True Confessions: In the Yard

I feel the need to come clean. Everyone is always commenting on my beautiful yard. You know, the one I show in photos on my blog, like here and here and here.


Wouldn't you just love to come sit on this bench and sip some pink lemonade with me? Or some good southern sweet tea?

So here's the thing: first of all, the only pink lemonade we have around here is the kind that comes from a little packet labeled "Kool-Aid." And I don't really know how to make sweet tea. I was raised in New York, remember?

And this pretty bench area is right out in the middle of an incredibly hot patch of the yard. I just cropped the rest of it out. If you look closely, you can see poison ivy peeping out from under the mulch and mosquitoes hanging in dense clouds.

While you're sitting on the bench, sipping Kool-Aid, you can look off to your right and see the garden in all its summer glory:


Or you can turn you head to the left and see our pretty little shed that we were once going to make into a playhouse:


If you're tired of slapping mosquitoes off your legs, you can walk around to the ivy-covered woods in back. One of the things that attracted us to this house 10 years ago was all the pretty dogwoods and the English ivy, which gave the house a nice cottage-ish look:




Come around to the side of the house (watch out for those huge mole holes and the dog poop!), where you'll see the jasmine-covered arch, which is so lovely in the spring. This used to be a jungle of blackberry brambles, but we cleared it out one year. Like maybe eight years ago or so. I think there's a bench in there that you can sit on if you can find it:


From there you can see the side of the house there, the one that faces our retired neighbors who mow twice each week (with a very big riding mower) and use that thing called a "weed-eater" and even a "leaf blower" more than once a year. They have told us many times how much they enjoy this view of our house:


And from there you can come around to the front, where hundreds of commuters pass every day and admire our Curb Appeal:


So please, don't be so hard on yourselves about your own floundering flowerbeds. Because what you just saw, my friends, is the reality of In the Yard at SmallWorld. And why I will continue to crop out the thorns and focus on this:

Linked up on Outdoor Wednesday at a Southern Daydreamer