I complain about yard work quite often on this blog, calling our garden a jungle and kvetching about how much work it is. What I don’t do is show you how awesome our yard looks as a result. We have almost 1/3 of an acre and the people who came before us landscaped virtually every square inch. We inherited a really cool garden and have worked hard to keep it up (during the summer we can guarantee at least four hours of every weekend to yard work.) The end result is, I hope you’ll agree, well worth it:

These are my beautiful pansies. I planted them for some color (as this flower box is visible from the kitchen) when we were trying to sell our house, but I’ve gotten very fond of seeing them outside in the morning. When it’s cloudy and gray outside they seem to brighten the very air around them.

In the Spring, there are about six daffodils that shoot up out of that middle spot there, but those have already gone back to sleep until next year.

These are just some of the roses we grow here. We have about eight different varieties, and these grow on a trellis that tops the fence by our deck. These roses are so neat, because every year they grow farther along the trellis. I’m hoping that someday they’ll cover the whole trellis and we’ll have a canopy of roses. Also, they smell amazing!

This is the walkway that we cleared out last weekend. The stones of the walkway are all very sparkly and this part of our yard has a very serene quality to it.

It’s right next to our deck and contains some of the biggest plants in our yard. In the far right corner, you can see the outline of our giant fleece flower. This beast grows over eight feet tall in about a month and is about four feet wide. It’s enormous!

Don’t you just wish you got to look out and see this every morning?

This is only a few highlights from our yard. We have a lot of flowers and plants that flourish at different times of the year, so our yard never looks the same from month to month.

Wes and I have given up on the idea of getting all the yard work done at once and have instead embraced a do-what-you-can perspective on the whole issue. Unless we hire a full-time gardener, there’s no way it’s all getting done! Still, even though it’s a ton of work and the dirt never really comes out from the farthest reaches of my fingernails, we enjoy taking care of our yard and love watching it flourish. Hard work is always better when it pays off in a pretty way.