A Trip Down Memory Lane!

It's not been quite a year. As a matter of fact, our anniversary for our first year here is coming up on June 30, as we arrived here late that night.  But I thought I would go back through some of the photos of the flowers and things that we experienced when we first got here. After all, I have dozens of photos to share with everyone.  
The house was surrounded by beautiful morning glories.  I love morning glories, just not where I have to clean them all up!  :)  It took a long time to tear them all down in the fall and I don't want to do that again, just too much work and not enough extra time to do that. So I will NOT be planting any this year!   I've seen some volunteers coming up and have been picking them out already.  But in the meantime, they did look gorgeous and I did get some photos (and some video of the bees with them).  So here is what they looked like all over our porch:

Next is an odd plant.  I had absolutely no idea what they were and neither did Kathy, Erin or Jerry.  Some friends from Ohio told me they were weeds:

But the locals knew what this was. This is Poke Salad!  Yep, it's a real plant.  You apparently take the smaller leaves and cook them or have them in a salad. The bigger leaves aren't as good and no one seemed to know anything about the berries except that you really shouldn't eat them.  The plant has a very dark red/purplish stem.  And they grow big, some here were 8 or 9 feet tall.
These are some volunteer sunflowers that came up from the previous year's birdseed. There were a lot of these around and some were quite big. The American Goldfinches thought they were just fine and ate all the seeds out of them before I cut them down.  I think I will put some along the fence line this spring.

This doesn't have anything to do with the sunflowers, but I put my pop up tent in the backyard for some extra shade for the dogs:

Of course, the corgis were busy themselves, and thought that the big pots on the back porch were quite fine.  This year these will be in the yard and filled with zinnias, I think.

There is a type of native hibiscus that grows naturally down here. We have one of these in the big garden out front and I'm trying hard to protect it so it continues to grow there:

Some color, huh?  I love this bright pink!
Of course, the hummingbirds loved everything. At one point we had around thirty that fed from early morning to late in the day.  We went through a bunch of sugar!  But it was so nice to seeing hordes of them as opposed to seeing a few for a fleeting glimpse as we did where we lived before.

There are also a ton of these around. I was told they were a Rose of Sharon but then Kathy said she thought they were really something else. They come in a purple, very light pink and white.  There are several dozen of these planted around the yard and were apparently here when the old house out front was still liveable. They are quite gorgeous and bloom all summer long.  And I love them!

Last is a flower that I found at a local nursery.  I immediately thought "creamsicle" and had to have it.  I have never seen a flower like this nor this color.  I kept it in the house until it just looked ragged and tossed it but it lived for several months here while it bloomed.  I have forgotten the name of it but will go back in a month and try to get another one.  I wonder if they come in other colors, this was the only color they had in the nursery when I went there.  I had also gotten a huge gloxinia that bloomed for weeks and weeks.

When Jerry got here, he told me he thought it was fake, he never saw a plant like this, either!