It's looking lovely and quite peaceful.

I'm looking forward to your tour! We have lots of the same plants and I know you do lots of reading before you do anything. I can't wait to see it. I like the preview!

Carol in Jacksonville

I would like to tour your garden too. If I am not too sick from the chemo.

Michael, it is nice to enjoy the results of a hard work in the garden. Your garden is coming along nicely, hope to see more of your plant arrangements...

Silvia

When I do the photo tour, I will have to borrow my mother's camera (and perhaps my mother). This one was taken on my phone and even though all the settings were in place for a 'natural' look, this just doesn't show what I saw. You can't really see the blues of the salvias, the gold-mound durantas just kind of blend in with the rest and really you can't really tell one plant from another in some cases.

Yeah, I have noticed that with my camera and garden, too. It just does not pick up in two dimensions everything you can see in three. I've stood there in my garden, playing with the camera adjustments over and over, trying to get it to show what I see. I went back to your photo and I do see the salvias and durantas and some bananas and other beautiful, healthy young trees. I bet it is simply gorgeous in person! What are the red flowers?
Carol

If you are talking about the orange-red daisy-like flowers on the left side, that would be Torch Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia). There is also a lot of Tropical Salvia, but they are mostly on the other side of the bed.

Very nice and inviting. I like your use of fallen woody debris, among other things.

+oM

Thank you. I have been drilling holes in those branches to make homes for solitary bees. Bug hotels are cool and I intend to build one soon, but I thought having the homes integrated into the landscape would be just as welcome to them as a bug hotel. And the great part is that they, the solitary bees, don't bother me when I mow... or ever really. Admittedly not all the branches are windfalls. Some are trimmings from a Live Oak to the right of this picture which is casting all that shade. It had a few branches that if I looked at the direction they were growing, I could see they would end up crossing or running into my house/lanai, so I removed them now while they were still small enough to easily manage. Another bonus effect from trimming the branches was that my bananas get more sun now.

Awesome. I'm a bee farmer too. Especially since I've gotten into growing haskap, AKA honeyberry shrubs up at my land, these things bloom very early and for us, that means bumblebees. So I am investigating this on two fronts-companion early-season bloomers that can attract bees, and housing like what you've got going. Good to see it going on down there too.

+oM