My writing friend, Selma P. Verde, posted a “G is for Gladiolus” blog for her A to Z Blogging Challenge and prompted me to write “G is for Garden” for my blog today.

First of all, I love gladiolus (though I seldom plant them) and learned a few things about glads in Selma’s post. It’s well worth a read and you can click HERE to read it yourself.

My garden at home is constantly growing, and by growing I mean more that I keep adding to it than I mean there’s plants growing in it. Come spring, I feel the urge to get out and dig in the dirt, this is probably because I come from a long line of farmers, and I always have a garden project in progress. Garden projects for me are less about maintaining the plants I already have and more about creating new spaces.

Last summer I added a rain garden to help with drainage because my back yard was prone to flooding. Well, I did some of the work and, for the first time ever, I hired someone to do the majority of the project. Knecht’s Nurseries & Landscaping came out and put the edging, dirt, plants and mulch in for me. I’m happy to say that the plants are coming up well this spring.

Though I’ve grown vegetables over the years, I’m mostly a perennial plant and flowers person. I love daylilies because they are beautiful and easy to grow and I have about 20 varieties of them. I have about a dozen Rose bushes (the easy to grow shrub variety), honeysuckle bushes, evergreen shrubs and about a dozen other bushes as well. I used to have more shrubs and bushes in my garden but they were so terribly overgrown that last summer we had a tree removal company come in and clear out a bunch of them. I have several variety of hosta and purple cornflower, asiatic lilies, columbine, sedum, black-eyed-Susans and a whole bunch of other flowers, the names of some I’ve long forgotten.

My garden is pretty overwhelming at times because of the amount of work it involves to keep it going. And, all too often, I walk out into my yard and I look at the work I still need to do in my garden instead of notice how wonderful my garden is. That’s not fun at all! So today, when I get home (I’m at the hospital again today – Saturday – with my parents visiting my aunt) I’m going to simply walk through my garden and take moment to appreciate it in the state it’s in right now. Weeds and all.

Do you like to garden? Do you have a favorite plant or plants?