A front yard tour

I just love spring!  There is so much going on in the garden and EVERY day it is different! There is always something new to see.  I find myself walking around the front and the back just looking to see what has changed from the day before and sometimes it is surprising how many things have changed in a day.

I went to Bend on Friday morning and returned Sunday evening to find a number of plants had bloomed in that short time.

The front yard tour will start with a shot from the porch looking out at the dogwood (a Mother's Day gift from Tad and the boys several years ago) and the hawthorn trees.  The hawthorn trees came with the house and have really gone past their prime.  The city removed one 2 summers ago and may well need to take out the others in the next couple years.  We enjoy the trees for about 2 weeks each year.

Hawthorns in full bloom

From here I'll move down to the driveway and the photos will just take us from the left side of the house to the right.  The front of the house faces the north so it's fairly shady here for much of the day.

The front walk

The sun was just really coming up and glowed on the trees to the west of the house. 

Driveway border garden

Driveway border garden seen from the lawn side

I have a bazillion daisies.  I got my first plant(s) from Mom many years ago.  They reseed like CRAZY and I let them.  I just pull out what I don't want.  Someday I will probably have more plants in my gardens and won't let the daisies run rampant but until then I let them do their thing and add a lot of cheer to the front.  Last year I tried to do a lot of deadheading so I could keep them in check, not sure if it worked or not but it seems as though there were fewer seedlings to pull out this spring.

A view from the corner

We've owned just 2 houses in our 29 years, both times on corner lots.  There are days when we wonder just why we wanted that extra space but most of the time we really appreciate it.  Years ago thoughtless neighbors started to wear a path through the corner of our lawn so we just removed it and put a tree and small garden there.  The tree, a Styrax Japonicas or Japanese snowbell, succumbed to a boring beetle 2 years later and now the corner is just filled in with various plants.

My first iris garden - with daisies too

Originally I planted my irises in this garden to the west of the house, just out our bedroom window.  Eventually I had too many to fit there and started adding them to other areas of the garden.  I hope to have the energy and time to dig up and redo this garden sometime after July of this year.  Just beyond the iris and daisy garden, running parallel to the sidewalk is my 30+ feet of raspberries.  The bees have been very busy back there and I've seen that the berries are forming.  Keeping my fingers crossed for a big harvest this year.

View from the sidewalk to the west of the house

And now I'll just put up some close-ups of some of the flowers blooming (or nearly blooming) this week. 

"Adonis" peony buds

I couldn't resist photographing these peony buds.  The marbling on them is so pretty.  These will be a lovely pink flower when they bloom.  I bought this plant and one other at Adelman Peony Gardens 2 years ago. 

Foxgloves

I am really looking forward to the foxgloves blooming.  This is the first time that I've had a plant that survived past the first year!  And the bonus is that I actually have 3 or 4 plants that are doing quite well and tons of little babies all around them.  I really need to dig some  up and move them.

Late-blooming dogwood

My dogwood is different from those in our neighbor's yards.  Mine gets leaves first and then the flowers.  Having grown up in Montana and then Bend, Oregon I didn't really know about these trees until we moved to Portland and then Eugene in the early 90s.  I fell in love at first sight. 

A miniature hosta in a pot on the porch

NOID heuchera

As I was working in the front garden my eye was caught by the intense color of the sun shining through this heuchera.

Scabiosa pincushion flower

The first blossom on the pincushion flower.

The year's first iris blooms

And lastly, these are the early bloomers in my iris collection.  I have lost track of just how many different iris I have and it's not easy to keep track because some of them seem to take a year off.  Most of them were purchased from Schreiner's Iris Gardens just out of Salem, Oregon.  Some were given to me by friends/neighbors and a few were picked up from someone else's discards.  All of the flowers shown above were from Schreiner's.  Another project for this year is to track down the names as their tags have mostly disintegrated.  That will be a big project.

Update 05-19-2015   This post from 2009 has photographs of several of my iris (photographed in 2008) with their names.  This will help me as I sort out what is blooming this year.   Some that bloomed that year don't seem to be blooming this year.  Maybe they are yet to come.

Thanks for visiting.  Feel free to leave a comment. I'd love to know you stopped by.