Tour My Victorian Garden | Spring Gardening with Thrift Store Finds!

Hey, I thought it'd be fun to show you around the garden today and kind of show you how everything's filling out since last year. The plants are really taking off and things are looking beautiful, so come on in. This is my favorite rose in the garden. This is my Eden rose. It's almost reached all the way across here, and I love this one because you can pick one stem and create the most beautiful bouquet from one stem on this rose. It's not a very fragrant rose, but it's super pretty. I love this one because it has a lot of petals. Here's a good example. This is like a really good fresh bloom here. This is a floribunda rose, which means many petals, and I love these because they're so chubby and round. I love it. This is kind of like my little coral colored garden. My Cinco de Mayo rose. This is one of my favorites that I got in an estate sale a couple summers ago. I got it for like a couple bucks, and it's a really great heirloom rose. This one's just really fun. It's the Cinco de Mayo rose because it reminds you of the Mexican skirts that are all ruffly and full. The petals look just like that. They're really fun, and it's a really fragrant variety. I love this one. I'm going to tell you I love all the plants because I do, and then the Shasta daisies are really filling out too. We have these all around the front of the house, and we'll kind of walk out there later, but I have Shasta daisies mixed with French lavender all around the house. Everything is purple and white and colorful. These are great. They are no maintenance. They just get fuller and fuller every year. I have a small little garden, and we live in a Victorian home, so I wanted to create kind of an English garden, I guess, if you will. And English gardens, there isn't really a lot of design that goes into them. They're very full. They're kind of free and wild and almost jungle-like. These were my big purple Allium. I'll insert some clips so you can see what they look like bloomed, but these are a bulb, and that means they come back every year. I love a good low-maintenance plant like this, but they have big purple pom-poms on them, and even when the flowers all fall off, I think they're kind of fun. They look like little alien blooms now, so I just leave them until they do their thing. And then over here, my peonies just bloomed. I dug these out at an estate sale a couple years ago with my mom. It was 90 degrees at this estate sale, and I had little fancy sandals on and like my little dress, like ready to go out for lunch with my mom and stuff. And this estate sale had a huge bunch of peonies, and I was like, do you have a shovel? Are these peonies for sale? And luckily they were, so I grabbed them. I think I got them for like a dollar a clump, he told me, or something crazy, but I came home with a bunch of blisters on my hands and a whole cardboard box of peonies. And then here they are. The rain kind of got them. This one was massive, but it kind of got over, kind of got a little bit brown from the rain, but that's okay. I was able to actually thrift a lot of my plants, which is really fun to do. If you're doing a lot of gardening, you can find some amazing plants out there for free. So don't forget to look on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace, especially if you just type the word free, a lot of plants and bulbs are going to pop up and you can't beat free baby. Since we live in a Victorian home, I wanted to find plants that were old fashioned and complimented the era of our home. And the Victorians seem to have a lot of irises, peonies, heirloom roses, lavender, and things like that. I found this on Facebook marketplace after having this on my wishlist since we moved into this home. Someone in the neighborhood also has the entire set on their front porch and it's so pretty. And I've been like staring at it for years and I was like too afraid to go knock on their door and make an offer. But luckily I just waited. I was patient. So now I got my own and I brought it to get powder coated. So I wanted to show you before and after on that. I'm a big fan of making old people work. And she does. We don't get nothing. Free labor. Not even child labor. Gotta owe people abuse. I was gonna get you through the archway but you're so fast. Yeah. You're gonna do it again. I gotta get the shot, right? It's so beautiful to sit at and have dinner and sometimes I come out here and have lunch during the day too before the sun gets too hot. But these are just so fun to sit in and take photographs in. It rained last night and there's water like dripping out of the cushion. That is funny. I don't think my butt's all lit. We're good? Laura just got me this dancing frog vase out of an estate sale and it's so cute. I have that turquoise aqua colored one and now I have a fun cheery yellow. I think this one looks extra cute here with the daisies in it. And then I don't know if I've ever shown you this picture set before. I have it out here like I'm entertaining but it's actually empty. This is I think called opaline glass and I got this at a local flea market. It has a set of six glasses actually and I picked it up for $25. It's so beautiful. I love that like really pretty rich blue that fades into the white. It's really pretty. You want to go look at all the lavender? Would you like to see that? All the hydrangeas are blooming right