One Hundred Days in My Garden

You all know that I love my garden. Hardly a day goes by that I don't find something exciting or beautiful and worth photographing. Especially in the exciting months from April to about October when the garden is changing constantly I love to be out documenting all the happenings.

So when the annual #The100DayProject came up with people committing to 100 days of exploring their creativity I decided I'm exploring the ways to take photos of the exciting things happening in my garden. I thought it would be easy to find something worth to show every day.

Well, I started out with - missing the starting day! Somehow I had it in my head that the challenge would start on April 6th, but when I saw pictures with the appropriate hashtag turning up on Instagram I realized I had it all wrong - the challenge had already started on April 2nd. Oh well, so I was just trundling a few days behind. Who cares anyway?

We had a very rainy April which resulted in a lot of grey photos with raindrops on plants. But the moment the weather became warmer and there was less rain the garden exploded. It's been a while since it had been that well soaked and it sure showed. Everything in the garden was just spectacular (the weeds as well...).

I included garden decor as well since there are a few objects in my garden that I simply love. This little angel that no one wanted because he has a broken toe has found his home sitting on some driftwood among the yarrow and fernleaf lavender.

Another angel is talking to a bird - angels and birds are good company!

This year I had a lot of poppies in my garden again. I used to have almost a meadow at the beginning of creating my garden, but then pulled the poppies before they could go to seed in order to reduce the number of them. However, in that following year I missed their happy colors, so I let those that were still there go to seed again. This year was exactly the right balance!

At the end of May the front garden looked like this:

There weren't only flowers - I also planted vegetables and herbs. This is the flower of chive.

I discovered butterflies and caterpillars; the bees are buzzing around like crazy; all kinds of beneficial bugs are hanging out in the flowers; and of course many birds come here as well.

For the first time my Rudbeckia "Indian Summer" turned out to be spectacular. All the years before they didn't do very well and I always felt like I'm an excellent Rudbeckia-killer.

I have to admit that on some days I ran out of steam - one evening when I still hadn't posted anything I actually took a picture of the glass of wine I was drinking while sitting out in the garden. Well, it was one of those 100 days in my garden, wasn't it?

An Image and Its Story - April 2019

There weren't too many photos in April. I mainly took photos in my garden for the "100 day project" that I'm doing on Instagram. Apart from that my camera wasn't put to work very much. But when I looked through those garden photos to find the photo for the month of April I quickly decided on this one. I gave it a bit of an "older" feel but that was pretty much all the processing I did.

My garden has a lot of plants and flowers, but I also love to put decorative elements in it. These angels were bought several years apart form each other and I think they make a great pair. The small wooden bench I found in a thrift store - the perfect place for the chubby angels to lounge. They're sitting at the base of a Japanese maple and are surrounded by peonies, Japanese anemones and heuchera. This is a corner in my garden that gets morning light but then slowly shade takes over. It's a bit mysterious with lush foliage and stunning blooms. This is exactly the mood I wanted to create. It took a few years to get there and it's still a work in progress. A garden always is.