All of us love to work in the garden.  Cheri is the horticulturist of the family; she plans the layout, selects the plants, decides what goes with who.  Miles is the activities director; he organizes soccer games with the dog, invents pastimes involving tree houses and water balloons, sets up campaigns for plastic army men.  I supply much of the, um, manual labor.  From each according to his abilities...

The afternoon light streaming through the giant feathergrass, (Stipa gigantea), was one of Cheri's favorite front yard sights in our previous garden.  The late afternoon sun caught the feathery tips, turning the plant into a six-foot halo.

There are a handful of orchids thriving in our house.  This one is a no-name multi-hybrid that looks pretty in bloom. 

Our indoor garden includes an avocado tree sprouted from a seed and now eight feet high.  The seed came originally from my parents' avocado ranch in Temecula, California (long since sold).  I remember the bumper sticker on my father's pickup truck, "Crime doesn't pay and neither does farming." We think our avocado tree may be one of the largest in Washington State. 

Another front yard photo from our previous garden.  This one shows a blue fescue, (Festuca glauca), golden marjoram and geranium.  Nothing all that fancy, they just look nice together.

Woke up one morning in our old house to discover piles of snow out the back door.  Our old house was smack in the middle of something the weatherman calls the "Puget Sound Convergence Zone".  This means something like "The Place Where It Snows When It's Gonna".  A couple of feet of snow turned our Ikea patio table into art.

This glorious tree is an 'Elephant Heart' plum.  Cheri loved this tree at our other house.  Perfect shape, not too big, fragrant flowers in the early spring, bees loved it, plus the most delicious plums ever grown.  We're trying to figure out where to grow one of these at our current house.

This is a view of the hanging garden on the upper deck of our houseboat, looking north on Portage Bay.  The tall twisty tree in the corner is a Weeping blue Atlas cedar, (Cedrus atlantica 'Glauca Pendula').

I must be featured on a thousand videotapes from tour boats that cruised by when I was watering the plants.  We had a bucket with a line tied to the handle; I'd toss it off the upper deck into the lake and haul it up and pour it on the plants.  There were a lot of plants up there, and it was pretty good exercise. 

Here's something I didn't know about plant people; when they move to a new house, a lot of their plants come with them.  Doesn't matter if they're big.  The Atlas cedar, in a half whiskey barrel, was bounced down the stairs in the houseboat, onto a handtruck, and then 200 feet down the dock, up a steep hill to the moving van, then up a ramp into the truck for a ride to our new house.

Recognize anybody here?  Hey, there's another one of those twisty Atlas cedars.  Really, it's the same one; it survived the trip and ended up in our front yard.  There's another plant mover represented here; the tree on the far right is a Tibetan cherry, (Prunus serrula).  This was such a beautiful tree, with a deep mahogany bark that peeled off all over.  Anyway, the Tibetan cherry moved to our current house with us, but alas didn't survive the first winter.  Cheri's still sad about losing this pretty tree.  Oh, the white feathery bush in this picture is a Miscanthus sinensis 'Variegatus', another favorite, but I think it stayed put.

This blurry panorama shows the hardy fuschsia, (Fuschsia magellanica) that forms the backdrop of our backyard patio.  This is a favorite garden room for both us and for our bird friends.  There are a pair of birdbaths here, and they get lots of use.  When the fuschsia is in bloom in the summer, it's a favorite of the local hummingbird set.  They're a bold lot, and fly right up to you.

Here's the same patio, but it's not summer anymore.  Not quite as inviting a place to sit and have a cup of tea.  I think this is the same storm that inspired us to create the aloha snowman.