flowers – tierneycreates

Reading Gardening Nirvana’s post Celebrating the Gardeners of In a Vase on Monday reminded me of a post I was going to write this summer but I forgot about.

Things have been mighty strange, sad and stressful here in “America-land” and this summer I decided to combat the ugliness I would see in the news (when I could bear to check it) with BEAUTY.

I decided to try to always have a bouquet of flowers on our kitchen table. I’ve continued the habit into the Autumn and plan to take this practice through the Winter and beyond.

I started with pulling flowers this summer from my garden and putting them on the upstairs patio table:

By the way here are our last roses of the season in our rose garden in the front of the house (I had some of them in a bouquet but didn’t photograph it):

Then I moved to purchased flowers each week (or every other week if the bouquet was especially hardy) and here are some of those bouquets:

The bouquets really make my kitchen table happy and add some happiness to our lives!

I’ll close this post with a beautiful bouquet of flowers I stumbled upon while we were in NYC in October 2025 (see posts Time in Times Square and West Village Wander, the Tiniest Yarn Shop and More) at this wonderful Japanese tea/coffee shop we stop at in Manhattan:

Agriculture Report: “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”

June 23, 2025June 23, 2025 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

What is an “Agriculture Report”? Well I was inspired by @quiteayarnblog‘s ongoing series of posts titled “Agriculture Report” (and this title always cracks me up) that are actually updates of what is going on in her garden. I just had to adopt this same title for updates on what is going on in my garden/my “garden report“…

Yes if you were in around in 1970 you might remember this song sung by Lynn Anderson – Rose Garden with it’s catchy line: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden”:

This song popped into my head as I was snapping some photos for this post on my early summer garden.

We are starting our own “Rose Garden” in the front yard’s raised bed and hope to someday have a large rose garden in the backyard. I love roses and roses are VERY special to my husband John.

John was very close with this paternal grandparents growing up and being at their house was his favorite place to be as a kid. At 14 he even blew off a big school dance to go hang out with his grandparents.

According to John his grandfather had a magnificent rose garden and John would hang out with his grandfather as he tended his roses. It was always his secret dream to have his own rose garden someday. We are working on making that happen.

Slowly, over the past couple years, we’ve been adding roses to the front bed:

Here are some of the other flowers currently in bloom, primarily perennials, that we’ve added in to to keep the roses company:

We’ve run out of space to put roses in the front of the house. So we are planning to change the landscaping of the backyard someday, removing the rocks that border the fence and replace them with garden beds with soil so we can plant a large rose garden in the backyard.

We also have plans (perhaps too ambitious..) to build a greenhouse where the raised bed currently sits and relocate the raised bed. My Pinterest inspiration board is getting full of images of greenhouses!

For now we have plants in pots and a raised bed that John built last year:

I am growing lots of sunflowers from seed in the raised bed (they are doing well so far); and growing a couple other flowers from seed and trying to grow basil from seed, which seems to be working so far.

We bought one rose for the backyard that was on sale and a beautiful red color and for now we have it in a pot until we redo our landscaping (big undertaking) in the future:

I also have my annual tomatoes and herbs growing on my upstairs back deck:

So this concludes my “Agriculture Report” and I just realized I did basically Promise John a Rose Garden – ha!

A Crafter's Life, Outside Adventures!

First Visit to Denver Botanic Gardens

September 24, 2024September 6, 2025 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Oh my, it’s already Fall/Autumn! I meant to write this post while it was still summer but I am not sure where the summer went as it seemed to fly by!

In early August I visited Denver Botanic Gardens for the first time.

Of course I took a ridiculous number of photos and I thought I share a few (giggle) in this post, to provide you a little bit of full summer bloom floral color added to your day!

I think we spent many hours there, I lost track of time. It was an overcast day but that did not detract from the beauty of the gardens.

They had wonderful structures and sculptures throughout the Botanic Gardens including these whimsical/fantastical animal structures:

They had an amazing Dale Chihuly glass structure in a beautiful pond:

Throughout the Botanic Gardens they had structures for pollinators, which are very important to gardens!

They have a large number of lily ponds, well at least for a non tropical climate. My friend L told me most of the water lilies are in pots sitting on the bottom of the pond so they can pull they inside during the cold weather.

I love the reflections on the water in the water lily ponds. In the image below you can see the overcast sky reflected on the water:

The Botanic Gardens has a breathtaking waterfall display with mist rising around it:

And to close out this post here is a tiny sampling the amazing and beautiful flowers and foliage at Denver Botanic Gardens – enjoy :-). (Visiting made me want to run home and plant flowers throughout my entire yard!)