Winter Garden

After what seems like days of cooking and eating and cleaning up my kitchen, it felt good on Sunday to get outside in the yard and in my garden. While everyone else in our neighborhood was putting up Christmas lights and reindeer on their roofs, we finished raking and mulching what I hope are the last of the leaves, and I emptied a few remaining pots. I did some major cleanup in the front garden, cutting back a lot of perennials that I often leave over the winter, but I was just in the mood to work so I decided to keep cutting and raking. Down with the anemones, peonies, asters, phlox. The more I do now, the less work in the spring, right?  I did leave the sedums and baptisia for now. And then there's the back yard...

The garden looks so bare and gray this morning.  Now it just needs a nice layer of pretty snow.

And just so we remember, here's what this front garden looked like in June.

Later in the afternoon, I went to Merrifield  because this weekend was their Holiday Open House and I wanted to see if they had any unusual holiday garden decorations.  They have really beautiful greens and wreaths and I picked up some greens and some poinsettias for the house. I am wanting to try an outdoor pot with greens, using branches from my yard, but I picked up a few specialty greens (winterberry, cedar lime, and some firs), so we'll see how that turns out.