No dirty dishes in my sink!

This is what my sink looks like this morning...

I can't believe that the peonies are blooming finally.

I will be cutting many, many bouquets of these in the coming days,

 and placing them everywhere in the house.

I truly do wait all year, just for this one bloom!

I have a love affair going on with these flowers.

I love roses...I love hydrangeas...

But I adore peonies...

So today...I have a sink full of gorgeousness.

How I wish they lasted longer in the garden. 

But thankfully they dry beautifully, and I can enjoy them year round.

These are my first bouquet, but there will be many more to share later...

Because I have forty of these plants in my garden!!!

Some are early bloomers...some are mid-season bloomers...

and still some are late bloomers.

I also wanted to share some pictures of the garden as it looked before the weekend.

It changes daily and I can hardly keep up.

This is the last of the poppies blooming now.

Aren't these colors so pretty.

The one's in the top of the picture are Patty's Plum

 and the ones below are Watermelon.

A close up of the Watermelon poppy

 Some of the iris are still blooming with the early peonies.

I love this color combination in one of the beds

Here is the naked lady (Athena) looking lovely with Jacob's Ladder.

She kind of looks cold doesn't she?

I love this iris blooming with the columbine.

Siberian iris with variegated dogwood.

A view of the garden from the porch looking towards the driveway.

We have a long'ish' drive to the house that is lined with forsythia, and

last year I added some roses in front of them to add color to the drive.

I can't wait to see it in the coming years in bloom.

A view from the porch in the other direction.

We have a large expanse of grass between us and our neighbor.

 We will be fencing it off to pasture someday, but now we mow it.

Thank goodness we own five acre feet of canal water with the property.

That is a lot more water than we ever use in a Summer however.

So mowing is where I will be most of today, after I publish this post.

Here are a few more views from the porch before I go.

Remember the piece of white iron fencing I bought at Farm Chicks?

It is propped up against this tree for now.

This is where it will stay I think.

Ivy geranium of the porch.

Thank you so much for stopping by today. I do hope you all had a wonderful weekend.

For those of you from the US, I hope your fourth of July was as wonderful

as mine. I was able to go to the flea markets on Friday in Hailey, and to Rebecca's

(a little shop in Bellevue) that I featured last year on the fourth of July. She is only

open on the 4th of July and Labor Day weekend, and I wait all year for it.

I will share some of that experience in my next post.

And now as you can see in the photo below...my shovel awaits.