Welcome to Cumberland Gardens

I was inspired yesterday to start this blog after read through some blogs and following new blogs they were linked to.  Although it would be great to be a full-time blog surfer, I realized that this would cut down on my time outside and attention I should be dedicating to my son and husband.  I have several new projects I've started outside, and I thought this would be the best forum to share rather than lumping it in with my family blog that is mostly adorable pictures of my son who will be one year old on April 9th.

I chose the name Cumberland Gardens for a couple of reasons.  First - Garden Girl was already taken and Texas Garden Girl seemed like too much of a copy.  Then I tried searching Parker's Garden and Dragonfly Gardens, both of which are names of nurseries in other states.  Cumberland was my next choice because it refers to the street I grew up on, and where my parents still live.  My dad always planted gardens when I was growing up, and now that I've started my own vegetable garden, I realize that I learned a lot from watching him till up the yard each spring, watering the garden, picking the veggies, cooking fresh veggies, etc.  His mother, my Nana, was also an inspiration on the flower side of plants.  Her yard is full of wildflowers each spring and it probably drives her neighbors crazy that she has two foot tall purple coneflowers in patches in her front yard and she refuses to mow them because they're flowers - not weeds.

We were lucky enough to move into a great house last July, with a huge backyard.  By the end of July in Texas, most plants are tuckered out and look pretty brown and sickly.  I knew when we bought the house, the yard would have great potential, but I had no idea what surprises were laying dormant for me to discover.  I have two degrees in biology and can't come close to identifying all of the plants that are around our house.  Somewhere in my free time, maybe I can use a dichotomous key to identify and then dissect each flower to analyze its pistel structure - NOT.  So far, I've been lazy and try to take mental pictures of leaf shapes and flower petals before going to our local nursery.  Then I identify what I can by matching them up.  Not the most official documentation, but it's a start.

I plan to use this site to showcase my new vegetable garden, my flower arrangements made from my home-grown flowers, and some of my own recipes I've invented using what I have in my backyard.  I hope you'll enjoy watching Cumberland Gardens grow!

Our front yard before we moved in last summer.

Our backyard last September before we added some more concrete to our patio.