Garden "deals" and my front yard
Garden mail-order ads amuse me. They're essentially all, "Hmm, we have a bunch of random plants left over, let's bundle it all together and sell it as a 'collection'!" At least the latest from Spring Hill was honest about it and called it a "grab-bag" instead. Unfortunately, even if I did have a yard large enough to just go in and turn major areas of it into plant beds on a whim, I'm the kind of controlling every-plant-must-grow-just-so person who would never buy those things anyway. XD
The ones where you get one of every color of a variety of plant are the most amusing. Maybe more people than I expect actually do want multiple (sometimes clashing!) colors of the exact same plant, but I definitely prefer the monochrome look to the random-every-color-in-the-rainbow look.
Unfortunately my icon is not, in fact, a picture of my clematis flowers, which are blooming fairly profusely right now. This would be wonderful, except that it was the one purchase of duo-plants I've ever made, and they were supposed to be one blue-flowered plant and one white-flowered plant, both plants having similar flower shapes. What I got was a purple-flowered plant not quite like the one pictured, and a white-flowered one trying to impersonate a carnation. Zero out of two!
The sole surviving bush from the previous front landscape is a white azalea, which I have duly pruned back now that its flowers are starting to brown. It's very pretty while in bloom but in the tail end of flowering, not so much. It's also planted in a little elbow of dirt in between the sidewalk and driveway that's not large enough for a big azalea (a.k.a. "a mature azalea plant") so I'm looking forward to pruning that thing every year until we move out. This is why I carefully vetted all my other perennials for adult size! The first year I had to cut it back artlessly to reclaim sidewalk and driveway space, and last year I did a bit of reducing and shaping. This year I've managed to get it to a cute little mound with only two spots that will need to fill in again, where I had to take out some fairly large branches last year. I love azaleas in the spring, but there isn't really any other spot in my yard that I could plant one - all the other areas get really brutal afternoon sun. Some of my neighbors have more though - apparently all bought as "collections". Either that or the neighbors are color-blind... ;)
The ones where you get one of every color of a variety of plant are the most amusing. Maybe more people than I expect actually do want multiple (sometimes clashing!) colors of the exact same plant, but I definitely prefer the monochrome look to the random-every-color-in-the-rainbow look.
Unfortunately my icon is not, in fact, a picture of my clematis flowers, which are blooming fairly profusely right now. This would be wonderful, except that it was the one purchase of duo-plants I've ever made, and they were supposed to be one blue-flowered plant and one white-flowered plant, both plants having similar flower shapes. What I got was a purple-flowered plant not quite like the one pictured, and a white-flowered one trying to impersonate a carnation. Zero out of two!
The sole surviving bush from the previous front landscape is a white azalea, which I have duly pruned back now that its flowers are starting to brown. It's very pretty while in bloom but in the tail end of flowering, not so much. It's also planted in a little elbow of dirt in between the sidewalk and driveway that's not large enough for a big azalea (a.k.a. "a mature azalea plant") so I'm looking forward to pruning that thing every year until we move out. This is why I carefully vetted all my other perennials for adult size! The first year I had to cut it back artlessly to reclaim sidewalk and driveway space, and last year I did a bit of reducing and shaping. This year I've managed to get it to a cute little mound with only two spots that will need to fill in again, where I had to take out some fairly large branches last year. I love azaleas in the spring, but there isn't really any other spot in my yard that I could plant one - all the other areas get really brutal afternoon sun. Some of my neighbors have more though - apparently all bought as "collections". Either that or the neighbors are color-blind... ;)