Good morning from the garden!

It’s been a while since I brought you a Sunday morning in the garden post hasn’t it?

So far we’ve had a rather mild fall.  There have been a handful of nights just below freezing, but nothing really cold.  As a result, I still have some plants that look pretty darn good in the garden, like this Alexander’s Great brunnera …

and my Hakonechloa, or Japanese forest grass.

Up until a few nights ago I could also have said that some of my hostas are still looking great as well.

Except they no longer look like that.  Every last hosta that was still green was chomped down to stalks by roaming deer a couple of nights ago.

I really only seem to have trouble with deer in the early spring when they come and eat all of my tulips, and now apparently in late fall when they turn my hostas into a salad bar.

I’ll count my blessings since they don’t bother my garden in summer.  Knock on wood.

But today’s post isn’t about the deer, or what still looks good in the garden.  It’s about my front window box.  I’ve shared it here many times, but for those who may not be familiar it’s quite large at about 12′ long.  One thing I didn’t really think about when we made it so big was how much it would cost to keep it filled with annuals in the summer, and evergreens in the winter.

Unfortunately I don’t really have anywhere that I can go to forage for free evergreen cuttings so I have to buy them, and they aren’t cheap.  So last year when I went to the Bachman’s after Christmas sale I picked up two lengths of faux evergreen garland for 75% off.  They were originally priced at $79.99 (egads!), so I got them for about $20 each.

I think it looks realistic enough from the street, and no one really gets any closer than that except me.  And now I have a nice, full base to start adding further embellishments to.  Plus I’ll be able to use this over and over for several years at least.

I still have all of the faux red berries that I used in the window box last year.

But I wanted to try something different this year.  That being said, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on all new embellishments.

Plus, I put in a little extra effort in early fall drying quite a few flowers from the garden, like this Astilbe.

And of course, lots of hydrangeas.  So I wanted to use those.

But I didn’t want a ‘brown’ color scheme, so I decided to add a little bling with some metallic spray paint.

I took advantage of some lovely fall weather this past Friday and set up a work area outside to spray paint the flowers.

They hydrangeas look amazing, but I’m not as impressed with the painted astilbe.

I also didn’t love the copper paint as much as the gold.  I chose the matte metallic copper and this is one time when I should have gone shinier.

I had also dried a bunch of allium, and they are awesome painted in gold.

As are the handful of dried poppy seedheads from nnK’s garden.

After tucking all of the painted flowers in with the faux evergreen garland, I decided that I needed to add a few items with a bit more impact.  So I pulled a few different elements out of the workshop and gave them a spray of gold too.

Now, I’m sure that a few of you are wondering how well the painted dried flowers will last.  The answer pretty much depends on our weather.  If we get a heavy snowfall, it will inevitably crush them and they won’t look so good after that.

But hopefully we’ll just get the light and fluffy stuff between now and Christmas.

Fingers crossed!

Are you a fan of the more subtle copper and gold theme this year?  Or did you prefer the pop of red from last year?  Leave a comment and let me know.