The flower garden

Here's an overhead shot of the flower garden. This has been a construction zone for over a year. We dug it all out by hand. With a pick axe and a shovel. The soil here is pretty bad. There used to be a building on this site, so the ground is full of bricks and foundation blocks and the gravel that covers the entire lot. We've had to replace most of the soil. But we're finally starting to make some progress. Last weekend John built the white horse fence (to keep Saro from trampling the flowers) and it has really helped to define the space and separate this area from the weedy overgrowth around it.

The big yellow flower sculpture on the right side of the picture is our seating area. The area closer to the street from here is the shady garden (mostly vinca vine and some coleus). The thing in the middle is a fountain, and it's hard to see in this picture, but the stick figure is watering the big funky enoki sculpture with a red watering can. We planted the garden around the fountain last year and you can see the plants that came back (sedum, yarrow, rudbeckia, delphinium, lambs ear and a few others).

The big curvy shape to the left (looks like half of the state of Michigan) is the sunflower patch. This will hopefully be overflowing with red and yellow sunflowers soon! We're working on filling in the areas around this with random flowers (cosmos, zinnias). It will be more chaotic and not at all planned out. We just want something growing there! We'll keep the gravel path in the middle so you can walk in between the flowers.

There's a lot of work still to be done. But it's finally starting to take shape.