It is unbelievably gorgeous out today! And with this lovely weather comes the spring clean up of my front gardens, unearthing the sleepy flower beds from under heaping soggy blankets of decaying leaves and other plant matter. I am happy to report that the flower beds I planted last year to the right and the left of the wild rose bush in the front yard have survived the winter. Everything is returning and propagating in numbers as I had hoped. Since our back yard flower garden was full of native wild flowers and perennials that more or less take care of themselves, I wanted to create a similar self maintaining garden out front, with a little more variety. The back yard is dominated by lilies, daisies, bee balm, goldenrod, jack-in-the-pulpits and evening primrose to name a few. The front has purple coneflowers, butterfly bushes, black-eyed susans (my absolute favorite!), coreopsis, bleeding hearts and lily of the valley for starters. Actually, if it were not for my blog documentation of what exactly I planted, I would be hard pressed to remember. In my cleanup I discovered what was once the remains of a squirrel, just a fuzzy tail attached to a leathery mat of indiscernible parts. I also uncovered someone's home, a neatly grass lined burrow under one of the new little azalea bushes. I left it in situ; I do not ever want to deter wildlife from my gardens or my life. Along those lines, I washed and filled with fresh seed the several bird feeder around the outside of my home. I also repeated the tradition of bringing in boughs of Forsythia from the bushes along our driveway to force to bloom. It doesn't take much, the branches have been inside for 15 minutes and already flowers are exploding open with their cheerful yellow splashes of color on our mantle. It's time for a break, perhaps lunch on the patio is in order today!