There’s a Monster in My Shrub! (and Other Garden Horrors)

I am ashamed to say that for approximately 8 months now, our front garden has resembled something out of a horror movie, the kind where the girl runs around in skimpy clothing before being dumb enough to go skipping down the dark hallway that says DO NOT ENTER, where she is promptly devoured by the nine-tentacled monster with bad breath/slaughtered by a machete-wielding maniac.

PLEASE NOTE: No scantily clad girls have been discovered running around our front yard.

Now, I don’t know the first thing about garden maintenance/enhancement. It’s on my to-learn list for this coming spring/summer. But in the meantime, we decided it was time to weed, trim, de-leaf, and yank.

You’ll notice I’ve taken 0.48 seconds to badly blur our house number out of these photos. This is obviously to ensure that those aforementioned nine-tentacled specimens suffering from halitosis don’t come here looking for girls to devour. Or mouthwash.

Who knew that under all of that mess we’d find a pretty flower?

By the way, this is what the front of our house looked like last spring:

Rick disposed of those gigantic shrubs and the decapitated wire couple that had obviously succumbed to the shrub monster. The wife does appear to be missing her top. No wonder the monster pursued her.

I would like to turn our front garden into something gorgeously beautiful with exotic plants and flowers that any respectable Enchanted princess would be proud of and invite her forest friends to, but I have no clue how to go about doing that, so for now I’m just content with no dead trees, no giant shrubs, and no scandalous wire people.

What have you done for the outside of your house so far this spring? Do you like to work outdoors, or are you like me and gravitate toward the inside? Have you ever met a nine-tentacled monster and lived to tell about it? Share your secrets.