my favorite yard pictures

Today I just thought I'd share some garden pictures with you.

I love my little gnome man. He's the keeper of the front yard; always on alert and watching over things.














And this collection of river rock, moss, and ferns is one of my favorite garden scenes. I love love love it!














One of my favorite hobbies is collecting driftwood. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of it on our beaches. But it makes great yard art with this sedum and chives.














This is an elderberry bush in our back yard. The flower is about 5" in length and really quite pretty. It's a wild shrub here. In the fall it'll have clusters of red berries.














This is part of my back yard. The rockery was a project two years ago.... another "in over my head" project! My husband was living and working in Seattle at the time. I drove to the beach and hand-picked each rock, hauled them up the beach to the car in a 5 gallon bucket. I don't know how many trips to the car, how many bucket falls I had to get, and how many car loads it took to get enough rocks for this. Then it turned out the rocks were actually too small and every time the dog took a running leap off the deck, she would redistribute the rocks. Clearly this was not going to work! Our DOT department was improving our road system (out the road), so we got these larger rocks from a quarry and they work much better. I don't know why I do this to myself! This was another back breaking job. I remember hours of laying rock in the pouring rain, water just running down my rain coat, and me sitting in the middle of all the mud and gunk crying I was so tired. But this pain IS totally self-imposed! I'm not forced to start these humongous and laborious projects! Maybe it's in denial of getting older.... Regardless, I love this rockery.















Hope you enjoyed today's tour through my yard!