In which I lead you down the garden path

My hunk o' burnin' love is a front-porch kind of guy who likes to call greetings to the people who walk past our house and sometimes pause to look at our garden. He's an architect, so for years he's been talking about modifying our Cape Cod-style house to give it a front porch.

I've been lukewarm on the idea because I enjoy having a garden right outside my front door and seeing roses and other colorful things through the lace curtains in the living-room windows. So a few weeks ago when he started in again with the porch talk, I said, Hey, why don't we just drag a bench to the front garden and park it under the living-room windows and pretend that's a porch?

It turned out to be one of my better ideas. And my husband satisfied his urge to build something by widening the discreet stepping-stone "service" path and laying what I'm calling a patio-ette. Now I sit on the bench to sip cafe latte and stare at my garden and he sits on the bench to sip wine and wave at the neighbors. Life is good.

Here's another view of the patio-ette. The walkway, hidden behind the euononymous in the left foreground, goes from the wide front stoop (just visible at the top center of this photo) to the driveway. Yes, there are now two routes from the front door to the drive. This one is actually a shortcut through the big garden outlined by the main walkway.

The climbing roses at the top left of this photo are the wildly fragrant Zephirine Drouhin. It'll be lovely to sit right beside them when they're blooming again. And this weekend, that patch of dirt in the center of the picture is going to get a nice bunch of lavender that needs moved from elsewhere in the garden.

The Japanese anemones are blooming, and will keep at it for the next several weeks. I adore these little green balls and glowing white flowers. (Yes, that's my new walk again on the right side of this photo.)

Moving now to the back garden... Hanging this cheap pot of strawberries on the arbor turned out to be a great idea because the bunnies can't jump this high. We have already bought a pretty wire basket, twice this size, for next year's berries.

This is probably the last Gerbera daisy we'll be seeing this year. They make great centerpieces for outdoor tables because there are always three or four stalks blooming in wild colors.

This tired geranium is telling me summer's over. And I haven't seen a single hummingbird at the feeder outside my office window today, so I guess they've headed to Florida or Mexico already. Soon the leaves will be turning, and while mums don't number among my favorite flowers, we'll probably scatter some potted ones here on the patio and in the front garden. Anything to keep some garden color going for as long as possible.