Backyard Paradise

I have my own little paradise in my backyard. One of the first things I do every morning is open the blinds in my bedroom window which overlooks my backyard so I can see what new flowers are blooming or what birds are visiting.
I keep adding new plants and bushes...not nearly as many as I'd like though. I have to wait until Greg buys a weedeater before I can really plant anything else because he doesn't want too many obstacles to push the lawnmower around. LOL
Funny story about these shrimp plants in my hummingbird garden...this was the first little garden we put in because we saw hummingbirds all around when we moved in last year. My dad gave me 4 shrimp plants from cuttings out of his yard. So all year and through the winter they were very small and didn't have the red tops on them like this.....
Once it got warm and we finally started getting rain they just took off and now they are beautiful. Dakota and I were walking around the yard one day watering, pulling weeds, etc and he saw the shrimp plants with the red tops and he said "Oh no! Mom, your plants are dying!" He didn't realize that was the flowery part.

We just planted this bed (don't have mulch around it yet because I'm having a hard time finding mulch!) from plants my dad gave me. I don't remember the name of the tall plants. The smaller ones are iris lilies but they haven't begun blooming yet. The tall ones are so cool because we wake up every morning with flowers blooming all over these plants, but they fall off every evening and the next day there is a fresh new flower in its place.
I took this picture of the purple flower in the morning as it was still opening up and there was still dew on everything... I took this picture of the pink one late in the afternoon...you can see how much the flower opened up and there is a flowerbud behind the two flowers that will open the next morning.
Our backyard has a fence around the back part because there is a large drainage area/holding pond type thing back there that is maintained by the county and then beyond that is a very busy main road in town. We live two blocks from a hospital and a fire station. We hear fire trucks, ambulances, life flight and police cars on a regular basis. I've started planting bushes and climbing vines back along the fence line to help block out the road. It's almost to where you can not see our backyard from the road anymore due to the trees and bushes...which is what I wanted.

This is one of the latest bushes I planted - a wisteria. I LOVE these deep purple flowers that are all over it!