It seems fitting to start with a picture including the house for the sake of perspective.  We are particularly proud of our lawn which has miraculously recovered after a year of being abused by Tru-Green ChemLawn.   Taking care of an actual lawn was new to all of us -- leaving us in a state of panic and self-doubt.  And so,  we hired 'experts' to do the work for us last year.  Nine months and about 500 dollars later our lawn looked like the fringes of the Trinity Test Site.  So much for the experts.

Our Japanese Roof Iris is more living proof of the folly of hiring 'experts'.  This entire planting was once enormous and lush -- I am sure the display this spring would have been spectacular...  But ... Last fall we hired a landscaping firm to come and weed out the overgrown garden.  The head-honcho expert guy informed us that these were 'just ol' sword plants' and should be pulled up immediately before they started to overrun the flower bed.  Luckily, our expert landscapers did a pretty shoddy job of weeding and we had a few left this spring.

This is my new favorite plant! I'm not sure what it is but the nursery people call it a 'native petunia'.  I always thought native petunia was a flowering tobacco... and maybe this is flowering tobacco afterall... but I can't really be sure.  What I do know is the flowers are a great bright purple and the plant itself puts up with a lot of abuse....  These are qualities I look for in garden plants.  Ahem.

Another clump of stuff in the front yard. I was actually taking a picture for the sun coleus -- which are really huge and pretty... But I can't get the colors to come out on film -- at least not in morning light.  Anyway - I ended up with at least a representative picture of the coleus and a nice view of how well the wave petunias are waving. I'll try again someday soon.

And by the way -- here's what my mom and I have come to affectionately call one of our 'Pennsylvania Azaleas'. :)  I did not get pictures while it was in bloom -- as it was literally the first thing in the yard to come to bloom...  But I am hoping this picture kind of shows just how much this one has grown.  It has done really really well and it's neat to have an azalea in the front yard.  Just doesn't seem right to live in the deep south without one.

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