. It doesn't have much in the way of fall color, and it gets too cold too early here to have the pink show from the calyxes make a show after the flowers finish in areas further south. But it's definitely worth growing! I can't imagine how much space it would be taking up though if I had left it as a shrub! Tree-form is certainly the way to go unless you have a huge space for it....

maylingsmom - by 'bed/border facing the street' do you mean the one I call 'the moat bed' (because it runs along the top of the ditch) ? That' an odd little border - packed full of plants! At its narrowest point it's only about 4" wide! At its widest it's about 30" wide. The purpose of it is to create a visual barrier that draws a line between 'public' space and 'private' space, while allowing a view into the private space. The bed is easily stepped over so the barrier is visual, not physical. The plantings are taller at the ends and slope down to a low point in the middle. The low point roughly lines up with a path through the main front bed (so the path into the front bed sort of invites you in but the straight line of the moat bed across it sort of says 'keep out!'...) The moat bed is straight on the ditch side; the other side is about 30" away from the main front bed, creating a grassy path that wraps around the main front bed and makes the moat bed wider towards the ends. The plantings were chosen to give the stretched-out U-shaped vertical profile I wanted, and also to tie the bed to the plantings in the rest of the front garden. So the plants include: Chinese wisteria 'tree' at the south end Japanese wisteria 'tree' at the north end 'Emerald Gaiety' euonymus beside the Japanese wisteria to repeat the ones elsewhere in several places in the front garden 'Pink Beauty' potentilla shrubs - also found elsewhere in the garden ditto the pale pink hardy hibiscuses with the dark pink eye ditto various dark purple heucheras pale pink fall-blooming anemones 'Silver Mound' artemisias beside the low point silvery thyme at the low point and other thymes as a groundcover under the Japanese wisteria various small spring bulbes clumping strawberries that are also found elsewhere throughout the front garden and on and on....! Everything that's in there is there for a reason. It's a fun little bed that really shapes and defines the rest of the main front garden. It was the last bed we made there and we made it because the garden seemed unfinished somehow and this bed seemed to make it look complete :-)