It's Not Easy Getting a Lot of Green

Last year we put an addition off the back of our house. As remodeling often does, one thing leads to another and you end up doing more than you intended. That is how a new kitchen suddenly expanded to include a new bathroom, and of course we should have a main floor laundry room so I would no longer have to fight the jumping crickets for the washing machine. Then...wouldn't it be nice to have a screened porch off the kitchen? But then all that oak dust...ewwww. Which is how we got the conservatory instead of a screened porch. Off the conservatory went a new deck, which called for new deck furniture. And of course we wanted to access the deck from the dining room, so in went French doors there. So this year we sat looking at all the planting beds around the new deck (and the new sod to replace the damage the construction workers had done to the yard), and we decided it was time to plant the gardens. I should interject here that my husband is a landscape architect. Like the cobbler's children, our yard does not get the attention of my master designer. Instead we hired one of the landscape architects from his firm to do a design for us. In all fairness to Jim, he really is the business/marketing guru for his company, and works mostly on large commercial projects. Carrie does more of the planting plans, so this was right up her alley. She came up with a great design, and today some of the perennials were delivered. 700, to be exact. They arrived from Michigan in a large tractor trailer. We live in an old, historic neighborhood. I consider it lucky that the truck only took down one telephone line on my street. We don't have a driveway, but instead share a private alley in back with 8 other houses. No way was the truck coming up an alley originally design for horses and buggies. So the driver parked at the end of the alley, and we loaded the plants in the back of a small pickup, drove them up the alley, and unloaded them on our parking pad. Up and back. Up and back. All 700. I find myself being extremely grateful that I am not the one who will be doing the planting. We have hired some landscape contractors to do that. I'm not sure when the shrubs and trees arrive, but I would think that when they are all in the ground we should have a pretty instantaneous garden. Which will look great for Katie's graduation party next spring!