How Does Your Garden Grow? 2 of 3

For the previous post about our garden, click here. For the later post, click here.

I am the proud owner of several pieces of yard art, most of which were gifts. For instance, I asked Dear Husband to buy me this little hummingbird as an early Valentine's Day present when we visited the Indianapolis Museum Art in January. I'm a sucker for glass art, and it was a nice reminder of the spring to come. My parents found me the metal spinning butterfly (below left), which for years floated over our sideboard in the dining room, before I finally bought some garden stakes and installed it over the back bed of short hostas. I purchased this lovely Merlady (below right) from a local art gallery's going-out-of-business sale just last month. I love its collage style. I imagine her splashed over green waves of hosta leaves.

Here we have before and after photographs from our deck. The bed has been full of lilies and hostas since the first round of gardening in 2009. I installed the blue rain barrel several years ago with the help of a friend from church. The bronze windcatcher was a gift from my aunt and uncle outside Dallas, and my mother gave me the plant stand for my spider plants. You can see the deck got stained once; it's our next project for the summer. Maybe you can see the swing in the background? After we moved in, I got rid of the old bland cushions and got some red ones with fern leaves; they were tucked back into the shed before I took this photo. We also acquired a glass-topped table and some chairs on a Memorial-Day sale a few years back; we like to have dinner out here when the weather is nice. I always tell Dear Husband that it somehow seems so "civilized" to eat in the middle of so much nature.

Not shown: the two pink flamingos I bought at the grocery store right after we bought the house, as a sort of joining-the-homeowners-club gift to myself. I thought they were rather classy, being made out of wood rather than plastic, but they didn't stand up to the Midwest winters very well and have long since been dispatched to the great Key West in the sky, where it never snows.