Remember that raised flower bed we built last summer out of a few tons of rocks, then filled with a few tons of dirt, then surrounded by another ton of paving stones? Well after half a year of growing nothing more than a bumper crop of some rather determined weeds (thanks in no small part to the impressive storms we’ve had lately), last night we finally filled it with actual flowers.

A few months ago we ordered a pre-planned garden set from High Country Gardens, which specializes in plants that do well in drought-prone areas, and they were finally delivered today. The instant I got home I tore open the box and carefully plucked out a few dozen plastic bagged pots, and then Richard and I went outside with large mixing spoons (because we are a garden trowel deficient household), and in an extremely quick rush of laying out all the little pots and consulting the sheet of info on how big and wide each of them will get and trying to remember which was which and getting very confused, we somehow managed to get all of them planted before it was too dark outside to see what we were doing.

You can see the collection we planted here (it’s the one on the top of the page – the ‘Hot and Sunny’ collection). Of course, currently it looks less like the colorful perfusion of foliage you see in the picture on their website and more like a few random dots of sad and pathetic half-wilted weeds scattered in some vague semblance of order in a flower bed too big for such itty bitty patches of green. But if all goes as planned, in a few months those teeny little half-wilted plants will fill that huge raised flower bed we spent so much time building with lots and lots of beautiful flowers.