When I'm not writing, I'm playing in my flower garden

I'm so glad we're not in this stage anymore. 

 When we built our house into a hillside three summers ago, the hill was nothing more than a pile of dirt and a couple trees. But I had a vision.

At our previous home, I'd created flower gardens all over: around the vegetable garden, the house, the shed, the garage, the mailbox, around various trees, and a couple big beds out by the roadside. As you may imagine, this meant there were flowers all over the yard. While this was very pretty, it was also a lot of work. So when it came to designing my new flower garden from scratch, I decided to keep my ambitious flower tendencies a bit more in check to correspond with my time and mid-life energy levels.

Who thought gardening on a hillside would be less ambitious? Ha!

Which brings us to summer number two. In which I planted and mulched around a whole lot of things. Many of these plants were brought over from my previous flowerbeds and survived a hard winter in pots and some of them even in plastic bags (because I ran out of pots). Others had been brought over years before and had resided in a holding garden. The rest were clearance finds. I allow myself a handful of full priced plants a year and even that pains me. I love the clearance table at my home and garden store or most any nursery I pass by.  I love them so much so, that I've rather run out of room for new plants already. Ooops!

Notice that rock pile coming down the middle of the hill? *We'll get to that in another post.

Everything grows like mad here!

Now were up to our third summer, well second living here, but you get the idea. As you can see, everything has filled in nicely. Some so nicely, that I've had to split plants and expand the garden another five feet toward the roadside because I hate tossing perfectly good plants in the mulch pile.

Iris is my favorite flower, followed closely by daylilies. I have a lot of other things in here too, but those two far outnumber the rest.

You can see how well the creeping sedum groundcover likes it here too. A year ago I had a few springs from my sister in law. I tucked them between the rocks. Next thing I know, I can't see the rocks anymore. And I've pulled out handfuls of the stuff and spread it elsewhere. The rocks are completely covered again!

In other rock pile project news, I decided to take care of my hillside ramp that started at the six nice rock steps we could afford (those suckers are pricey!) at the top of the hill and break it up into steps of my own with other rocks that I'd purchased this spring. So now I have a slightly less dangerous and more traversable slope. Wet mulch on a steep incline was slippery!

It's funny to see these pictures from a couple months ago. That sedum has mostly covered these new steps too. I'm not complaining. Everything that covers means less mulch I have to buy next year.

You may notice the wall of large rocks to the left of the last photo. I put a bunch of different varieties of sedum between those last year. It filled in beautifully.

We get a lot of dragonflies and butterflies in the garden, as well as bees from the neighbor's hives. That's all fine and dandy until that creeping sedum flowers. While it's lovely to see the hill covered in tiny yellow flowers, it makes spotting the yellow bees difficult, yet necessary when the sedum covers the path areas. Yes, wearings shoes also a wise choice.

This particular dragonfly was in no hurry to leave its warm rock and let me pretty much put my cell phone on top of it to take a close up. I wish butterflies were as patient.

Please, may I eat another sky raisin?
They're sooooo tasty.

Who loves the flower garden even more than me? My little dog. Bitsy spends hours weaving through the iris and lilies chasing sky raisins (flies). This is a rare picture of her sitting still in the sun. I wouldn't think flies would be all that tasty, but she must. If nothing else, it's good exercise and the world could do with a few less flies. Not that I want her licking me anytime soon after eating one. Euw.

The lovely black-eyed susans are transplants from a corn field next door that was left to its down devices last year and soon filled with wildflowers. When I moved a few plants here, I thought they would never make it. They shriveled up and looked dead. Yet, this year they came up all over the place and I just might regret planting them a little. I pulled out quite a few of them already before they took over.

*That new rock project? I'm creating two ponds and a long waterfall between them. Watch for photos once I get that project done.

Until then, I'll leave you with this last photo of flower hill.