My Summer Gold - Metamorphosis Monday

I have a little transformation that I did on a side garden that I'd like to share for Metamorphosis Monday, our gracious hostess is Susan of Between Naps On The Porch. Be sure to check out her blog to see lots of other before and afters!

I'm calling this garden area on the side of my house my "Summer Gold Border" inspired by the Grace Livingston Hill book "April Gold" (which I'm reading for the third time this summer).

"April gold is flowers. Beautiful bright yellow flowers, yellow as gold....You watch when April comes and you will see little green shoots begin to come up through the ground, and by and by there will come buds, lovely big yellow buds, and then when the rain has fallen, and the sun is bright again you will see a burst of bright yellow flowers, all golden in the morning like sunshine. My April gold! That's what I call my April gold! Lovely golden flowers!"

So this is what it looked like at the end of June! It's taken me months to finish this area. It started getting so hot, I really could only work out there very early in the morning. So I would do 20 minutes here and there. Then I worked on other things and I just finished this yesterday!Sometimes you just have to give yourself a break when you're doing a large or time consuming project and realize it's not going to get done over night (unless you have the funds to hire someone to do it for you -which I don't)!

Garden Before


Bench Before

There's this lantana right next to the bench that comes back every year (it's the only one I have that does that). So I took my colors from it. The last couple years this bench has been red so this year I painted it orange!

We don't ever really sit here because it's too hot usually. This area gets sun all day! We usually sit here under the shade of the crepe myrtle.

Here's what I did:

• weeded
• removed sod to enlarge the bed
• re-trenched border
• moved daylillies & cannas
• planted annuals
• painted bench
• wound some grapevine around the top of trellis
• put down two bales of pine straw

Removing sod is hard work! This grass creeps so you really can't smother it and we don't use chemicals if we can help it. Now, I'm just going to show you the after pictures without any text. All the pictures enlarge when you click on them.

The trellis is just some lattice from Home Depot that we framed and attached to two posts that I topped with finials. I needed something tall on that big white wall that was inexpensive so this is what we came up with. We have a grape growing up the side of it.

Here's a view of the side of it

I think it's all ready for some pumpkins this fall!

I'm so glad this is done...I need to trim my bushes now and think about my fall veggie garden! But now my neighbors have something pretty to look at as they drive by this side of the house (we're on a corner lot).

Thanks for stopping by!