Take it OUTSIDE!

I don't know what summer has been like everywhere else in the world, but in my part of the world it's been more like early spring, wet, cloudy and generally gloomy! Before this past weekend I had worn shorts for 0.5 days. We've been planting through all of it, in fact a couple of weeks ago we were caught outside in a hail storm planting boxwood!
I can't wait to show you what we've been up to. Keep in mind it doesn't look like much now, in order to get it all done we purchased small plants, that will grow into big crazy blooms but for now and possibly a season or two more it's a little under scaled! But I'll explain as best I can, with my run on sentences and poor grammar, what our plans are!
Here's the house Today:

Here's how it looked when we bought it:

We pulled out and either gave away or sold (on craigslist) our "builder" plants, just some rodo's and azala's (not the pretty kind).
We replaced them with a two layer scheme my mom came up with (my mom is a bit of a gardening fanatic). At the back against the house we planted White Hydrangea bushes! St.Theresa Varitey! I debated for a long time whether or not to plant the beautiful BLUE hydrangeas but I had a color scheme in mind and blue wouldn't really work in it, so WHITE it was. We bought 8 bushes in total, 4 for each side. I am hoping to make a hydrangea hedge along the front of the house!

Now, in front of the Hydrangea we planted Boxwood. I love the look of a nice trimmed boxwood hedge, although we'll have to wait a while for it to grow into a hedge.
So we've got the White Hydrangea bushes against the House, in behind a small hedge of boxwood in front. We could have gone with just a hydrangea hedge but I don't like the way they look during the winter so we planted the boxwood to hide some of the hibernating hydrangea, and add interest and greenery in the winter!

Off to the left of the house we have a Korean Dogwood. We chose a Korean dogwood because I LOVE dogwoods, their root systems are not aggressive so they can be planted close to your foundation and Korean Dogwoods are known to be very hardy! They can grow anywhere between 20 and 30 feet tall, although I hope ours stays closer to the 20 foot mark :) They have beautiful white flowers, that will match our white hydrangeas!!!
We chose to plant it on the left side of the house because I could see it growing up along side the double height windows and you'd be able to see the lovely leaves and beautiful flowers from inside!

On the right of the house is our little crooked Japanese Maple, I love that he's lop sided, kind of WABI-SABI!
And behind the maple is a ceder tree we planted against our porch post!

We hung two ferns from off the gable, to me every porch needs ferns, I couldn't wait until I had a porch of my own to hang ferns from! It's really cool to have a place that I can do the things I always said I would do if I could, like the ferns and vegetable beds :) We're very blessed!

The color palate we're using has always been a favorite of mine, I've used it in container gardens since I've had a container garden it's, white, with bright chartreuse green and dark purple or black! It's my favorite! I'm working on a front porch planter that will embody the scheme!

I hope you liked it!
Sorry I don't have any mad photoshop skills or I could show you what I was thinking, I hope my words will suffice, because anyways, the book is always better than the movie . . . right? haha