croque-choux

Lighten up dude, Spring is here

"Yeah well, you'd be ticked off too if you had to sit outside under an apple tree all damn Winter waiting for Spring"...

Looking over the fence... this is growing in my neighbor's yard - mimosa! Same word in French.

Garden goodies

Not many of these left now that Fall is here, but that makes them all the more special. I caught my dog Pixie trying to pull a couple of these off the bush with her teeth! It made me laugh to see her tugging at the raspberries but I still scolded her :o)

Virtual blooms

Make a flower or an entire garden online with this super fun Flash® game here. Then you can e-mail your creation to a friend. Cool! I can't get a screen shot of this, but check it out. (Warning: fun & addictive!)
Thanks to Zefrank!

Dahlias, dahlin'

The Peppermint Dahlia I planted in a rare fit of gardening is blooming like mad in the garden out back, so I just had to snap a photo. Hard to believe that this huge plant sprung from just one bulb! Here I would like to admit that I am the world's laziest gardener. So no oohing and aahing, ya'll. And the number one thing I hate about digging in the yard is all the extremely gross creepy crawly things that one unearths while gardening. Eeeeeyew! But when something this amazing blooms it's worth it.

Green Design

I'm really liking this idea I saw on inhabitat: make your own designer terrarium, a mini indoor garden you can personalize to suit your taste. This would be a nice thing to do this Fall so that when Winter rolls around, you'd have a miniature garden to admire. For some reason this made me think of the marvelous little gardens I saw over at Liquidsky Arts, so cute... especially the Alice in Wonderland garden. Now to add inhabitat to my sidebar, and also treehugger, which I keep forgetting to add. Vive l'eco-design!

Fairy food

You have to get down on all fours and hunt for these little things, but they are so worth it: wild strawberries. They have taken over a certain corner of my garden, and they overan the lemon thyme so I'll have to plant more somewhere else. But then again lemon thyme does not taste good sprinkled over vanilla ice cream, whereas these berries do. Yum.

Stop and smell the flowers

Woohoo! I'm off next week- no training classes and no hustling back and forth to Paris- so I'll have time to smell the flowers I hope. I stepped out into my yard and discovered that the peonies I planted a couple of years ago finally decided to bloom this year! I had almost forgotten what color they were supposed to be, so it was a nice surprise to see these pure white flowers with a touch of blood red in the centers. They smell wonderful too. Oh yeah, and my Charles Rennie Mackintosh roses are in full bloom. I really love this shade of pink, but I doubt that my camera does it justice. If you'd really like to see some lovely flowers, check out what's blooming chez Kim this month. I love her flower photos!

Technicolor, at last

I'm experimenting with color here and in my garden! I am trying to learn a little bit of html to liven up my blog and because I love learning things. I'm also trying something new in the garden. I picked up the prettiest dahlia bulb yesterday, and I managed to plant it this afternoon before it started raining. It goes by the name "Mick's Peppermint", and looks like this or this. These are candy cane colored! I also bought some Stargazer lilies. It must be fun to name flowers. A lot of the time I am attracted to them because of the names they have- i.e. the pink English roses I have out back are Charles Rennie Mackintosh roses, and I just had to have some Labrador violets in honor of my dog. More English roses than you can shake a stick at here, along with their lovely names and perfume descriptions (check out the English rose section). I can almost smell them... and I am totally restraining myself from buying a William Morris to go along with Mackintosh :o) I hope that all this talk of flowers has me inspired now to make another fabric postcard for the Garden Fantasy exchange...