So, Is This "Cute"?*

or just an awful lot of roof?**
(and I despise grey stucco.)

The door is also out of scale: and I'm not entirely sure this is how the roof actually looks. I did this late, late, so I couldn't run out and check.

Without the tree, it's obvious to me the shrub is far too big. I figure I could prune it down by 1/2, keeping most of the mass in the corner. What a monster.

I'll show the doctored picture to the husband and see what he says tomorrow. Then if he says OK, I'll call for quotes. I have no idea how much removing trees cost.

*I punctuate with quotation marks the British way...basically any way I want! I like being Canadian.

**Hey, Anne, I see the small deciduous tree to the right, now. It was an accidental offshoot from the neighbour! The foliage in the foreground, right, is from her Birch. She waters it continuously. I'm happy to *have* it. So many have died here recently.

Help needed.

I got these great wash tub containers several years ago. I want to use them for the tomato plants I bought. I have rocks and soil, but I'm not sure what to do.

I tried taking a nail and making holes in the bottom: I was successful, but they really are very tiny holes. Then, someone told me to line them with plastic so the "rust" (which is only in one of them) wouldn't transfer to the soil. The thing is, with the plastic lining the planter--the holes are fairly useless.

What should I do?

I really need to get my tomato plants transplanted soon. They were falling over in their little pots yesterday in the wind: and thunderstorms and rain are forecast all weekend.


Help.

An Excercise in Garden Design.

I was perusing House Beautiful last night and I was struck with an idea from the article on colour. This month features brown. Perfect for my fence! I thought. David McCauley recommends Pratt ad Lambert's Autumn Dusk 12-19 and writes

try it with mustard, lavender, cerulean blue. Or cinnabar red, blush pink, black, bone.

Two instant colour schemes for the garden!

So, I started going through web-sites and garden books to find plants in these colours, suitable for my zone, with an eye to picking one for each season and varying height. As you can imagine, I was rather quickly overhwelmed.

For illustrative purposes, though, I stuck to tulips. (The brown "fence" colour is screen captured from Pratt and Lambert and blown up.)

Tulip images from this site

As it happens, I don't like it. But that's O.K. It gives me a place to start, at least. And it is rather exciting! I can see how gardening can be addictive.

The Front

Thanks to Anne for asking! I am betwixt and between about all of this--the trees and the shrubs. Thanks to Lorijo for calling my house cute. Later, I plan to photograph the neighbours' houses and give you all an idea of the neighbourhood.

I have no idea what any of this green stuff is called. Help on that front would be great, too.

I tried to do a panoramic, but it didn't work.
So, from left to right, there are two deciduous shrubs, (I believe one is an offshoot of the other), an evergreen shrub, and a tree on either side of the front door.

Here we have the two deciduous shrubs on the left that Anne thought didn't look well:




And here's a close up of both of them:
(Sorry the pics are so bad!)

Then, we have the evergreen shrub and the tree behind it:



Of all the plantings at the front, the shrub is the one I am most attached to, if only because this is the view from the front door.



That of course leaves the tree behind it a bit bare:


On the right side of the front entry, we have yet another evergreen tree. It's been pruned in an unfortunate way, however.


And so, there we have it.

The deciduous shrubs can go...perhaps somewhere else? They are far too delicate to balance out the the rest of the growth. I am often tempted to take down the two trees but I'm genuinely worried about the cold. As this facade faces North, my feeling is they keep the house warm. As well, as the trees cover the front entryway, they do provide some shelter--as the inadequate "porch roof" thingy does not. See it up there above the proch railing "trellis-like" supports? I have no idea who thought that was useful!

This was taken yesterday, when it was sunny. Consider this your "before" picture!
I had planned to ignore the whole thing, just because I don't know what to do, and just work on the lawn (such as it is), but perhpas I really should make up my mind about it!
Advice? Thoughts?

Here it is...

I'm not entirely sure we have put it in the right spot. But it is fairly close to the back door for easy access and that seemed important.

Playing with Paint

The quest for the perfect fence colour has led to a complete re-visioning of the colour scheme for the house itself. Of course. That's just the way it goes around here.

So, first I turned to palettes. Not much, but I determined I liked fewer colours rather than more.

(I also seem to like black shutters. From Style at Home.)

Then I went looking for those "personalized colour viewers" that all the big name paint manufacturer's seem to have. I wanted to play around with painting a house. But my house is of no known style.

Victorian? Nix.
Colonial? Uh, no.
Craftsman? In spite of my location and blog name, sadly, no.
Modern? Nuh uh.

Immediate post-war square cheap story and a 1/2 just wasn't on any menu, either.

But I did find the "Historical Color Chart" from Sherwin Williams--and not only does it give you the colours (and co-ordinates to make a palette) it also gives you the RGB numbers and the hex values of the colour!

So, I was able to open up paint and go from this:



to this:
(Yes, I added shutters to the left window to give the facade some presence.)

Would it be tacky to spray paint my old, ugly aluminum front door to match the front door itself?

Where GT and WT meet--

on the bra fence near Wanaka on the Cardrona Road.



New Zealand.