The View from My Balcony
Lately, my house and my little gardening attempts have been making me happy. John and I spent a good deal of time looking for some simple but colorful plants to add some bright touches to our very small back yard.
This is the view from the balcony off our master bedroom that overlooks the back of our house. We've got 5 long flower boxes filled with red Wave petunias (I love these guys! They grow like crazy and are pretty tough customers when it comes to not getting enough water)and some nice contrasting white or yellow flowers and then we went for purple, with a touch of red for most everything else. We also got a couple of extra boxes so that I could have some fresh basil, spicy peppers for salsa and green peppers just to enjoy.
And that strange small pot sitting just to the left of the table? That contains our attempt at raising a giant sequoia from a seedling that we got when we visited the Johh Muir Woods last year. It's actually about 6-8" tall and is spreading out at the base and getting a start on a woody trunk. We have high hopes for this little tree (no pun intended) and are having a great time watching it grow. Nothing like the thought of a mammoth sequoia growing in urban Chicago... though it will likely head off to live in my parents spacious and wonderful backyard if it survives to the point where it gets to start experiencing it's "giantness".
*sigh* I'll trade you your tiny back yard for my monstrous front yard! It looks great (yours, I mean). I'm a decent gardener, but for some reason I simply cannot grow petunias. No explanation. I've grown exotic and unusual plants, but petunias mope and die on me. I'm curious, though... what did you crop out of that shot? Last I checked, photos were generally oblong in shape :)
What a great idea - to grow a baby sequoia. It'll probably surprise you with how fast it DOES grow!!
How colorful and happy looking.
Actually, there was no editing to these photos. I used -- at least not to remove anything. I used Photoshop Elements' PhotoMerge function in order to take two photos that were roughly perpendicular to each other in terms of orientation and merge them into one shot so that I could show off most of our deck. The piece that is missing conains our grill and our little recycling area.
hey that's so cool- I love the idea of growing a giant sequoia in a tiny urban courtyard. I wish your little tree well!
Very nice! Not to mention the seamless joining of the two photos . . .
It's beautiful!