Ibidem ("in the same place")

I've changed the look of the blog -- just because I like to rearrange things now and then. (What do you think? I may change it again next week.) It seems appropriate to refresh now -- it has been a year (more than a year, actually) since I started this blog. Now, as then, I staved off writing for a few weeks, awaiting the "perfect moment", or the completion of something, or some unknown milepost that it would make for the right post. And finally, last year and now, I just gave up and wrote something (this, in this case).

We have changed, or rearranged, quite a bit in the last year. I'll start with a summary of the front yard, and move (in other entries) to the back.

Before Today

The car isn't new, but in the last 12 months we've installed a bike cellar under the porch, repaired the rotted porch floor and increased the usable size of the porch in the process. We've changed the look of the front steps by masking them with a decorative box and a hand-railing, and growing a wisteria greenly up the middle. We've ripped up the dying clover and weeds on a steep hill that constituted part of our front lawn, and replaced it with more formal wooden terracing. (I'll plant that with perennials and spring bulbs later this fall.)

Off to the north side of the house, the changes have come this summer, mostly, and in their own way are more dramatic.
8/2007 9/2007


4/2008 Today.

The flowers include, from left to right, a rhododendron (moved from the back yard), a volunteer pumpkin which is aiming to take over the world, an azalea, dahlias, marigolds, snapdragons, an hydrangea, and rhubarb, and a rose in the middle (which I fear I killed in transplantation). We've also moved the fence up to the front of the house -- right behind the rhododendron, off the left side of the last photo.

It has been a lot of work, much more than we anticipated, with less satisfying than-we-expected results. No, that's not right -- I get great satisfaction from simply staring at the garden. Rather, checking these off the list of projects has not led to any sense of completion, merely another project pops to the top of the list to do.