Garden Design for Dummies

We need the above book. You see, I mentioned in my 1st post that design was not my thing. You know how sometimes you marry someone who is strong where you are weak? Well, that didn't happen in this department--my hubby is just as bad as I am. Together, we are truly pathetic. We're both brown thumbs, too--which is pretty sad since both of our mothers are avid gardeners. Clearly none of those genes made their way into either of us.

So, we're having company over this Friday--one of Uncle Brainy's childhood friends. (Uncle Brainy would be my husband.) And we realized that we'd let some landscaping/outside decor things slip away from us this spring. In short, our little patch of "garden" in front of our door was a jungle of undergrowth, some daisies that UB's mom planted last year, and dandelions. Did you know that dandelions get ginormously tall? We do now. Anyway, on Monday UB pulled the weeds and cleaned up the patch in preparation for us to buy some flowers to plant. And we needed a new welcome mat, since we still had our Christmas one with the presents on it in front of our door. Yep--right next to the dandelion trees.

So, despite being totally unqualified to attempt any sort of landscaping venture, we set out on our own (now that we're grown-ups and all) to purchase plants for our little patch. Sounds pretty simple, right? Not if you're us, it isn't.

So there we were, trying to shop for plants and we didn't know:
1.) What we wanted
2.) What would look good
3.) Any measurements (kind of forgot to do that before we left)
4.) How to plant anything we would buy

AND we don't have much time because the sun is going down soon and we want to have this handled. So we went to one garden store, where we decided on those little solar lights to create a border. But this was only after wandering around trying to find them, considering the fake brick, the fake stone, or the fake wrought-iron fencing (again, not that we know how much we need, since we didn't measure anything) and going back and forth and thinking some more before finally deciding to get the lights.

By the way, any and all purchases made by UB go through this exhaustive thought process. Yeah--fun times. Anyway...

After making several laps around the plant beds (apparently we were hoping the appropriate plants would leap off of the pallets and into our hands, since it's not like we were actually LOOKING at them very carefully) we decided to go to Walmart since the garden store we were in was shutting down for the night. At Walmart, we made several rounds around the garden department, still having NO CLUE what we wanted/needed. And then, in desperation, we made our way into the fake flower department. Oh, yes we did. And we almost succumbed to buying fake plants. For the OUTDOORS. Because we are landscaping LOSERS. We come from decidedly green-thumb stock (I am a descendant of the Royal Gardener to the King of Sweden, so my mother tells me) and we actually considered putting fake plants in our yard. But we resisted the urge, knowing we'd never live it down, and finally decided to buy a little chair-plant-holder thingy and two matching pots of flowers that we could just plop in the yard and call it a night.

So, all told it required three hours of shopping to buy a new welcome mat, a box of lights, a planter chair, and two pots of flowers. I don't even know what kind they are, I just know that they are pretty and pink and white and they go well with the yellow daisies and are at the very least better than the dandelion trees we had out there before. And the Christmas-themed welcome mat is gone.

Apparently, we need to either have company over more often or earlier in the season when we can bring one of our mothers to chaperone our shopping venture. But in the end, we were successful at making the outside of our townhouse have a greater welcoming effect. It just shouldn't have been that hard.