Finally, the last little walk-about of my gardens!! I will be happy to have this over, so can only imagine how you all feel!
First my apologies - I have a lot of photos on this post - I hope it doesn't take an obscene amount of time to upload for everyone.
I won't go into great detail about each of these. The first three are the view from the porch roof. Basically, it's what I see when I wake up every morning.
Then I just walk you down the east side of our lot - these gardens are mostly shady until you get past the river birch clump - so a lot of hosta etc.
The lakeshore gardens and big garden on the west side get a lot of sun. The 8th, 9th, & 10th photos are taken from the dock looking back up towards the house.
The big garden on the west side used to be filled with prairie type plants - purple coneflower, black-eyed susans, etc - and I'm leaning toward doing more of that again. It has good color in May, June and most of July - but right now all I'm seeing is pale purple, white and yellow. The purple coneflower gave it some punch. Along the same thought, the west lakeshore garden used to be full of monarda which I dug out because it was very invasive, but I haven't figured out what else would fill it in as nicely. We'll see...
Nan left a comment that she would like to see the view from our bedroom window. This is it in July - the gardens in full bloom. From the bedroom we don't actually see a lot of the lake itself because of the leaves on the trees - but I love looking out at the gardens first thing every morning.
And then you have days like this morning. :( Our snow had pretty much melted off the yard last week, but we woke up to a couple inches on the ground. By noon this was gone. I'm going to be very happy to see open water instead of ice, green leaves instead of bare trees, and flowers instead of dock sections in the gardens!!
I have a little bit of green showing in the garden - very fun! Jacob's ladder and a couple other plants retain their green color through the winter - which totally amazes me. 
Back in November, Kate did a post on her glass pens. I thought hers were beautiful and showed the post to Mark. A couple weeks ago he found these on eBay and bought them for me. Aren't they pretty? They're very fun to use - too bad I'm such a slug at writing notes and cards to people! :) The first pot of ink I bought was purple - very cool.
I'm afraid I still have weeks to go before I really have any interesting garden stuff to share. This has been a very long and very cold winter and I am quite anxious for it to be GONE! But in the meantime, thank you to all of you who have flowers in bloom for posting photos. It is such a treat to see right now! 
