Gardening & flower photos

Our new house on Greenbriar has quite a large yard with lots of deciduous trees. In last fall, we had to rake a huge amount of leaves and take them to the roadside so that the city's leaf collection service would pick them up.
However, even though we had raked a lot of huge heaps of leaves back then, we wrongly ignored the leaves on the borders of the yard and just left them as they were. I said "wrongly", but I realized that only very recently, when I saw flower buds shooting out through the layers of leaves around these borders of our yard.

So, while Amar was away for a conference in Chicago for 4 days, I started raking the yard again, and raked and raked for all day long for 3 days. It was quite surprising to see how much leaves were still left after such a work in last fall (we had about three times more heaps back then than what you see in the picture above, which are the leftover leaves I collected in the past few days) ... but after 3 days of work, I collected almost all the leaves from every corner of the yard and now the garden looks much greener and fresher.
I am a total novice in gardening and a little bit overwhelmed to think just how much I need to learn and by the amount of work I would have to do all the year round, but I can also see that it is a very rewarding job too. Getting a close contact with the earth and nature calms your mind and nurture your spirit.

Amar was very pleased and grateful to find the whole garden cleaned up and much greener on coming back from Chicago on Tuesday the 27th. After some chat with Amy who was visiting me for a coffee, Amar and I went to a piano concert by Christopher O'Riley at IU Auditorium, the concert we've long been looking forward to - Chris O'Riley is a classically trained pianist who also "transcribes" (=transfer into classical music) and plays rock music such as Radiohead and Eliott Smith. The concert was really terrific and deserved our long expectation for it.

By the time Amar came home from Chicago, Bloomington became very warm (almost like an early summer rather than spring), and lots of flowers and trees have started blooming. Bloomington in bloom is really beautiful and lovely.

Here are some photos of the flowers and trees in bloom in our yard:






































P.S. on April 6th: The collected leaves were picked up on April 5th by a tree-specialist trader who we found through a friend's introduction, for which we paid $75. It was not cheap, but we thought it is worthwhile to ask someone else to do the job... I'll make sure to collect all the leaves before winter next year! ;-)