Welcome to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes? Over the next few months, a group of seven bloggers will be sharing their workspaces, their homes, towns and more!

Make sure you visit everyone to see where the magic happens!

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Julia at When the Girls Rule
Leslie at Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After 

This month’s theme is “outdoor space,” whether that’s acreage, a patio, yard, balcony, or stoop. Whatever bit of earth and air we get to enjoy.

Outdoor space has always been important to me. I love sitting in the shade and feeling the breeze and gazing off into the distance. I also love sitting on a city stoop watching people walking by 24/7. As a renter for the past 10 years, I have not always been fortunate enough to have outdoor space to call my own, but I’ve always managed to eke out a little something, even if it’s just a pot of pansies beside the front door.

I’m fortunate in my current apartment to have a lovely patio right outside the door. In one of my Brooklyn apartments, I had to go down two flights of stairs to the basement, then walk back up a different flight of stairs to end up in the backyard. If it hadn’t been for Caleb I would probably have never gone out there, especially as much of the spring and summer, the space was sickening with the scent of the Vomit Berry Tree – actual name unknown, but you can imagine the delight given the name.

I’ve always loved gardening. Well, to be honest, I’ve always loved buying plants. I like the research and designing phase…definitely the plant buying stage…but not so much the hard sweaty work stage. So I’m quite content having a smaller space to work with. And everything is in containers, so no digging. Even when I want to feed the soil I just go to a local stable and get two spackle buckets of aged manure and mix some into the pots. So much easier than the days when we’d have our friend dump 10 yards of aged manure in our driveway and it took me days and days to wheelbarrow it all over the yard to where it was needed. Plus, the neighbors were not such a fan of that.

So I’m happy to have my little square in the shade. As regular readers know I do most of my blog outfit photos out there. Now that the weather’s turning nice, I sit at the table with the laptop to watch webinars or attend Zoom meetings.

The Japanese have a term, “borrowed views,” meaning creating space in your garden to see beautiful things beyond. I always think of that when I walk down to my car and can see the pond down below through a clearing in the trees.  Nice of my landlords to arrange that so nicely for me 🙂

This year I kept mainly to bright or variegated foliage with just a few flowering plants. It is so shady out there that flowering things really struggle. But I couldn’t resist the one pot of foxgloves. I’ve always said that if I could have only one type of plant in my garden, it would be foxgloves. So dramatic and whimsical. Little foxes in polka dot kid gloves! Look at the little heart-shaped flower! You can’t make this stuff up!

I’ve been lugging vintage concrete statuary around from apartment to apartment for ten years (my movers love me), and just recently the last of it got delivered from behind my ex-husband’s shed as they’ve put their house on the market and needed my junk treasures out. So currently there’s A LOT of stuff out there, ha ha. I’ve tried to hide incorporate it into groupings of potted plants, which is working about 85% of the way, but I had to stash some things in the house (oh, the creepy crawlies there will be!) for the pictures.

I acquired all my statuary and furniture from all over the place over many years. The rocking chair is close to a hundred years old and the previous owners of our second house  left it on the front porch.

Y’all know the story of the original concrete rabbit being stolen off that same front porch.

The four more-or-less-matching concrete planters were at our first house. The original owners had been in the concrete business and there were SO many things – planters and columns and driveway entrance thingies. I took what I could.

The little elf and the deer I took from someone’s trash at the curb (can you even??).

The two scrolly iron Victorian chairs I bought for TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS APIECE from a literal mountain of them piled up behind a landscaper’s office.

The four black wrought iron chairs at the table were a find of my mother’s – a bigtime garage-saler. They’re mid-century Salterini hoop chairs. Like this. But not in “good” condition. They’re really not bad, they just need a good sanding/metal brushing and painting. I wish I could sell them (not for $3,775!) because while I love the way they look, they are miserable to sit in. I’ve tried a couple times in the past with no luck.

The table is not Salterini, but it coordinates nicely with the chairs, don’t you think? It was a hand-me-down last summer from a friend re-doing her deck.

The other smaller items I just found here and there: estate sales, a friend cleaning out his mother’s house, a garden center going out of business.

When I had my house I had soooo much more! Tiered wrought-iron planters and galvanized watering cans and a metal rolly cart and interesting little metal things hanging on outside walls. Oh, I love me some old stuff.

This year for Mother’s Day, Katie gifted me with a donation to the Patio Prettification fund, so it’s many thanks to her that I have so much beauty right outside my front door now.

And I love my little patio…and my foxgloves and old chairs and concrete bunnies and borrowed views. I hope you have an outdoor space you love, too!

Don’t forget to visit my friends at the links above to see their outdoor spaces!

xoxo