One of the former owners of my house was a PhD candidate when she lived here, and though I don’t know in what, exactly, it had something to do with plants, and as a result, I have the most interesting assortment of flora in my yard. Some of it is just nice flowers, but the parts that fascinate me are the ones that are edible but might poison you (such as the varieties of dock) and the ones that will make you super uncomfortable (the damned stinging nettles EVERYWHERE come to mind, but also the poison ivy that we have so much of in so many places I sort of wonder if maybe it wasn’t deliberate) and the ones that will straight up murder you (the wolfsbane). I learned a lot about plants and gardening from my grandmother, but I never learned anything about growing murder plants. Sigh.
We have a lot of houseplants, which is something that was never really a thing, but now they’re everywhere and I love having them around. The window garden overlooking the deck is my husband’s domain, but I maintain the rest of them, including a not-pictured hoya that is doing just fine dropping flower petals in the entryway, and a very moody nerve plant that is also not pictured because it is going through a phase right now and I’m not sure it’s getting better.
The day we closed on the house, the previous owner walked us through and told us about some of the more unique features of the home. As we were standing in the kitchen looking out, he mentioned that his wife had planted a shade garden on that side of the house and had spent thousands. She did an amazing job; there are lenten roses, celandine poppies, campanula, astilbe, hosta, wolfsbane, flowering dogwoods, vinca, and an insane number of ferns.
So. Many. Ferns.
In the spring, we also have a few varieties of daffodils and what might be tulips if the dog would quit walking through them and laying on them and using them as a toilet. Not sure why he goes specifically for that spot as soon as the leaves sprout from the earth, but he sure does.
I’ve added a few things — a lilac we got as a wedding present, a couple of hydrangeas, some daisies and poppies, a veronica. I have more I’d like to add; my plan is to eventually turn the yard back into the showpiece it obviously once was. But that is something that will take years to complete, and in the meantime, it’s a fun project.
(This was originally supposed to be a list of things I like, and it wound up being a post about all the plants — well, most of the plants, because it’s definitely not all of them — at my house. I’m currently getting post-a-day prompts, to get back into the habit of thinking in blog posts, which is a skill I don’t really have anymore, but I figure that I don’t really have to follow the prompts, as long as they get me started.)
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