It’s a little gloomy here in Indiana on this Earth Day, so here are some more flower shots to cheer us up. :)
Happy Earth Day! Here’s hoping the nicer parts of spring come to us soon. :)
Is it possible? Has spring really sprung?
Here are a few flowers in my yard today! I got these bulbs from American Meadows and planted them last fall.
Some little daffodils…
And some tiny crocuses…
If it’s at all nice where you live, I hope you get to go out and enjoy it!
Our current project is one we’ve definitely hired out and one that’s taking quite a while. We are having a number of trees cut down and removed. The biggest one is a huge cottonwood that had branches as big as small trees hanging over our house and garage. It provided lots of shade in the summer, but also a year-round dropping of seeds, pods, leaves, and twigs, along with the constant threat of a limb falling on our roof. It was a gorgeous tree, and if it were somewhere else in our back yard, I would have wanted to keep it. So I took lots of pictures before it began to be cut down.
I had to take this picture from waaay in the back yard, just to get it all in the lens.
I mean, it’s gorgeous, but you can see all the junk it drops on our roof, and from this angle, you can’t see just how the limbs really reach all the way into the front yard.
Look at its gorgeous bark.
It was beautiful and shady, but look at its crazy limbs over the house and the garage (all the way to the front of the house!). As a girl who grew up with a lot of oaks, I’m not used to trees that are this crazy spread out. And its huge trunk was impeding any additions to the house or changes to the deck and garage.
Just looking back on these pictures, I know a part of me misses it! But just a part of me.
We hired our awesome neighbor, Mark, from Stump Busters, to do this hefty job for us. The nutty weather and all its wind have been dragging the project out. He’s been working on this tree on and off for over 3 weeks. But here’s what it looks like now.
And from the side.
Crazy, right? Who knew we had so much sky! And when that humongously huge trunk is down, I might not even know what to do with the huge space I’ll have between the house and garage.
(I haven’t posted many of pictures of the outside of our house, because there’s definitely a lot I want to do to it before I love it as much as I’m loving the inside, but the change is tremendous with these trees/bushes gone!)
He also took down a large pine from the front of our house, again to save the roof, as well as some large bushes we had. (I tried to prune and save them, but they were very messy and a lot dead, so I think starting fresh will be a good idea.) Having all that gone will open up the house for some fun landscaping that I’ll start in the spring.
Here’s what the the north-east side of the house used to look like. You can see it was completely covered by the pine and the bushes. And in the upper right side of the picture, that’s the humongous cottonwood tree.
And here it is now:
Nuts, right? Grandpa said he didn’t even realize the front of our house had that stone stuff!
Of course, I can’t wait till spring to fill this with pretty flowers and landscaping. In fact, that’s some of what I started planting and transplanting yesterday. And I’ve already ordered some more seeds and bulbs. :)
We had another tree taken down outside of kitchen door, but I’m not ready to take pictures of that one yet. :)
And just for some reference of the size of this project, this is all the wood that was on the ground, after the first two rounds were cleared up! (I had Grounder sit in for scale.) :)
Wood and branches were going all the way out to those fence posts in the background!
It’s sad but very exciting and I can’t wait till it’s all finished!
