Foliage Friday

As the flowers of summer begin to fade I thought I would take you all on a walk around the garden to look at the wide variety of foliage we have. I’m not talking about the colors of autumn but rather the use of colored foliage (other than green) within your garden to create interest.

North side of yard

Here is a look at the north side of our yard. Every few shrubs is one with red foliage. From left to right you will see the red foliage of the ninebark, columnar barberry, smoke bush, standard barberry and on the far right is a columnar red birch.

Closer view showing columnar barberry, smoke bush and barberry

In the closer view (and below) you can also see the smaller shrubs. A yellow variegated foliage dwarf weigela and the red foliage weigela.

Dwarf red weigela and dwarf yellow variegated weigela
Spilled Wine® Weigela florida ‘Bokraspiwi’ and My Monet® Sunset Weigela florida ‘Sunset’

As you can see the foliage can be red or yellow.

Japanese maple surrounded by yellow barberry

This is one of my favorite parts of our garden. I just love the contrast of the red leaves of the maple and yellow barberry. It also helps to draw your eye to the weeping structure of the Alaska Cedar evergreen (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis ‘Pendula’) behind them.

Another red barberry adding a pop of color

Moving around the yard we see more pops of the red foliage.

Dwarf variegated weigela
My Monet® Weigela florida

The variegated foliage of this dwarf weigela has it all from red to green to white.

Japanese maple with yellow rug juniper and yellow barberry

This corner of the yard shows that some of the shrubs can be ground hugging too. The weep of the Japanese maple coming down to the yellow juniper (Juniperus horizontalis “Mother Lode”) is a wonderful contrast.

Dwarf variegated weigela with red heuchera

Not all the contrasting foliage is found in the shrub border. We also have some in the perennial garden. Here a My Monet® weigela is contrasted against the red foliage of a heuchera.

I hope you enjoyed this tour of our garden to see the variety of foliage we have used to enhance the look. Maybe on another post I can show you some of the different textures we have in our garden?

As always we have to thank Charlie for his excellent care of our gardens.

Even though this was mostly a foliage post we are joining Dory for Flower Friday.

On another note I want to apologize for being absent from the blog for a while. As the membership secretary for a large (350 members) quilting club I have had a lot of work to do to prepare for our upcoming first meeting of the year. I’ve also been working on a few crafty projects and all of it has kept me away from blogging. We have been keeping up with reading all of your blogs but our commenting may not be as much as we usually do. Thanks for your understanding. We hope to get back to blogging more soon.

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Safety Week – Zoomie Safety

Or What Not to do By Millie!

Hi everyone it’s Millie & Walter here. First we want to thank Sarge and Bites for organizing this wonderful safety week. To view all the blogs participating, go to the hop at Oz’s site.

Today it’s our turn to do a post for Safety Week! If you are a follower of our blog you may remember a few videos we showed of our high speed antics around our yard (if you need a refresher you can go here, here and here). We don’t discriminate based on the weather either. We have learned a few things about our high speed antics and thought we would let our Mini Me’s demonstrate what we have learned.

When chasing your brother don’t try to run through the shrubs.

Running into shrubs can be hazardous to your health.

It is best to go around the shrubbery wherever you are running. Otherwise you might end up with a stick up your nose.

As you can see, when Walter zigged Millie didn’t zag and instead ran right into one of the shrubs. This ended in an emergency trip to the vet but she recovered quickly.

The next scenario involves a tree and the same concept.

Pay attention to the obstacles in your way.

Don’t run into a tree at high speed.

On the 4th of July we were zooming around the yard when Millie ran full speed into a tree and hit her knee. There was a small open wound but it wasn’t bleeding. We cleaned out the wound and kept our eye on how Millie was feeling.  Since it happened on a holiday we figured she could wait until the next day to see a vet. She was a little stiff and sore the next day. The vet shaved the area around the wound and flushed it out with saline and determined that it didn’t need any stitches.

Another embarrassing injury

Here is a close up of the wound so if you are a bit squeamish scroll past real fast.

Nasty ouchie on the knee

Don’t worry, in just a couple of weeks the wound was completely closed. In just a couple more weeks the hair has already completely grown back and you would never know anything had happened.

So the moral of the story is if you are going to run high speed anywhere Watch Where You Are Going!!!

Now all I need is a helmet to be safe

We hope you enjoyed this lesson in how not to get hurt while zooming around your yard or dog park. Don’t forget to visit the other safety lessons today so go to Oz’s site to find them.

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Black & White Sunday – A Dog and His Ball

This is Walter’s favorite toy to play with. It’s a Jolly Ball Romp-n-Roll. You can’t see it very well in the picture but there is a hole through the center and a long rope through it. As you can see it makes him very happy!

We are participating in the Black & White Sunday blog hop.

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Flower Friday – Variety

Last week was all about day lilies. Today is all about everything else that is in bloom right now.

First up a look at our beautiful containers.

Containers on our patio wall

I purchased these as hanging pots and we transferred them to larger containers. There are just three types of flowers and the container that gets the most sun has grown to over 3 feet across. It hangs down so far that you can’t see the pot under it any more.

South East view of perennial garden

In addition to the day lilies (many of which are still blooming) there are many other flowers in bloom.

Pink cone flower

Black eyed Susan

Close up of Black eyed Susan

Here is a lovely trio of flowers.

White gayfeather, Joe Pye Weed, and Loosestrife
(Front to Back)

There are also some visitors enjoying our flowers.

Eastern tiger swallowtail feasting on loosetrife

Around the patio are some more flowering shrubs and perennials.

Yellow Potentilla

Crocosmia

Crocosmia are one of my favorite flowers. Our hummingbirds enjoy them a lot too but so far I haven’t  been able to catch any pictures of them on it.

Crocosmia close up

As always we have to thank Charlie for his excellent care of our gardens.

We are joining Dory with this Flower Friday post.

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Wild Bird Wednesday – Bluebird Babies!

I thought I would give you a little birding update from our yard. You may remember a while back when I reported that our bluebird box had been under attack by some House sparrows. Sadly the first brood of babies was lost but since then our bluebird couple have been working hard to raise two more broods. The last couple of weeks the babies from the final brood have been coming to the feeder and we have been able to watch them grow.

Please note that all the pictures in this post were taking through our windows so the quality isn’t very good.

A baby bluebird spotlighted in our linden tree

At first the babies would land in the tree above the dried meal worm feeder and call to be fed.

Baby bluebirds huddled together

Feed me mom! I’m starving here!

Eventually they got up the courage to land in the feeder but still wanted to be fed by mom or dad.

Hurry up mom! I don’t care how big the worm is.

Nom, nom, nom, nom……

Eventually the babies started coming to the feeder and helping themselves and sometimes would even start to forage on the ground for themselves.

Anything good to eat down here?

I always love the call that the male bluebird makes (click on the link to find a recording). He sweetly calls to his family to keep them all together. We sure are going to miss these bluebirds when they are gone for the season but we will always have the welcome mat ready when they come back next spring (and make sure to keep the sparrows away).

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Wild Bird Wednesday and will take some time to stop by the blog hop host too.

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Flower Friday – Day Lily Edition

Hi everyone it’s Cindy here. This weeks edition of Flower Friday is all about day lilies. We have a wide variety of day lilies all around our yard. So sit back and enjoy the show.

As always we have to thank Charlie for his excellent care of our gardens.

We are joining Dory with this Flower Friday post.

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