Come Fly With Us!

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Madi and Angel Easy to show their friend Sammy our favorite place in our home town.

Little Black Dog in Big Snow

Whether it’s right after a winter snow storm where we love to plow through the fluffy white stuff and wrestle until we look like abominable snow dogs or…

Little tan dog under big tree

…it’s early spring when the trees and shrubs are just starting to bud out and the grass has started to green up or…

Happy tan dog in shade of big tree

… it’s the heat of the summer where you can cool off in the shade of the Katsura tree during a game of fetch or…

Two dogs playing on a cool fall day

…it’s a wonderfully cool fall day to play fetch and search the yard for hidden treasures (maybe a mouse, mole or vole to dig up) there is no better place than home.

We love our back yard and are sure Sammy would enjoy visiting us here any time of the year.

Even with this celebration for Sammy we are sad to report that today he crossed the rainbow bridge. He was in poor health and that is why Madi and Easy wanted to let him travel the world with this blog hop today. As many of you already know our dear friend Easy didn’t win his battle with bloat and crossed the rainbow bridge a few days ago. We know Easy and Sammy are having a great time meeting up with all their friends that have gone to the bridge before them.

Here is a beautiful fall rainbow from our back yard to share with all our rainbow friends and the Angel sisters that lived here before us.

In addition to the pain from loosing Easy his pawrents have been left with a hefty vet bill that their insurance won’t cover. To help them donations are being accepted through PayPal. You can learn more about how you can help by visiting Murphy & Stanley’s blog. We made sure to get out our mom’s plastic card to send some money to Easy’s family.

It’s been a tough week in Blogville but we hope this tour of our back yard brought a smile to your face.

Read Full Post »

Fall Foliage Friday

Hi everyone! It’s Millie here.

I’m hanging out under what my dad likes to call…

The Best Seat in the Yard

Our beautiful Katsura tree is looking the best it ever has in fall this year. It’s full of beautiful yellow leaves. We have lots of color in our yard and last week Walter showed you the Japanese maple trees. This week I’ll show some of the other trees and shrubs that are showing some lovely colors.

The Stewartia tree shows off its beautiful orange and yellow leaves.

Oak leaf hydrangea (burgundy) against climbing hydrangea (yellow)

Multi-colored Spirea leaves

Parrotia Persica tree leaves

I love to see the beautiful colored leaves against our evergreens too.

Blueberry against a pine shrub

Four colors and textures

Fallen Japanese maple leaves on blue spruce

Sometimes the leaves fall on the rocks our dad “planted” in the garden and that makes a pretty picture too.

Red maple leaves on moss covered rock

Grape leaf Japanese maple leaf

Another view of “The best seat in the yard”.

I’ll sign off with this picture of our yard. It was just a perfect fall day and Walter and I enjoyed our time outside. I hope you enjoyed seeing our beautiful fall colors. Sadly as of the writing of this post most of the leaves are down. At least we have these beautiful pictures to look back on.

Read Full Post »

Fall Foliage Friday

Hi everyone! It’s Walter here.

We are finally seeing some great color changes in our yard. The above picture was taken a couple of days ago and the big tree in the middle, a katsura tree, is now all yellow. Today I’m going to show you just the colors on our Japanese maple trees. We have a wide variety of them throughout the yard and boy are they putting on quite a show.

Check out the beautiful yellow and orange on the Japanese maple on the right above.

Now lets look at a different view of that same tree. You can see much more orange to red color on this side.

Here is one of the lacy varieties of Japanese maple next to our yellow barberry.

This is a close up of that maple tree. Don’t the leaves kind of remind you of feathers? My mom said it reminds her of a feather boa, whatever that is.

Here is a close up of some pretty leaves against the grey bark of the tree.

One more close up of the leaves on another tree. These leaves are like a big fan and have such pretty colors ranging from yellow to dark orange.

Last but not least just look at the trees in this picture. The red tree on the far right and the one in the center are both Japanese maples. The lighter yellow/orange one in the background on the left is a Red Maple (not a Japanese type).

In case you were wondering what that darkish brown is on the corner of our house it is caulk that our dad put in some holes that a crazy wood pecker has been hammering into our house. It is one of the downfalls of having a cedar sided house. As you know we love the birdies around here but we didn’t want one making a home inside our house!

I hope you enjoyed this walk around our yard. Next week I’ll show you some of the other trees and shrubs that are giving us a nice show of color. Happy Fall everyone!

Read Full Post »

Flower Friday – Hazy, Hot, Hostas & Hydrangeas

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Dory for her Flower Friday Blog Hop. As our title indicates we have been having a heat wave this summer. The weather peeps tell us that we have had more 90+ degree (32 C) days than the past 3 years combined! In addition to that we are experiencing a drought. Our daddy has been working hard to keep all our plants happily hydrated. We haven’t been spending much time in the yard because of the heat but lets take a look and see what is blooming.

First up are our hosta. You can’t see much blooming in this picture but we also like our hosta just for its colorful foliage.