now too. They're so beautiful. I love how these are just big full pom poms. I think I might actually cut some bouquets this year. This is finally the year where I can come out here and just pick bouquets every week. Last year it was kind of like I didn't want to pick the flowers because I wanted to enjoy them. I didn't have enough but I think this year I can get in here and pick and no one will notice that any are missing. All around the house we live on a corner lot so I have lavender and shasta daisies all around. My husband built the retaining wall because this is once all invasive English ivy. So all around here this is the one we always walk by. Oh this is the champion lavender because it's so big. This this one is like a prime example of a well a fine specimen. I think that's the word I'm trying to find specimen. But yeah this one's doing really really well. So we put these all around the perimeter of the house and in the summertime these are covered in honeybees. It's really cool. It seems like the bushes are like moving with life but it's really pretty and it smells really fragrant. And then at the end of summer I come in here and I cut off all the blooms and I just put a little cardboard box out at the end of the block there and put free bouquets for the neighbors and they usually like last a day because everyone loves free flowers. Whenever the blooms get all dry and start dying down, which is usually around September like early fall for us, we go in here and we really trim the lavender down really really far. If you don't do that this part here, see that woody part in here, the whole bush will eventually turn woody. So if you see a lot of people that have lavenders where they're splitting and flopping open like that, that's because they didn't trim them back. So if you do that every year they'll be nice and healthy and full and give you that like well-rounded look. So cutting them back and pruning every year is a total must. I don't know the answer. We were trying to figure out why are these ones so much longer than the rest of the bush. Is that funny? What happened? It's a mystery of nature. Really? Are you helping? Yeah, the lady of the house. I got a new hedge trimmer this year and that was like a super exciting adult purchase. You know like you've really grown up when you get a new appliance around the house or a new tool and that was it for me this year. But I finally got a cordless hedge trimmer and I went out here like Edward Scissorhands and shaped up the boxwood. This really gets kind of crazy in the wintertime. These get pretty top heavy and this walkway gets a little narrow where you got a shimmy. So I got a trimmer back here every year but it turned out pretty good. I still need some practice. Practice on my husband's hair last weekend. Yeah haircut number three. The flower pots are pretty cool. These hangers are old wrought iron ones that my husband and I picked up at the local antique mall like right when we first moved into the house. And this side of the house doesn't get a lot of sunshine so we kind of struggled with finding plants that would actually thrive over here. And I finally found the magic mix. These are beautiful firecracker fuchsias. I love this variety because hummingbirds really really like them. They have a long trumpet like flower that's really vibrant. That pretty coral. And then these are a begonia and they just look otherworldly. I love like the inside of the flowers have this really really cool swirly pistil. I'll have to get some close-up clips for you. And this vibrant red orange color. Super pretty. They're really really filling out so I'm pretty proud of my flower pots over here this year. We're gonna be painting the house this summer which is really exciting. And we kind of... what is the word? Deliberate? What's the word? Debated? Is deliberate a word? Oh it is, good. So we went back and forth on different colors that we wanted to do. I was leaning towards green. My husband really likes the yellow. I'm not opposed to the yellow but I am opposed to this country red. So we picked a few shades of yellow and we wanted to kind of get your opinion. I did some swatches on the other side of the house so we could kind of see what they look like in natural daylight. And we definitely want to add shutters. I think that's going to look really beautiful. I found an inspiration house on google that I want to show you that looks so pretty. So let's go look at the different colors and you have to tell me your favorite. So these are the different yellows that I picked. We've got choice A, choice B. This is actually choice C down here. It's pretty close to the original house color. I think this one is a little warmer and more orange rather than a yellow tone. So let me know. A, B, C. Which is your favorite? Not only are we wandering through the flowers today, tomorrow is actually the shop release of all my new goodies that are coming in for the month of June. And I've got some beautiful new home decor on there. Amazing antique vases, some artwork, and of course beautiful piano shawls. If you have a piano shawl on your wish list right now, you definitely want to be ready for my shop release because I have some incredible embroidered ones with that beautiful romantic fringe on them that I just love to decorate with. So if you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet on thevintagebombshell.com, don't forget to do that.