Lovely!

Looks wonderful! We want to do something similar in our front yard with the exception of probably putting in a tall evergreen. But our house most definitely has the same "feel" as yours.

This year we are doing our backyard. I've got daisys, coneflower, and rudbeckia started from seed because with the cost of the hardscape, we need to be more economical with the plants!

I'm very new at gardening so I don't always (okay almost never) recognize flowers/shrubs/plants. What is the (I think) ground cover by your door that turns a firey orange (as seen in the fall pictures). I also live in Oswego so I know it will work in my flower beds too.

wow very nice. I wish I had a front yard that big

tinalouwho, that groundcover is "yellow stonecrop," or "sedum kamtschatikum." It's the greatest. We started with 32 plants in that bed, and they spread fast. This year instead of the snapdragons colonizing the patio veins, it's the sedum.

The patio faces southwest, and the sun heats those flagstones and bounces off the house there. You can see they like it hot! But they also make it through the winter great.

My advice is to trim the old stalks during winter when it's frozen, since the new buds come up very early in spring, and you won't want to walk on them then. It's more than a stretch to reach the middle of the bed the way we have them.

(I'm thinking the botanical name must come from Kamchatka in Siberia, and the spelling looks like German, so some German plant collector may have brought it back. Germans spell "jungle" as "dschungel," for example.)

Thanks you all for admiring the plants -- I'll be sure to tell them. :-)

Here is a link that might be useful: yellow stonecrop pictures

Thank you so much! I've C&Ped your post into my "dream house" file. We are building a new home and I'll be starting from scratch. Thanks for the link, also. You are such a peach to get back to me. Hopefully soon I'll have some pictures to post :) I hope my garden looks as great as yours. Thanks for sharing.

tinalou, If you want to contact me sometime by email, click on the screen name. There's at least three of us from Oswego here...

I live in Springfield, Illinois, and your garden is beautiful. I do my own gardening and I love the way your landscaper put those black-eyed Susan's by your front door and the purple cone flowers out by the drive-way....really pretty!! The changing colors of the shrubs are really what gives that beauty and was that red sedum I saw by that one shrub or a fiery mulch? Beautiful!!

barbiejo, it's sedum, and during the growing season it's bright green (see "yellow stonecrop" link above); right now though it is starting to turn red. I love autumn!

Our designer is Bonnie Henne Johnson of Earth's Echo in Somonauk, IL. McKay nurseries installed it. I can't take credit for all their talent and hard work, LOL. I just enjoy it.

Here is an update of the garden from this past summer (link below). We had a few volunteer sunflowers come up from last winter's birdseed.

Here is a link that might be useful: Photos from 2006/07

Good to see you on the forum again! Your pics are great - I love the white rose of sharon. How about that snow this morning! Red maple in front of our house is turning red.....

Yes! We saw that the other day, going out to the grocery store. That tree is a perennial treat. :-)

The flowers and still-green trees looked pretty darn surprised in my yard this morning, as well as me. I heard Tom Skilling say it was going to get cold, but I didn't think I was going to see flakes falling and sticking.

If I can get my courage up to leave the warm house, we should make a trip over to the Arboretum before you snowbirds head out for Arizona.