A room with a view: summer garden color

When we moved to East Tennessee after thirty years in the Arizona desert, I knew nothing about what grew here. The first thing we discovered was that we had to do a lawn renovation. Something I'd never heard about because most Phoenix lawns were, in fact, some sort of decorative rock.

When I called a friend in Baton Rouge to tell her what the Scotts guy had told us, she literally gasped. Then said, "Oh, no! Not a lawn renovation!" I told sweetie that this could not be good.

But it wasn't bad. They killed off the crab grass posing as fescue, then reseeded, and in a few weeks we had a lovely green lawn. Which ushered more than a decade of on-going lawn wars with the neighbor across the street, but that's an entire blog by itself for another day.

About the same time, bulb catalogs began flooding our mailbox. Seduced by the gorgeous photography, and excited at the prospect of growing something besides petunias that would be burned to a crisp by Easter, I ordered twelve hundred daffodils, tulips, irises and hyacinths. Okay, maybe I didn't realize that planting all those bulbs in hard-packed red clay might not be the easiest thing, but I got them all in by Thanksgiving, and continue to add about a thousand a year. Since mulch has become my life, each year the bulb planting gets easier as that clay slowly, gradually, turns into soil. Honestly, finding earthworms while digging is more exciting than if I'd unearthed a diamond!

So far we've also added eleven trees to the fifteen we already had (two of the original have been replaced after splitting in storms, while another two had to be removed after succumbing to pine beetles), and hundreds of bushes. After having spent too many decades living with shades of brown, I really wanted year-round color. Spring remains the most spectacular season, thanks to all those bulbs, but even now, as lawns and gardens struggle under our southern summer heat, this is the view from our bedroom window. The tree is crepe myrtle, the white flowers which surround our back deck, are butterfly bushes, which attract butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds, and I can't remember the name of bush with the bright rosy red flowers (which unfortunately look a little rust-colored on my computer), but we have another two out by our mailbox, and the hummingbirds and I love them.