TIME MACHINE - google maps

Not having had a summer in my new home yet I am intensely curious about what everything will look like this summer.  I have to admit that we drove by on our bikes or in the car quite often (after we had purchased it but before we moved in), and I never saw a single flower blooming despite the really good bones the garden has.

I do not know when Google mapped our street, but it is fun to go back in time and check out what it looked like a few years ago. It is not that different from today, so whomever put in the garden beds either did not do that much with them or it has been so long that weeds have just taken over. 

•  Under this spruce are lots of Lily-of-the-Valley (great), Bishop's Weed (fine for now) and what appears to be some kind of miniature Solomon's Seal (get rid of it).  It just looks overgrown to me, so I will have lots to keep me busy for the next few years to wrangle it under control.  I have already cut back those unsightly dead lower branches on the Spruce.
• In the bottom left is a sucker that needs pruning.  If the snow was not too deep I would do it tomorrow, but that should definitely be a tree and not a shrub on the left.

• The shrubs against the house were too big even back then. I am going to wait and see them flower first, but they are growing right in front of the windows so a severe pruning is just a mater of time.
• The three small Globe Cedars need to be rearranged somehow, most likely by bringing them together with others from around the property - after all, grouping things is 'what I do'. 
• The Weigela and Amur Maple on the left are larger now and more wild, which I do not necessarily mind.  Squared off, neatly trimmed shrubs are not my style, but you can see that they definitely need to have a lot of the dead undergrowth pulled out to improve air circulation and hopefully get rid of some of those bare patches.

So if you have never checked out your garden on Google maps, why not give it a try? Just type in your address and you are off to the races.