Progress On Our Yard Part 2

Hello Friends.  Are you having a good week?  Ours has been pretty good so far.  Thank you for your comments on my previous post.  We are still sad about Duncan; we do plan to get another dog, but not for a little while.  We have a lot going on right now and more work to get done on the house.  Speaking of that, we have gotten some things accomplished in the yard.  Actually, I should say that the man we hired to clean up the yard for us has gotten some things (a lot) accomplished, and the yard already looks so much better.  We are excited!         

   

   

   

   This is our natural area.  Below are some pictures from a post I wrote in 2015, and it looked quite different then.   

   

Those gumball trees were so tall, I couldn't get the tops in the picture from this angle.  I used to worry they would fall on our house.  Basically, we had three trees and a spirea bush, and nothing else in the natural area.   

In addition to our maple tree (on the right) we had two sweetgum trees (left).  We just call them gumball trees because of these --      

-- prickly brown balls that fall off the trees and get all over the yard and driveway and make you turn your ankle if you accidentally step on one.  Sigh.  We always seemed to have a bumper crop of gumballs on our property, but the trees did have pretty leaves in the fall.  However, we had the two sweetgum trees taken down sometime after 2015 -- can't remember the exact year.   

   

 Now we have a few more things here, but we're not finished yet.  This area was a mess back in the spring and early summer while all the other work was going on with the house and yard.  Alex did a beautiful job of cleaning out this area and putting down pine needles.  He has his own lawn service business, but he has managed to do this work for us by coming over about one day a week.  We have some big clumps of liriope in this natural area, and I honestly think they must have self-seeded, or either the birds seeded them.  In the old pictures of this section there is no liriope there, but I'm glad to have it, as it helps to fill in the spaces. 

        

This is currently what we have growing in this area.  We originally planted three azalea bushes, but one of them died after the first year.  These two are still very small, and we want to plant a few more.  I'm sure I need to fertilize these, too.  I'd also like to add a peony in here and some lenten roses.  I would love to try one of the old-fashioned hydrangeas with pink or blue blooms.  It would need to be closer to the maple tree in order to get more shade.  The limelights can take full sun, so they've become incredibly popular here in the south.

   

   

We also have an autumn fern planted in this area, and will plant more in the fall.  

           

In addition to cleaning out the natural area, Alex also cleaned out the area right in front of the house.  You can see our new front door in this picture; we're still loving it.  :)  We also ordered new porch lights to replace the ones currently there, and they arrived today.  We like the look of them and think we're going to be very happy with them.  Can't wait to get them installed.

         

Alex pruned my rose bush way back to a stub, but it's already got new green on it.  I hope it survives!  It had become very overgrown, and I hope it will bloom more profusely next spring.

       

   

I've been thrilled with the limelight hydrangeas this summer.  This is the third year we've had them, and they've outdone themselves this year.  Last year the big one only had one or two blooms, and the small one didn't bloom at all.  We bought the bigger one at our favorite plant nursery, and we got the small one at the farmer's market for $10.  We thought the small one wasn't going to make it, but it surprised us by blooming this summer.

       

    

I love the creamy white of these blooms,   

      

      

  but also the lime green color with mauve pink mixed in.     

            

   

I admit I didn't care for this variety of hydrangea at first, but I'm definitely a fan now.  I adore the old-fashioned mophead hydrangeas, but there are many people in this area who simply can't get them to bloom.  You have to hit on the perfect combination of light/location and soil type.  Our son has some growing next to the house he rents with two friends, and they don't do a thing to pamper those shrubs.  Yet every summer, they have beautiful blooms.  Go figure.  

   

   

Alex has also done some work around the back of our house; I hope he gets to work here again this week.  Later this month, we plan to have him plant some crepe myrtle trees along the side of our upper driveway to replace those ugly old poplars that came down.  We hope they will eventually give us some shade, but never as much as we had before.  With all those trees and undergrowth gone, we are actually getting fewer mosquitos around (and in) our house now.  I never expected that, but it's a welcome change, believe me.  

   

That's all I have to share at the moment.  I'm hoping to have more updates soon.  The next project for me to work on is getting the front porch spruced up.  I need to plant my big pots with something pretty that will last for autumn into spring.  I'll show more updates as we continue to progress.  Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I hope you have a wonderful week!!