Yard work!

Well, this is my most recent little project at home... cleaning out the overgrown/ overpopulated flower bed full of canna lilies and replacing them with fresh rosemary, flowers, etc...

For some reason, I woke up the morning after the UA vs. Tennessee game ready to take on something big. I took the dogs out in the backyard and noticed how bad this flower bed looked! Here it is after I had started digging up some of the plants.

 

Not to worry, I didn't kill ANY of these cannas. I dug up the root ball for all of them and put them in a bucket with some water. Turns out some family members wanted them. :)  You see, it's not that I don't like these plants; they look great early in the season but then they get so heavy they start to fall over. There is also a huge oak tree over our house that loses branches quite frequently and they usually land here and break the stem. 

So anyway, I spent a good portion of the morning digging these out and was finally left with this empty bed (well except for the mondo grass I left)!

At this point, I headed to Home Depot to pick up some supplies. I knew I wanted rosemary because I love the look of it and it's so fragrant. I also knew I wasn't going to fill this up today because I didn't want to spend too much (the hubby appreciated that)! I decided to transplant a hydrangea that I've had for 3 years and has never really amounted to anything spectacular. Hopefully it will like it's new home better:) So after picking up 1 rosemary plant, mulch and some pretty fall flowers, it looked like this:

So this is how it looked for about a week.I forgot to mention that I found the brick pavers in the back yard around some Azaleas. They were pretty much completely covered with grass so it wasn't a huge loss to move them over here.

Fast forward to last weekend. I had finally decided what I wanted the rest of this to look like. Since there are some things that we want to keep hidden, i.e. gas meter, I decided to get 2 more Rosemary plants since they grow pretty large and will fill up the space.

I can't wait for these to start growing and by the way, every time I go out the back door, I can smell them... :)

Also, the hydrangea was not really enjoying it's new home so I moved it to another location (I'm afraid it might die because it's been through so much). I decided to order a plant I found online (from Brighter Blooms) to fill that space. I ordered it because no nurseries in town had it in stock and from what I've read, this is the best time to plant. I ordered a snowball virburnum because it odorless (since the rosemary is very fragrant) and it has beautiful hydrangea-like blooms. This is what they look like when they mature:

 And here are the beautiful blooms. They start out lime green and eventually turn white.

From what I've read about them, they're relatively easy to grow and you can determine the size you want by pruning each fall. Of course, I won't want mine as large as the pic above but I can't wait to put some of these blooms in my mason jars this spring! :)

I'll keep you updated on how it turns out. Hopefully it won't die! :)