Cameron,
Your home and garden are stunning!! What an inspiration! Looks like a magazine cover! Glad you enjoyed the shower and then the gorgeous light. -amy

Wow Cameron, looks like a wonderful place to take a stroll or just sit and enjoy the sights, smells and sounds with a good cuppa tea!

WOW!!!!
AMAZING use of color and texture, just picture perfect!
Even more amazing that you could restrain yourself to just one little rosebush...:)

BTW, I would put copyright watermarks on ALL those beautiful pics before someone starts to use them as their own for profit. Except for ivillage, you just gave them all rights to profit from your pic that you just posted here. :)

I'm glad you all are enjoying the photos. I just use a little Canon Elph camera on the "scene setting" for "foliage". I play around with the zoom. I then compress the photos in high quality, yet use less storage space.

I'm building up the spring color as I had focused on June peak color season last year when planting. I still want to add more Dutch Iris, phlox subulata and more varieties of daffs. The daffs are disappearing right now, so I didn't take any photos.

I have 7 Knock-out roses along the fence and two Lady Banksia (one at each garden gate). I just reduced the view in the photo that I posted.

Rainbow -- you just blew my cover! Just kidding, but that's another reason why I prefer to use my blog rather than insert photos for iVillage in the threads. (They created a slideshow from some photos on the Home Dec forum). I do know I should watermark photos. I did that on a few photos last year, but it takes so much time with the quantity of photos that I take. With so many more professional and better done photos out there, I don't worry too much about my intellectual property...I'm retired from the corporate world! LOL Just enjoying my retirement.

I really like all of the colors and textures too. The quality of the light after the rain really shows up in the photograph with the house.

I'm envious of your lavender. :)

Not taken after the rain, but within the past couple of weeks. Gosh, isn't this just the best time of year.
Pam

Lavendula stoeches, Verbena 'Homestead Purple' and Camellia/Azaleas

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Dutch Iris
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Species Tulips 'Lady Jane'

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Trachelospermum jasminoides and Clematis 'Miss Bateman'
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Tulipa clusiana (I can't remember who)
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Saponaria ocymoides, Euphorbia amygdaloides 'Efanthia' and an unknown chrysanthemum.
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Pam -- do deer eat the saponaria? It's really beautiful and I'd love to add some if it is deer-resistant. I'll do some research. Since you have azaleas, camelias and tulips, I assume you've got deer fenced out or no deer! You're so fortunate! Beautiful gardens!

Cameron

Hi Cameron,
I didn't know if they did or not so I did an online search for "will deer eat saponaria" and lo and behold, there was a wonderful gardenweb list that someone had compiled that shows what others have experienced as far as what deer don't eat. However, it's been my experience that deer will eat anything if they get hungry enough. I know that because we lived in Pennsylvania for 6 years. I think the first question I ever posted on Gardenweb was "Do deer eat roses?".

I don't have a deer problem here (knock on wood). I'm in eastern NC and in my area the deer still have some habitat.

By the way, your gardens are lovely. I have seen many photos and have admired them all! You've done a great job making them your own.
happy gardening,
Pam

Here is a link that might be useful: Deer Resistant Plants FAQ

Okay ladies enough with the photos! Cameron, I will not be moving out west so if and when I get settled north of Raleigh, Franklin County, I'd like to stroll through your garden with permission of course.

Pam, FYI, the deer on my property nible on Liriope unless I raised the self pruning type.

Here is a link that might be useful: Propagating Perennials

I've thought about having an open garden for forum folks sometime. My garden is still is young (that outer garden was just planted last year), but I decided that mid-June is peak color season for me, based upon last year's photos. I've been rearranging plants the last few weeks to tweak things that just didn't look right to me last year, or were located in the wrong place. Every time I tell my husband that I want to expand the garden, he just rolls his eyes! LOL One of my neighbors stopped by today while I was in the garden and she said that I have too many plants -- she's on the HOA, so I guess they aren't too fond of my front yard gardening. Oops!

