I’ve Been Wanting To Do This For A Long Time! 🌿

Well, welcome everyone to Signature Style Saturday. Today we're going to discuss something, well, let's just say I have been wanting to do this for a long time. It has been a low-grade kind of annoyance to me, and since I've been a gardening fool this past week because the weather has just been so cool, so lovely, I was able to get some gardening help, and well, let's just say that I finally got to scratch that itch, and well, let me just show you what has been bothering me for a long time. But if you guys like this kind of information, if you like this kind of content, just make sure to hit the subscribe button. Okay, so my new pathway, a couple of changes, this is not what was bothering me, but I did change it anyway, and that is I had a couple of hollies in these pots that just weren't doing well. They'd pretty much been compromised, and I had two of these double boxwood topiary. One was in a garden bed, and another one was in a pot, so I was able to transplant one of them in here, and another one in here, and think how fun this will be for my garden tour when I can adorn them with some small pumpkins and things. Which pot? Oh, that pot? Yeah, that pot is pretty happy. Okay, notice my pretty gravel. Notice that I am still waiting for this. I did get the hardware to hang the sailcloth, and once it's arrived, we'll get that up. This is all still kind of messy, but keep following me, and I will show you what has been bothering me. So come this way, and you may not notice any difference, but I really did. What has been bothering me for a very long time is what the porch steps looked like. I had some evergreens in them, but the evergreens weren't as full and as beautiful as I would have liked. Some of them were a little spindly. I didn't think that the pots that I had were substantial enough to get the impact that I wanted on these steps, and I think another thing that I had reservations about was I really needed to get some new pots, and I hesitate to ever do that anymore because I think to myself, Linda, you're crazy. You have enough pots, but actually, I didn't have enough to achieve the effect that I wanted to achieve. So definitely, I will put a link to these pots right here. They look old. They look like they have patina on them, but more importantly, they're a little bit larger, and I've got one, two, three, and then I've got a fourth one over there that match. So when we come back, I'm going to talk a little bit more about why this was bothering me from a design standpoint and some other, well, just some other clues that made me feel as if this just needed a little bit of a refresh and a rethinking. Well, today's little fashion show is sponsored by a new sponsor for me, Spanx. Yes, that Spanx, that miraculous clothing line or under clothing line that we all have relied on to keep our body parts in place, if you will. Well, now they have a clothing line, and I couldn't be more excited for a number of different reasons, but one, and this is very serendipitous, and by the way, these jeans I have on right now, these are part of the Spanx clothing line. So I was talking to my niece who is a doc, and she was emergency room doc, and she was telling me that Spanx clothing is all over the Physician Moms group on Facebook, and they talk about Spanx all the time because it looks so professional, is so figure enhancing, and just so popular because of its comfort and the fact that it just kind of, well, you can live your life in a good looking way and in a comfortable way. So these jeans, as you guys know, I think I shared with you that I was getting rid of lots of the things in my closet, some of my old jeans in particular, and even though I'm happy, I can still wear them. Just because I can still wear them doesn't mean I should still wear them. So I'm getting rid of a lot of those, and I'm upgrading specifically to some of these Spanx jeans. Now, why do I love these? Well, number one, they are so comfortable. They're just like wearing leggings or the kind of comfy, cozy clothes that you would wear when you're lying around at home, but these look, I think, more than appropriate to be out and about. They're so comfortable. They are very, I think, flattering. They're form-fitting, but in, again, a comfortable way. They hold in your tummy. They give you a little booty boost, and they kind of hug you in all the right places in your thighs. They've got a nice slender silhouette. Plus, there's none of that fussiness that are just, that can be so irritating, you know, zippers, buttons, hooks, waistbands, all of that kind of thing. And even, there's not even any side pockets, which gives a really flat silhouette, but fortunately, they do have back pockets because I'm a girl who needs back pockets. Now, I love this look. I love this dark denim, a four-way stretch denim, if you will, but I also love these. Now, those classic jeans, they were a little bit longer, and I'm going to have to have those hemmed, and here's a tip, by the way. I got them in regular length. You guys might want to get them in petite length. I'm about 5'5", if that helps in any way. And even though I love that classic denim, and will wear them on repeat, I also love these wide length, ankle length version in white. And now that we've been given permission to wear white after Labor Day, these will transition easily into fall. I can already see them with