Coral bells and half a girlie!

This is a pretty shade plant called (if I recall correctly) "Coral Bells." We have a few in the front called "Foamy Bells," which I think must refer to the flowers. This backyard guy started flowering about three weeks ago. The front yard versions (four from the nursery, two from the farmers' market) haven't shown any inclination to flower, but they are newer.

In the foreground is a kid, pure ham.

Ripening!

We're picking a few tomatos every day now, and the cool ones - the yellow ones, the heirloom ones, the little bitty grape ones - are so much fun. If we could get Peter and the squirrels to quit picking the big, luscious green ones, we'd be set.

Tiger lily success!

Earlier in the spring, on the first 90+ day of the year, we went to the house of a woman in Homewood who had posted on Craigslist that she had plants to give away, on a "you dig" basis. These tiger lilies were among them. We transplanted seven; one died right away, one died after a couple of months, Peter lovingly pulled the tiny buds off another, but the remaining ones have been looking promising for a while. And today the first one bloomed! I'm so happy that they like the sunny bit of garden I picked out for them, which got much sunnier after Mike and his dad took a chainsaw to a dying maple tree soon after we moved in. The chainsaw stopped working when the tree had been reduced to a five-foot stump, which they took out - with the additional help of our brother-in-law Scott - over Thanksgiving two years ago. (We women and children for the most part remained sensibly in the house, because it was cold, and children don't mix well with Chainsaw Fun.) Sadly, we have no photos of Chainsaw Fun, so you'll just have to imagine it.

Before and after in the back yard.

So that's Gracie hamming it up the day of our home inspection. You can see the backyard a bit behind her. We've added plants between the sidewalk and garage to make a shade garden, and we took out the shrub that's directly behind her and to the right in the first picture. That's where our veggie garden is now. I just transplanted the peony you can see behind Grace in the second picture to the front yard, along with the rest of the peonies, which were clumped in the shade at the south end of our yard. To put it nicely, they were not happy to be transplanted. They practiced passive resistance that would have made Ghandi proud, and they look - mostly dead. But mostly dead is not all dead! I hope they'll come up again in the spring, and that the new, sunny location will be better for them.

Daylily roundup.

They're a very common flower, but they're still really beautiful. Ours are blooming very well.

Before and after pictures of our yard.

So the picture with the empty yard, but for half a dozen hostas and some very tired mulch, is the "before." The ones with tidy brick border, the fresh mulch, and the *plants* - those are the "after." When we moved in almost exactly two years ago the front garden was basically bare. We added shrubs the first fall, some perennials last summer, did a ton of transplanting last fall, and spent this spring and summer adding more perennials.

Oh, my gosh...

sunflowers at last! (Peter, quoting from one of our favorite picture books, "The Sunflower House.") Not technically *sunflowers*, they're Black-eyed Susans and purple coneflower, but we're happy anyway. The former actually (mostly) came back as perennials are supposed to, and we bought the latter at a yard sale for $2. At any rate, they bloom.