Pre-birthday post

Have I mentioned it's my birthday soon? I know. I'm totally shameless! It's the only-child gene. I can't help it!

Yesterday before I did the job from HELL, I actually did up some pretties for my back stoop. I knew I would be in no shape to do any gardening today after the big job I had to do. It would not have been so bad except for the fact that the person who hired me to make their back yard pretty? They dug the holes for all the plants and apparently thought I was planning to put in giant redwoods. Holy HUGE holes! Maybe they wanted to get a peek at China? Maybe they wanted to bury their old Volkswagen bus? Or an elephant?

I'm sure you get my drift. In any case, I had to go out and buy another 12 huge bags of soil to fill in those ridiculous holes. So, on top of lugging about 6 good-sized arborvitae, 11 large hostas, 3 boxwoods and 3 huge grasses? I also had to put down 12 bags of peastone and then literally lug around a grand total of 18 big bags of soil.

To say the very leastest, I'm SO sore. And I slept like death. I always forget how well I sleep after doing these big gardening projects! Bonus!

Ok. So enough complaining. I did up some planters for our back stoop and also did up our neighbor's planter last week. We all share a driveway and she usually wants plants in the same color range that we have, so it looks very nice back there! Here they are...The first one is a grouping of three planters:

And this is on the other side of our stoop:

And this is our neighbor's planter I did (I love that little bunny!)


Here in my driveway is a shasta daisy and peony waiting to go into a client's yard this coming week. Also my HUGE lettuces!Those peonies smell divine. And isn't it nice I get to enjoy the pretty plants that go into my clients' yards before they get planted? I always have some sort of plants or flowers in my driveway!

And here is the planter I did up in March that was on our back stoop until yesterday. I moved it into the back yard to see what develops with the curly willow and those ENORMOUS arugula blooms - they're the ones in back - tall tall tall with white flowers. Crazy!

Lastly, here is the new Deutzia I got the other day with the lime green foliage and white, delicate flowers. Next to it is one of the mystery peonies I picked up about a month ago at the garden center. It had no tags, so I had no idea what color I ended up with - it's a white one! One of the flowers is there on the ground now.

Ok. That's all that is going on over here! Happy long weekend! Happy birthday to me!