Because I'm TACKY!

So, I went to Lowe's this afternoon to get some topsoil and look at the ground cover/perennials as part of my attempt to begin "desirable plant domination" of my gardens (get lots of good competitive stuff in there so I have to weed less in the future).

I wound up buying some lysimachia nummularia (not shown; it's on the north side of the house) which is a shade-tolerant, perennial groundcover. (They had no liriope. Maybe it's the wrong time of year and I just need to wait). And here are a couple of gaura and three anemones. (The gaura were probably a good choice; butterflies were visiting them even before I had them in the ground).

And the flamingos. They were on an end-of-season sale. First I thought, "Nah" then I decided "yes." And they are the made-in-the-USA kind - I don't think the Famous Flamingo Factory of Leominster, Massachusetts is still in operation but I read about a nearby factory (Pennsylvania, maybe?) that now makes them.

And I thought: They're cheap enough. And they make me laugh. And yes, if someone from the city comes snooping over my back fence again this fall they will see two pink plastic flamingos. And if they think that's bad, well, they might just be tacky too.

"I put pink flamingos on my lawn/ after the city griped at me."

(And really, one reason I love Weird Al's "Tacky" so much? The narrator of the song is completely unapologetic about the ways in which he is tacky. He owns his tackiness, admits to it, and even revels in it. And I spend way too much time worrying about whether what I am doing is "proper" (essentially the opposite of tacky))

Heh. They do amuse me pretty deeply. (I'll probably take them in and put them in the garage over winter, so they don't get all sad and cracked in the cold). Hm. Maybe I do have my own brand of slight silliness and even happy-go-luckiness, just one that's less public and a lot quieter than some people's...
***

For future self-reference: Several sites said October is the best time to plant lilyturf. In fact, a couple sites that sell it won't even ship it until mid-September. So I just need to be patient. Maybe if the weather is good over mid-fall break, one day of that could be a planting blitz of perennial groundcovers in my yard. The more and more I think of it, the more I really like the idea of the north side of my house just being a groundcover garden that's a mass of things like lilyturf and lysimachia and, if I can find it, partridgeberry. And maybe in the slightly sunnier edges, stick a few aquilegia in there. All perennials, all stuff that spreads well.  Lots of the ground covers I'm seeing suggested are described as "tolerate foot traffic," which they will need to do a little bit back there.