Mara got a Butterfly Garden for her First Birthday

We were lucky enough to have Gene and Tammy visiting for ten days around Mara's very first birthday. We went for a lot of little celebrations with a lot of people, rather than one big overwhelming party. We'll share snippets of the events over the next week or so, but today's highlight is the gift that Grandma Tammy bestowed upon Mara.

Tammy got us our very first butterfly / humming bird / aromatic plant / flower garden!!

Mara has been diligently taking care of it.

Here, she is checking the moisture in the pot with one of the snapdragons.

The aromatic plants pot you see mid-point in this photo has basil, oregano, parsley and rosemary. Temporarily it also had a blue plastic ball, but we decided to take it out soon after. It really was neither aromatic, nor a plant.

This fern-flower attracts a species of butterflies, but it's most interesting part are the soft fluffy leaves. Great tactile experience. Mara likes to show us the different-color flowers, they range from green-yellow to white, pink and red.

Here's Mara in mid-step. We've mentioned before that she's been walking more and more. It's the most exhilarating sight. This walk was very short lived though, Mara is extra careful because of all the little white rocks and the hard-as-rock ground we have in our backyard.

Here is the centerpiece with three gorgeous snapdragons and a pink star flower plant.

In the back you see the planter experiment we started, with the cut-up logs from our side-yard tree set up as a natural barrier to hold the new gardening soil. That is where we planted lots of little ground cover plants that we are hoping will expand to make the little hill a happier place.

There is some stonecrop, some wooly oregano and two other little ground cover plants with blue and yellow flowers.

 Here is Mara inspecting the pretty pots that Grandma helped us get, all lined up for the planting. Labor Day was quite seriously labored.

Saying hi to some red flowers.

 A close-up of the Wooly oregano which is a fun ground cover, pretty drought resistant.

This plant is commonly known as a Kangaroo Paw, also drought-resilient. Planted with low succulents because the location of the pot is far away from our watering hose :-)

We wanted this right in front of Mara's window when she has meals at her little table.

This is an old planter that literally killed everything we put in it. We got some survivor succulents from some other old pots and planted them in it. That should work!

Here's a closer view to our ground cover experiment. Stonecrop is at the top, wooly oregano on the left. We are trying to establish it with a sweat-hose :-)

We picked this plant because humming birds were checking it out while we were at the nursery. It has very interesting flowers, and the leaves make it look drought-resilient but it isn't. We'll see how it fares.

In the far back, there's the big orange flower we added as well. Don't remember the name.

This is the wild salvia, it decided to bloom already a week after planting. We have so many cool rocks spread out in our garden that it was easy to make a little rock enclosure for it.

Thank you, Tammy!! We love the new garden!

This yellow flower already had a yellow butterfly on it! I call that a success :-)