A pretty spot

Hi!
We had a fine weekend-- pretty mellow as Fourth-of-July weekends go. I went with Patrick to his all-day Independence Day gig, and watched fireworks. Saturday and Sunday I did yard and garden stuff, took it easy, got a little sunburned, y'know, good summer stuff. 
The dramas of the weekend were Del's hot spots-- icky awful oozy pussy things he seems to be prone to during the hottest weeks of the summer-- and the damn DEER, who managed to find a way into my garden. So our weekend had its moments of feeling daunted and grossed-out and irate (the DEER) but now, with an embiggened fence (update on Wednesday) and a lot of hydrogen peroxide and Gold Bond powder we have both situations under control. 
And I got to make Del an Elizabethan collar out of some blue-and-white ticking I had in the stash, and his poor self-pity face, when it's not making me sad for him, is quite hysterical. 
So anyway, instead of pictures of my bean-stumps (sobs and tears and tears and more sobs) or pictures of poor Del, I will give you pictures of my flower garden. 
This is the first year the garden itself is really starting to look good. I never realized how long a road "decent" can be when you start with a blank slate. Also, the depth of the bed is daunting. I've done lots of two-foot-wide foundation plantings-- those I can handle. This is a whole different ball game, and it's shady. 
But this was the before...

...and though the garden does look a lot better in person, in the pictures above you can see the snowball bush that's getting tall enough to hide our fuel tank fill pipe, and and the pretty leaves of everything, and the foamflower that's blooming against the rich purple ligularia leaves... oh, it is all so pretty out there. The two hydrangeas I planted on either side of the porch did not die, over the course of the long hard winter, and are now rebounding triumphantly. 
It certainly has come a long way from weeds-and-sedum-and-a-few-ferns-and-more-weeds, and that is satisfying. A total transformation.

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