When they do bloom they have these nice bell shaped flowers that the hummingbirds just love.

Next up we will show you some of our hydrangea. We have this great climbing hydrangea and smooth hydrangea on the side of our garage.

The climbing hydrangea flowers aren’t much to look at but the plant itself is a great place to raise a family. We have had robins nesting in it almost every year. Here is a closer look at the smooth hydrangea and its big white mophead flowers

Also next to the garage is one of our oak leaf hydrangea.

Many of our hydrangea have only white flowers but a few also bring a bit of color to the yard. Here are some pictures of another type of mophead hydrangea.

They start out a pale greenish white color and change color over the course of the summer. You can just see a hint of pinkish purple in them now.

Last but not least is our mom’s favorite hydrangea the lacecap variety.

These are a beautiful pink color. Let’s take a closer look so you can see how they get their name.

They sure are a beautifully delicate flower.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Flower Friday. Be sure to pop over to Dory’s Blog to see who else is participating.

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

Read Full Post »

Flower Friday – Perennials

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Dory for her Flower Friday Blog Hop. The last time we did a flower Friday we showed you mostly trees and shrubs so this week we are showing (mostly) perennials. Since we said “mostly” perennials we will show you the one shrub in our post today first.

Deciduous Swamp Azalea

Now on to all our perennials. Let’s start with some of the campanula or bellflowers we have. These are all blue or purple and bloom at about the same time.

Willow Bell Campanula

Serbian Bellflower – Blue Waterfall

Purple Clustered Bellflower

Now sticking with purple we want to show you how spectacular our clematis is doing this year. We can’t remember when it has been so full of blooms in recent years.

Clematis

Clematis bloom

We have a couple more blue flowers in the garden too.

Agastache – the hummingbirds love these

Amsonia – Blue Star

Let’s move on to some white flowers.

Rodgersia

Goats Beard

Astilbe – This one actually has a peachy tint to it.

Husker Red Penstemon – another hummingbird favorite

Heuchera – two varieties shown here

It’s difficult to see the heuchera flowers but there are many tiny white bell shaped flowers along each stalk. Now let’s move along to a little more color.

Ladies Mantle

The ladies mantle almost form a hedge along one edge of the perennial garden. Among all the blue and purple flowers the yellow sunflowers and pink cone flowers really stand out in our garden right now.

Yellow Sunflowers

Pink Coneflowers

Last but not least our Stella D’oro daylilies have been blooming like crazy and are a hint of the many daylilies we have in our garden that are just about to start blooming.

Stella D’Oro daylilies

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Flower Friday. Be sure to pop over to Dory’s Blog to see who else is participating.

Read Full Post »

Flower Friday – Trees & Shrubs

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Dory for her Flower Friday Blog Hop. We have so much in bloom this time of year that we are just going to show you the trees and shrubs that are flowering this week.

It’s really looking rosy around here this time of year.

Old Fashioned Rugosa Rose with bee

Yellow Knock Out Rose Bush

Yellow Knock Out Rose – closeup

Therese Bugnet rose

‘Purple Pavement’ rugosa rose

Last week we showed you one of our deutsia and this week we are showing a different form of that same shrub.

Deutsia shrub covered in flowers

Deutsia Flowers

The next picture has a tree, shrub and a perennial. We love the color contrasts of all three next to each other.

Catmint, Japanese Maple, & Yellow Barberry

Potentilla in bloom

Kousa Dogwood Tree

Kousa Dogwood Blossoms

Last but not least…

Spirea flowers

We have a lot of spirea around the yard and all of them are covered in these lovely pink flowers.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Flower Friday. Be sure to pop over to Dory’s Blog to see who else is participating.

Read Full Post »

Flower Friday – Catch Up Edition

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Jakey who is filling in for Dory for her Flower Friday Blog Hop. We are way behind in showing what’s blooming in our yard so today we will get you caught up a bit. Of course we totally blame our secretary for the lack of service on our blog lately and apologize for not commenting much either. We want you all to know that we are still reading your blogs though.

Let’s get on with the show! Most of the flowers in today’s post are shrubs but we do have a few perennials blooming too.

Columbine – covered in cotton

The cotton has been flying from the trees for weeks. If you look closely at the columbine you can see some of the cottony seeds sticking to it.

Backyard border featuring our columnar beech tree

One of the interesting things in our yard is the nice mix of foliage colors we have as seen above.

Deutsia with bug

Red azalea blooms

Pink rhododendron blooms

Doublefile viburnum with bee

Variegated weigela with white flowers

Japanese Maple with Yellow Barberry

Snowball viburnum flowers

Deciduous azalea

Variegated weigela with pink flowers

Perennial garden – from south east corner

Now let’s take a look at what is blooming in our perennial garden.

Perennial geranium with light pink flower

Perennial geranium with dark pink flowers

Siberian iris

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Flower Friday. Be sure to pop over to Dory’s Blog to see who else is participating.

Read Full Post »