Before & After: Front Yard Centerpiece

We started off our Memorial Day weekend by improving our front yard landscaping... Below is the "before" picture. Notice the lovely empty pot in the middle of the rock garden. This picture is from when we looked at the house before buying it last September. To me, this empty pot looks out of place, too small for the area, and well... empty.

Before Picture

We decided to spruce this area up. We went to Home Depot and spent 3 hours getting items on our long shopping list but a good portion of that time was spent selecting a half whiskey barrel (LOVE it!) and choosing flowers to be planted inside. 

Once we brought home the barrel - still smelling of whiskey - we drilled a couple of drainage holes in the bottom, sanded down the cut edge (after a couple of splinters), treated the wood, and then got to the good part of filling it will soil, tall grass, and flowers!

After Picture!

I just love the details of the barrel, and I think it's more size appropriate for the space (hard to tell in these pictures but it is much larger than the original pot). We'd love to replace those rocks with mulch but we decided to wait on that for now. I choose to plant perennials... Feather Reed Grass Overdam, Delphinium Blue Mirror, and Linaria Enchantment but because they are above ground they will probably not survive winter. I chose these because a) they are drought resistant (hard for me to kill), and b) they should bloom through early fall! Now that it's been a couple of weeks, they've really filled out and have many more blooms. I really should post a recent picture... but that would probably delay this post. Ha!

Oh, and Koda supervised the entire process of course.

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