Enjoying Saturday

 We have a tradition in our home of leaving our work behind on Saturday and relaxing with the Toronto Globe and Mail.  In the winter we sit upstairs in the living room, enjoying the view of outdoors, but in the summer we like to sit in our "solar space," the enclosed area underneath the balcony that we added after we moved here.

We had our carpenter build the walls and insert the windows (my design).  Someone else laid the ceramic tile.  In the winter this space houses plants that we are overwintering.  In the summer it's a lovely place to sit and relax with a book or newspaper (or knitting),

An additional pleasure is listening to the water trickling in our three water features.  First up, closest to the house, and the most audible is this cute little barrel with an old fashioned pump.  The water simply recirculates, and creates a refreshing background sound.

Then a little farther away in the landscape directly in front of the house is our lovely fountain.  Today we can't hear it because we have a lot of fairly noisy wind, which covers up the delight of this slowly trickling fountain.















And last of all, at the front of the property is the "waterfall" that Jim created a few years ago, recycling the water in the shallow pond that he spent so much hard labour cleaning up this spring.  You can't see it on this photo, but there is a trickle of water falling down the rock pile at the center.

Birds love these features.  They bath in the fountain, and take a refreshing shower under the waterfall.

In the evening, we unplug the water pump in the barrel, and turn a switch on the panel in the garage that controls the power to both the fountain and waterfall.




So nice of Jim to have incorporated these features into our landscape, a landscape that had no trees, no shrubs, no perennials, no annuals when we first lived here.  What a fantastic amount of work he has done to create this little paradise.  I think an appropriate name for our place would be "NewEden."  Without the serpent!