some Chino boots, a great big heavy sweater, or just, you know, just a light jacket, light blazer like this, because even though they're very, very comfortable, I mean, so comfortable that I could take a nap in them and then go out on the town. They're that comfortable, but they also look, I think, polished enough, so you could wear these to work. You could wear them in kind of a professional way, and again, you can elevate them up or down, just depending on what your footwear is. These would look great with tennis, I think. So, I love them in the navy, but I also love them in the white. Gentle, really flattering compression. So comfortable. Very, very good silhouette. Well, what's not to love? Now, these might be my favorite. If you're of a certain age, you'll get this reference. They make me feel very Mary Tyler Moore. I love their slim silhouette. I think these would be so, well, so multifaceted, multifunctional, if you will, because you could wear these so many different places. I could easily dress them up with some heels and a silky type top, maybe some fancy jewelry, but I also love these probably, well, also because this is the pair that my niece has and that she really recommends to her other doc friends because they're so professional looking, and they're so, so comfortable. They just, well, like I say, they just make you feel kind of put together. I do think they're figure flattering, and this is, you know, maybe a thing that's really specific to gardeners, and basically just from an anatomical standpoint, they really make me feel as if my back is secure, if you're somebody prone to lower back problems. I love them. I think they're very figure flattering. You could wear these all season long, and like I say, these might be my favorite ones. Here's a question of the day for you. Let me know which ones you really like. Now, if those three pair weren't comfortable enough, you need to try out this, well, I guess I would call it athleisure wear as part of their Air Essentials line, and this is like but a baby. It is so soft and so comfortable while also being figure flattering. I don't know how they did it. In fact, I loved this duo, this set so much that I immediately gave one to my friend Deb as a birthday present because it is just wonderful for travel, wonderful for laying around the house, wonderful if you are about to be a new grandparent because it is so comfortable and chic looking, I think, at the same time. So, oh, well, I love, don't you love this collar? The collar is just incredible and doesn't itch, is no way uncomfortable. There's just not an uncomfortable thing about any one of the pieces in this line. If you guys want to update your wardrobe, if you are looking for a really classic pair of jeans or some kind of, oh, athleisure wear like this to update your wardrobe for fall, then definitely use my coupon code below, 15% off, and free shipping for those of you that use my special code, my special numbers. Love these. I have been more excited about this clothing line than anything in a very, very long time, and thank you, Spanx, but also thank you, Christy, my niece, for giving me the 411 or the 911 on what a wonderful clothing line this is. So, I shot a bunch of footage yesterday of Victor and his helpers and Sergio and his helpers who were here to, well, just heavy lifting. I just could not lift some of these things, and we also have started work on the beds on the east side because that garden tour is going to be here before we know it. So, I'm going to show you a lot of those behind the scenes, a lot of that footage that I took yesterday, but let's for a moment just rewind. So, if you are new to this channel, you may not know that none of this was here two and a half years ago. All of this is, for the most part, pretty brand new with the exception of the cedar trees. Everything else is brand new, including these steps. So, before, and if we can, we'll find some pictures to put in right here. There was nothing but a set of three crumbling steps, concrete steps that went down to the lawn. What it really was was just dead hard pan clay, and so I wanted to just really, well, create this dramatic set of swooping steps so that I could stage my topiaries and my boxwood on here. Now, one thing that was informative to me was I went back and I looked at my steps at the other house, which I was satisfied with, and I thought, okay, what's the difference? Why I'm not satisfied with these? Well, here was my dissatisfaction number one. The plants that I had in here, the topiaries that I had in here, and yes, I do consider balls to be a topiary form, they just weren't thick enough. They weren't grown out enough, like this one right here, and I had another one that was kind of small and spindly. These will grow up and they will ultimately be beautiful, but I didn't feel as if they had the visual weight to really hold down their position, their very important position, on these steps. So this one got moved over here, and these got moved to these two steps. Now, interestingly, the other thing that I wanted, and what was my dissatisfaction number two, was none of the evergreens looked as if they kind of matched. They were just different kinds of evergreens that were in different shapes and in different styles, and I wanted more cohesion and more uniformity. So I actually shopped my garden, and I looked around to see if I could find some really full boxwood