Spring is here

As many of you know, we've been experiencing almost-but-not-quite biblical sized rain storms. When you add what we got over the last week to what we got the week before, it was just amazing. We were definitely much luckier than many of our friends and even neighbors. Our basement stayed dry. Some of our neighbors were not as lucky and definitely had some cleaning out to do. Our Good Friends D&J had to pump out basements in two houses. When you look at the pictures of the damage caused by the latest storm, we definitely count ourselves as among the blessed this week.

This was caused by a sinkhole in the city of Fall River. A small Nissan sedan was almost "inhaled" by the sinkhole.

But the weather has finally turned (at least we hope). I don't think we could have asked for a better Easter weekend. Apparently, our neighbors were equally excited.

Last Sunday we went to the famous Boston Flower and Garden Show. We'd thought that it would prime us for thinking about Spring and help us not get too depressed over the upcoming storms. We could only afford to go for one day, and it was worth it. We went to a couple of lectures, wandered the displays of everything from the elegant, to the interesting, to the head-scratching strange. There was an aviary and I learned what a pheasant looks like. We brought our own lunch and people watched. We didn't buy anything except for some really neat serving plates from the Lynne Puhulla Studios (highly recommended for those of you in New England). But we were inspired.

We particularly liked the design here.

So, yesterday, the Good Mr. Dr. spent a couple of hours mending the fences in the back.

It's not easy to see in this picture, but he used branches from the grapevines as stakes that were stuck deep into the ground.

It also happened that the nice warm weather has prompted all of our flowers to bloom.

The exception is the geranium, which we inadvertently left outside when the temperature went near or below freezing. It lost its flower, but we are hoping to rehabilitate it.

If you click to see the larger picture, you can see my Lilies starting to pop through.

The tulips in the far back are also starting to sprout and the other bulbs are still holding on despite the torrential downpours.

Today, however was the big day. Today, we decided to try out the design we had been working on for the past year or so. Our goal is to create different spaces in the garden. In addition to the patio, we wanted a small bench on the north fence, a slightly larger sitting area underneath the Pussywillow, and a vegetable garden space between the Burning Bush and the Dogwood. In doing so, we needed to move the path to the south fence, create a smaller path to the sitting space, and then to the vegetable garden, and then out from the veggie garden to the far end. Today, we decided to rearrange things. Using the stones, bricks, and chunks of concrete that the Good Mr. Dr. has dug up in his effort to clean the garden, we tried to imagine this new space.

Click on the picture to see the detail. The orange areas will be the seating spaces and the green will be the vegetable garden. The rest of the space will be filled with plantings, urns, and art.

Same design, different view and without the colored markers.


Short video explaining the design.

We're pretty excited about the new possibilities. We're not going to use the same materials seen here, except perhaps for the stones. They are useful borders. The full design will not be complete until maybe next summer. We need to learn to manage the grape vines, see how the sun tracks when we control the grape vines, and of course, find the right furniture for the new seating areas. But we will be planting something in the vegetable patch, the details of which are still being worked on. Soon to come. In the meantime, we both look forward to getting some much needed sunshine. We hope you get some too.