Creating something Beautiful

During the LDS General Women's meeting last September Elder Dieter Uchtdorf gave a talk on creating and mentioned something about taking something with nothing there and creating a beautiful thing. I have had his talk in my mind a lot as I have been working on our yard. I have an herb garden up between the a window well, a patio , my house and a sidewalk. The bed actually goes down a small back of our house and all around the other side. A few weeks ago I noticed some weeds in my herb garden and thought, "It just rained and if I pull them now it won't get to be too big of a task." So I picked them, and kept going. The only problem was once I turned the corner to the side of the house it looked like this:

Isn't it lovely. This isn't an actual photo of what if looked like, this is just what is left, I forgot to take a "before photo." But basically, this was the look but instead of buckets, it was 2x4's.

My plan, since we moved here was to plant some sort of bushy perennial with bark and call it good. This year I finally had the motivation, much to Brandon's chagrin since he had to do some of the work. But between the two of us we got it all weeded. Then I went and got ground cover and some bark, planted some Columbine, and voile:

A Place of beauty, the Columbine are really small but they won't be for long.

Then last weekend for Mother's Day I got flowers for my flower gardens, my favorite Mother's Day present. Brandon's brother works at a green house so we went down after hours and got to pick and choose what we wanted. The kids also all chose something, Karissa chose a Geranium, Alexis a Petunia, and Andrew picked Moss. I loved the moss, so Andrew. The flower bed had a lot of poppies & alyssum that reseeded themselves from last year, much to my distaste, so Brandon had to "Round-up" them and after a small amount of rain I was finally able to get the flowers planted.

With the exception of our bleeding heart in the corner (over twice its size since last year) some sedum, hydrangia, & some hostas you can see it was pretty bare.

Then with a little time, and some wonderful Visiting Teachers that dropped by and offered to help, we ended up with this:

Brandon built the wall last year and I have loved this garden even more ever since.

The plant at the the top of the post is called "Oxalis" and it is one of my favorites. It loves the shade and grows like crazy with those beautiful purple leaves and white flowers. I loved it last year and I got the most compliments on it than any other flower and had to have it again.