Back in May of 2007, we had a landscaper come in and totally redo our back yard area. This is a before look out of our back yard out our patio door. You really could't see much of anything and what you could see, wasn't worth looking at.

This is a view looking at the same direction but from the side of the house. That shrub you see on the right side of the picture above is about all you can see in the picture. There is a path between the fence and the shrub but you can't use it because it is so overgrown.

Our landscapers came in and stripped out all the trees, shrubs and other stuff that had been growing there to make a clean start.

Here is a view after they completed the job, looking from the patio again. That rock feature you see at the right of this picture is a pondless waterfall. You can see it on the left in the next picture. This was a great addition because it supplies water for the birds and I can run it all year long. The pit is about four-feet deep so the water doesn't freeze at that depth. Since the water for the waterfall is supplied from that depth, it will run all year. An ice layer will form over the top of much of it in really cold weather but it always manages to leave a hole where the birds, squirrels, and other creatures can access the water.

Side Note: We sit on our patio swing nearly every day around 3:00 PM. You can barely see one of the legs in the bottom left corner. We have a heater for the winter that works down to the upper 30s and use a fan when it is hot until it gets in the mid 90s. Outside of those limits, we stay inside. But this does allow us LOTS of days to appreciate our "Perfectly Ordinary Paradise". Description stolen from my good friend John Hess in his book “A Perfectly Ordinary Paradise.”

Another view looking just to the right of the previous picture. Note the five Arborvitae trees.

This picture is from March of 2021 and the trees are all grown up now. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, the left tree died over the winter of 2021. So I cut it down, leaving one-foot stubs of each trunk, and painted them an orange color, just to do something with it.You can see that just in front of the heart wall in the top pictre.

Then the one next to that died over the winter of 2022. Something different had to be down because the orange stubs aren't exciting at all. As you can see in the top picture, I stripped all the branches from it, then topped it off at the height I could reach. Then I purchased artificial palm leaves and wired them to the top. Next, I made coconut shells. Yes, I know they should be greenish, but in Nebraska, all we see of them is after the husk is removed and they are brown, so that's what we wanted. Anyway, I made the shells out of styrofoam by gluing two 2-inch sheets together and then cutting them into a bunch of circles. Then I shaved off the excess to make them into ball shapes and painted them brown. Final step was to wire them under the palm leaves and you get the trees as shown at the top of this page.

On a side note, for some reason, sparrows like to pick the beads from the styofoam shells. I don't know if they are eating them or taking pieces back to their nests for added material to make them softer. Maybe they are even using them for insulaton??? Anyway, about to grow new ones for next season.