Garden happenings

For Mother's Day, a week ago, my request was to spend time gardening. I did, and picked up a case of poison ivy from the patch of shrubs, ground cover, and (belatedly discovered) poison ivy in the front of our house, by the trees by the sidewalk. I look like I have smallpox, and want to scratch all my skin off.

This is the patch with the offending plants. I will forward this picture to our lawn people and beg for assistance.

Meanwhile, I've been doing a little weeding/trimming of the rest of the landscaping. It still doesn't look like much. The lantana plant has perhaps spread the most so far.

Phlox, stock, begonias, geranium. I planted a ready-made "plant pot" with 3 zucchini seeds in it behind the flowers last week. We'll see whether it comes up.

Geranium, begonia on the other side of the front step

The view down the steps. On the right is a peony plant that looks poised to produce beautiful blooms.

I pulled out two of the small boxwoods along the front pathway - the ones I'd haphazardly tried to prune earlier. They were looking more and more dead. The third, visible in the last picture above, still looks mostly healthy.

You'll see a lot of brown debris in the pictures - the trees in both the front and back yard shed an ENORMOUS quantity of those bits. On a windy day, they floated down so thickly they might have been snow.