Birds in the Garden

It is high summer and everything in New Hampshire is very green. I like to tell my students to make birds based on the things they see around them. Here are some birds inspired by gardens and things that grow in them.

I planted coneflowers in my garden this year. This is one of them.

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 I planted this hosta as a tiny little plant in the spring of 2015. It is "Sum and Substance." I try to tell everybody how big it is...

but nobody gets it until I show them this picture.

I love making birds based on flowers...


If you would like to make your own free-pieced birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away. They're fun, easy to make, and you can use scraps.

Stay-Cation

I'm on vacation, and I have a long list of things I want to do. I finally put mulch around the tall grasses on one side of my driveway. It's hard to believe I planted these big grasses (along with the Yukka plant down front and the Veronicas) in the Spring of 2015.

Here's the same view taken in April 2015.

This is the Shade Garden that faces North. It is clearly a resounding success, and three years in I need to thin some things (like those grasses down front) out!

This is the same Shade Garden, but this photo was taken in June. Lots of things flowering.

This was the Shade Garden in early September 2015.

It's a nice kind of problem to have. I worked in my herb garden on Sunday, and that's looking better. It's been a bit hard. I was teaching and working on tutorials in the Spring, then it got so hot in July and then so wet for the first part of August. The weeds have taken over! My plan is to work out in the yard for an hour or so in the morning, before it gets too hot, then I'll come inside, wash up and do some things around then house, have lunch, then settle down to watch tennis and have some fun in the sewing studio.

Shade Garden

This is the shade garden along the side of my house. I worked very hard on it, and I'm happy with it and proud of it. It faces north and when I moved in it looked just awful.

This was taken in early September. There are ornamental grasses, hostas, columbines, coral bells, lamiums, Lady's Mantle, bugbane, Black-Eyed Susans, Brunneras, phlox, toad lilly, jacob's ladder, lungwort and ferns. When the garden is fully mature some plants will be between three and five feet tall, filling up the long blank wall. There will be color from spring to fall as well as different leaf shapes and textures. I'm excited.

This is what it looked like when I moved in last October.

This is what it looked like five  months ago in April. It was a disaster. Mulch was spread over that brown garden cloth, and weeds were growing through it. Underneath that was 2 inches of dirt and then under that was all sand. I had to hire a landscaper to clear it out and spread some topsoil. It was another month before I could put the plants in the ground.

This is the shade garden on Sunday.  Because I was delayed getting the plants in the ground, some of them didn't make it. Replacements arrived last week, and I also transplanted some things I had had in pots. Now everything is where it should be,

 Here's another view from the other end.  It's a perennial garden so everything here will come back again next year, and it will withstand any snow cover, which is a good thing,

because this is what it looked like last February.