Heavens to Betsy..who could have a problem with your gardens? They are so orderly, well planned and executed. I can't understand anyone having a problem with gorgeous. I have really enjoyed the pictures and am jealous of them all. This thread and the others on spring flowers gives us all ideas on what else we can try here in early spring. Can't say enough of what I have learned here on this Carolina forum. Adele

I heartily second Adele's words. HOAs are wacky! Too many plants?? Jeesh!! Cameron, please don't be deterred! Your gardens are glorious, and that much beauty should not be discouraged!

This shall pass with time. I'm sure she's just nervous about having her beautiful house for sale. All traffic to her house passes by ours. All the houses have large meadows out front. She also told me that we need to mow our meadow every week. We're temporarily mowing every 2 weeks since our mower broke-- and we're paying $100 to have the 2 acres mowed until we get a replacement mower! I'm painfully shy, so this kind of thing is a big ouch for me! LOL We do have some very sweet neighbors who walk through the garden to see the flowers and their dogs play with ours.

As with you folks, gardening is my passion and I can't imagine life without flowers. Our garden is dear to our hearts -- our grown sons and my husband have all played important roles in creating this garden.

Thanks,
Cameron

She's just JEALOUS. All her prospects are probably more interested in buying your property. Good riddance when she does sell her house.

My neighbor across the street makes sarcastic comments every time she catches me out front. Comments like "Are trying for yard of the month?" She filled up her backyard with a pool and her front was done for her. Some people never grow out of the terrible two's stage. Just forget them and keep on gardening. :)

Beautiful Cameron. Thanks for sharing your blog with us. I'll never understand HOAs. In the hundreds of homes in my HOA-regulated community, I can think of only one that has a yard I would like (and that's just from the front). It's kind of strange that when we are all so different, a small board of people decide what everyone else should be doing, mostly peer-pressured into enforcing what one loud-mouthed and opinionated person wants to impose on everyone else. I think any reasonable person would LOVE their home and gardens to look like yours. Really, I can think of many times in the last year that people have used "inspiring" to describe the beauty of your property, and I feel the same.

Your HOA friend would probably like to see some boxwoods put in. =) Ha!

The garden is simply stunning.

Bah Humbug!! HOA's!! Cameron, your garden and yard is outstanding!! Being a former Real Estate person, I know what kind of crap the builder leaves one with. That is why I told my builder hands off my yard. Just give me a house and a cleared space and I'll take it from there. LOL I can't imagine anyone having an issue with your garden. Hopefully in 5 years I will have some notes and pictures to compare with you! :-)

Nannerbelle -- we didn't use our builder's landscaper. From the beginning, I told him not to do anything to the yard. I brought in a landscaper (that I'd used before) to install a few large trees, the fence, water feature, a patio, the main path, etc. Then, we did the rest.

On the upside, another neighbor stopped by for a garden tour this weekend. Our best friends (from G'boro) came on Saturday and we had just a lovely evening dining outside, meandering through the garden and then walking through our neighborhood, which is quite pastoral. Our "common" area is an old dairy barn and a pond. No clubhouse here.

I look forward to seeing your results...it won't take 5 years if we continue to get rain like the last few weeks! What a relief! My plants must have grown several inches in just a few days.

What a wonderful common area!! I really wish more developers would do that with some of these beautiful old farms they turn into communities. It would be nice to see some of the charactor of the land preserved. My place is just now getting underway good. Last year(1st spring and summer here) were spent getting buildings up. This season is landscapings turn. Right now, I'm concentrating on the hardscape in the back. I have my back walks underway, the deck will be going up soon and I'm getting the foundation beds in. I'm also putting in some trees for yard definition and privacy/wind blocks. My land was a tree farm previously and had been cut a few years before I bought it with only some nice old oaks left in several "glades" around on the land. Nature has taken it's course and I have a forest of young pine and hardwood from about a foot high to 8 or 10 ft high thriving on the acreage. I'm trying to define things a little and plan to leave a nice sandy path open to all of the glades for evening walks. It's a fun project, something I've wanted to do all my life. I have a TON of work to do but I'm enjoying every second I spend out there and all that I'm learning in the process. And you are so right about the rain, it seemed like a foot of growth on the pines and overnight, the hardwoods had leaves!! You can actually see weekly progress in plant growth!