The House with the Blue Door

Attention...the below photo is NOT PHOTOSHOPPED. (well, it is, but just to make it prettier, not to change the door color) Do not adjust your monitor. Our front and back doors are now painted Violet Beauregarde Blueberry blue. I love this color. It looks vaguely purpleish in some lights.

A non-photoshopped shot of the front porch area:

Eee!! So exciting.

My coworker also let me have some more starts of forget-me-nots, and I bought an Endless Summer Hydrangea. So now the plants near the front porch look like this:


Lobelia, lavender, lamium, forget-me-not, violet, hydrangea, rhododendron, and hosta. Can't wait to see it all grow grow grow over the years as we live here!

We couldn't leave the back door red, of course, so here's the back door, also painted blue:

Lamium Buds!

It has been a busy holiday weekend around Catty-Corner Cottage. Yesterday I had to work till 3. Today we woke up bright and early and power-washed the outside of the house and an especially grody section of the fence. We also cleaned all the main floor windows inside and out, and did several other house projects.

I was giddy and literally squealed out loud when, while cleaning the front of the house, I saw a handful of flower buds starting to appear on our mysterious lamium plants.

Isn't it lovely?

Pretty Jar Candles

Last weekend we hosted a birthday party for a friend. Another of our friends who came to the party brought us a housewarming gift of a handful of Bath and Body Works jar candles and Scent Bugs.

Well, for fun today I decided to try this awesome and super simple tutorial over at EPBOT blog, showing how to make old-fashioned Art Nouveau and French labels for your jar candles. It worked great!

In about five seconds, using a glue stick, my jar candles went from this (stock picture):


To this:

A No Rain Saturday

Yesterday at CCC we finally had beautiful late spring weather all day long, with nary a drop of the wet stuff falling from the sky. Ahh, how wonderful!

You can see the Rhododendrons planted last Sunday are all blooming now. Yay! (Yes, I photoshopped the door...it's not painted yet ;)

A bit of silliness...I planned to make a sign for our "Waterhouse Water Closet" on the main floor. J.W. Waterhouse is my favorite artist, for those of you who didn't know already. :)



It's silly, I know, but it makes me smile.

Now for a few more plant pictures. I know. I know. I'll stop. Really.

I finally planted the sweet potato vine I bought weeks ago in the planter box with the ivy. We'll see if the ivy doesn't choke it out.


The Siberian Delphinium is doing wonderfully.


Rhododendrons in bloom!


Aaand my favorite....our first lavender blossom!

Friday Pictures

Of course you know I have to start my post with a new picture of the eponymous cat of Catty-Corner Cottage, Corvin.

Yesterday, mom and I went garage saleing in the morning, and then I enjoyed some yard work at home. I shot a few pictures.

The ferns on the far side of the garage have really taken off. And now the wild strawberries are starting to flower.


..and peek their little red berry heads out of the greenery.


I thought this curled fiddlehead on the fern was lovely.

The thornless blackberry start I bought at a garden society sale last weekend seems to be doing decently.

As is the purple passion plant I bought for inside a few weeks ago.


My neighbor let me see her back yard garden yesterday, and she quipped that gardening is easy to get addicted to. Well, I do believe I'm smitten.

Yesterday at the garage sales, my favorite find/purchase was this gorgeous stained glass butterfly light...perfect for the Dreaming Room.

Hawthorn Tree

Thanks to Lindsey for identifying the tree in the back yard. I can't say with 100% certainty, but I'm quite sure that we have one of the hundreds of species of a Hawthorn tree. Which is ridiculously awesome because a) they are traditionally associated with faeries, b) they frequently appear in Celtic myth and Arthurian myth.

In fact, the tree in which Merlin was trapped was a Hawthorn, and if you click the above Edward Burne-Jones (one of my favorite artists) image of The Beguiling of Merlin you can see that Merlin is entangled in a tree with exceedingly familiar blossoms....

ID the Tree?

?

Well, you all were so absolutely amazing at immediately identifying the lamium in my front yard, I thought I'd give you another challenge.

We have no idea what kind of tree we have in our back yard. Here are a few helping images. Click any to see larger:

We just got blossoms on the tree about a week ago. And the birds and bees LOVE IT. Seriously, it's like chirp and buzz buzz city back there right now.

The flowers/tree smells like...well...it's kind of hard to explain what it smells like. It doesn't smell bad, per se, but it's a very musky raw smell, kind of earthy and slightly sour sweet.

Finally a last "pretty picture" of the tree and the back yard from today.

So help me, oh internets...what sort of tree do we have here?