When we bought the place in 2001. Thanks for looking!

What a beautiful and tranquil garden! I love the purple clematis on the fence and the structure of your garden.

Thank you! We kind of fly by the seat of our pants. Our ultimate plan is to take the rest of the grass out of the backyard and put it all to beds.

What a showplace! You must have worked very hard on design and implementation to create this lovely display. Thanks for the tour!

Wow, very nice! Great work.

From boring lawn to a wonderful garden! I wish more people would be like you :-) Great work!

Love the wagon wheels! You’ve done such a great transformation, congratulations!

You have created a nice tranquil space. I too removed the grass from my front yard and created a garden of hostas, sedums, hydrangeas, and other beautiful plants and flowers. Unfortunately my neighbors other both sides of me don't take care of their yards :( I wish they were more like us garden lovers. In my backyard I have vegetable gardens, a pool, and a patio with a gazebo on it. Of course I have plants in the back too but I need some nice plants to border my fence. Any suggestions?

Where do you live (U.S., State)? What do your garden look like during the cold season, if you have a cold season?

The only suggestion I would make is to possibly add window boxes to further dress up the house windows.

Again, congratulations on putting in the hard work of creating such lovely and tranquil spaces.

Lovely. I love the wheels. I used old wagon wheels to define the back of my gardens. I found them here on the property. I miss them!!

Very nice, I love the transformation.

4b! You must in far far north Iowa! Looking at the USDA zonal maps I noticed I've been moved to 5b (-10 to -15F). Erroneous - I've seen it -27 here and more recently seen it -22F. Ya just can't trust the government.

Your garden looks fantastic. Love the steel wheels (great album- Rolling Stones). Bet steel wheels are easier to come by in your neck of the woods than most places.

Thanks everyone!

Took me two years to convince my husband to tear out the rest of the grass in the front. The yard wasn't that big anyway, why bother having grass? Once we did that, he said "That looks great, but we are NOT doing that to the backyard-we have to have some actual yard." Since he said that, we've added two small beds by the back part of the fence, and expanded alongside the fence, bringing it out a couple feet-the railroad ties used to be next to the yuccas. The plan is to divide the rest of it so we have hostas/heucheras in the shady part closer to the house and then more sun stuff farther out.

The wagon wheels came from my grandparents farm place, from when my grampa and gramma's families came over from Sweden. They were just going to leave them, all overgrown w/weeds, partially stuck in the creek bed when they left the home place thirty years ago, and thought dad was crazy for wanting them. Oh, and that tub came from my grampa and gramma's too!

Celeste, gardencool, I'm in NW Iowa, good call gardencool! Some maps show us as 5a, and I'd like to ask them then why we never have good luck w/5 plants (aside from ones that cross a few zones, like 3-5 etc). Zone 5 things don't do well here.

It's pretty blah here in the winter, Celeste. We cut our stuff down end of October/beginning of November and then it's just...hunker down and wait for the geese to come back in the spring so we can start our daily tours then to see when my hostas start poking up again. If we could afford it, we'd turn that back garage into a greenhouse to make our winters more bearable. However, when it's freshly snowed, it's pretty..it sits on the wagon wheels and on the fence etc. I might have some pictures someplace of the winter.

That one could have been from May, can't remember...we had two bad blizzards in May this year and I know I took a "OMG can you believe this crap?" picture to put on FB.