Ma had a garden all my life. I remember there were vegetables for a while. She used to hand Blondie and me huge bowls of peas to shell and strawberries to, um, shuck? Uncork? Then, after a while, she gave up on the vegetables and went back to just flowers. Because she's had some rotator cuff problems, Ma is scaling back this year, much to the benefit of Blondie and me: We got her autumn joy sedum.
Blondie has always been more into gardening than I have, but last year I ripped out a bunch of uglies from Chateau Travolta's flowerbeds and hauled myself to a nursery with a book of prairie flowers given to me by FweetieB. I was DETERMINED to find something I could not kill. I even considered planting goldenrod until Ma said she was allergic. After my massive seed experiment (100 peat pots that sat in my window for a month, then died from overwatering), I left the nursery that day with cleome (oops, an annual), black-eyed susans and purple coneflowers. Last year, they grew shockingly tall. And then fell over. And since I didn't know what to do, I left them like that for weeks, leaning like drunks. Finally, someone told me to stake them, and boy, they looked better standing up.
This year, I've been clucking around them like a new mother as all the black-eyed susans and coneflowers CAME BACK! MY LOVELIES! And so Rita became sucked into the Ma/Blondie gardening vortex. And I asked for the autumn sedum.
This past weekend, Beloved and I moved a lot of river rock. We had this odd triangle-shaped patch of it in the front yard and some random piles of it by the garage door. I decided to move the river rock by the garage door so I had a place for Ma's autumn sedum. I got out the wheelbarrow and the large, flat shovel and found myself having flashbacks to the time I moved 14 tons of Kansas river rock to completely surround This Old House. Oy. I think it was This Old House that really turned me off gardening. Between the rampant daylilies, the wild strawberries and just THE WEEDS GOOD GOD THE WEEDS, gardening felt more like the prince's battle to free Sleeping Beauty from a hundred years of vine growth than something relaxing or fulfilling. Chateau Travolta isn't as much of a challenge. It has some crab grass and dandelions from eight months of standing empty, but really there's nothing odd growing there that shouldn't be.
This summer, we're attempting to create "landscaping." By ourselves. While Beloved pulled 2-foot-long metal spikes out of the rotting railroad ties around the front and side of the house, I moved that river rock, planted a whole bunch of perennial goodness I've been told will return AND withstand the hot Midwestern summers and mulched my ass off. The little angel refrained from helping with this part, but she did get involved with the window boxes, containers and our new sunflower patch in the back by the fence. Then I sat on the back deck with a glass of wine and texted Blondie all my photos of my plant babies. And she texted back hers. And we talked about the Kentucky Derby and I thought how incredibly cool it is that we have both planted Ma's flowers, that we'd both arrived at this gardening thing around the same time. It makes me feel closer to my mom and my sister somehow.

The little angel is slightly apprehensive about this high/low thing her mother is attempting.
The rear pot is full of marigold seeds, which have produced itsy, bitsy, teensy marigolds.
Two more pots of marigold seeds, along with zinnias, which last year I thought were a new kind of marigolds, and some other unidentified-but-cool-looking stuff.
In Year 1, I tried impatiens in these boxes. FAIL! Then I tried marigolds last year -- they fell over. Since these boxes are so shallow, this year I tried vines.
Ma got me that azalea bush. I'm not sure if it should have been planted, but it seemed to want to be planted. So I planted it. I have no idea what those bulb-looking things are -- they've never bloomed before.
This is the new-and-improved flower bed. It's about three feet wider than it used to be, and thanks to Beloved, now edged. The autumn sedum are in the back along the house, and this year I added blanket flowers.
Here are some photos of what I planted in bloom in someone else's garden.
Autumn joy sedum Source
Purple coneflowers Source
Black-eyed susans Source
Blanket flowers Source