A Garden of Blue Flowers

They're my favorite group of flowers in the garden. Blue salvia, flax, delphinium, bachelor's buttons....

I guess it's because they're all so old-fashioned. You just don't see the growers coming up with big, showy blue petunias or geraniums like they do in bright pink or red or purple. Blue flowers remind me of a grandma's garden.

In fact, more than even my parents' perpetual vegetable garden, I think my grandma's garden was what started me as a gardener. She didn't have much land -- her little Detroit backyard was half-filled with a lovely, but dominating willow tree. But her little garden was cool, and informal, and always very beautiful. Old-fashioned flowers. Something always blooming. My favorite sort of garden.

Last year Bob and I were finally able to landscape the front of the house. For several years it looked like a construction site. Subsoil, scrubby weeds, and planks of particle board for a walkway.

We spent most of the spring and early summer on it. Bob built two really lovely brick walkways from the front porch. One leads to the garage door, the other to the parking area. He rototilled and we packed the soil full of leaf mold, compost, and Canadian peat. We raked and cut a deep edge along the bed where we laid heavy-duty plastic edging.

I didn't really make a garden plan. I knew I wanted a cottage garden feel to it. And I wanted a little evergreen it in somewhere because early on Bob told me the house looked like "Santa's house." (I was going through a patch of buyer's remorse after I made the decision to do green stucco and a red roof.)

I shopped at several local nurseries, picking up hundreds of dollars in perennials. A base of blue flowers, with snippets of other colors to add interest.

Almost everything survived the winter. It's been so much fun watching the new babies flourish and bloom.