balls, or in this case, these are kind of egg-shaped boxwood forms, boxwood topiary, that all resembled one another. And happily, I could in the front yard, in between the roses and the buddleii and everything else in the front yard, there were some really good, strongly shaped, very full boxwood. So what I did was I took some of the things that were here before that were a little bit less full, like this, I dropped them into the flower beds, and I pulled those up, dug them up, and we transplanted them here. And this was pretty heavy work, and Victor helped me with this. So I had one, two, and then you'll see over here that I have a third one. Now, all of these pots are the same. They're a nice backdrop for what seasonal flourishes and seasonal color that I want to have running up and down the steps and in the backyard just in general. And because they are larger, that does two different things. And this was a source, my third source of dissatisfaction, I guess. Number one, I didn't think that the pots were big enough to support the plants themselves and that they may not make it through the winter. So these larger pots, they more accurately match the scale of the plant itself, and they will also be more resilient for wintertime. So there'll be more volume of dirt, of gravel, and a thicker pot wall to insulate that root ball over the course of the winter. While we're working on the pots in the back, the work continues on the new border out here. The grass has been killed, and Sergio and his guys are removing the sod that was on top. It's pretty much been killed out. She'll probably, she may or may not treat it in another way chemically to do something if there's any roots in there, but it was pretty thin soil over here because of the amount of shade. So they are taking off. Sergio, what do you say? About four inches? Four to five inches off the top, and then you'll come back in and we'll amend this soil, correct? Yeah, we'll get really, really good soil in here, and then what they are taking out is then going into the back in that Forgotten Places bed in the alley. So see, they're using their brute strength to remove that Bermuda. You can see it's pretty much dead, and then we'll start planting this in September. I've got a big shipment of Southern Living Plants coming, and this should be beautiful, and yes, I do know how fortunate I am. Okay, now I think the magic sauce to creating a beautiful presentation like this is a mixture of both architectural, highly clipped, and structural, and then things that are a little bit looser, a little bit more romantic and flowing, and so that's what this pot with mullein beckia does, what this sedge does, this Everillo Carex does, and then ultimately also what all of this free, I might add, coleus is doing, because all I did was just take clippings. You can see some of it is drooping a little bit because it's still waiting to get its root system established, and then once all of this is done, when it is pumpkin time, I can come out here and I can stage those pumpkins and gourds running up and down the steps, and I think it'll be, well, I hope, I think, I pray it'll be pretty magnificent. So that's my question of the day. Tell me what you think, and tell me, should I go with just traditional orange gourds? Should I go with green gourds? Should I do a mixture of the both? Tell me what you think, because I think in the going, so we'll put it in here. A lot of what's underneath there is that garden debris that will rot down over time, compost in place, and all of this will settle, especially after another big rain. I still have some weeds on that end to pull out, but then this will be ready for all sorts of fall seeding and transplanting, and it's not irrigated, so I really don't want to put anything back here that is too precious, but I will be transplanting some perennials and things. I want this to have a very naturalistic look, so there's some coneflower, some salvia, things like that, that I'll put back in here. And then some of that additional soil will go in this forgotten place around this tree. Not a lot, but just enough so that there is a little bit more topsoil here, so I can continue planting this Tradescantia, and it will fill up this area, and then I'll also seed in this spot. Now here's my question of the day. In addition to doing all of this, I'm thinking maybe I need to plant some bulbs in here this fall that will perennialize, so crocus, maybe some daffodils, something like that. So you guys give me your input on that, because these then, they could just die back in place. I don't have to worry about the appearance of the browning foliage to feed the bulbs, so give me your thoughts on that. So in our last video, five things you want to be doing right now, I talk a lot about common sense gardening, and here's an example where I did not practice very good common sense. So I have a boxwood right here, and it was browning out on the back side, and I checked, and it wasn't water, it wasn't too much light. I just really couldn't figure out what it was until a little common sense kicked in, and remember, conditions on a hundred degree day are a lot different than they are on a day like today, where it's not even probably going to hit 70. And I had a large shovel right here, and that large shovel had a large, had a large head on it, and what it was doing was refracting the heat from the metal off of the shovel onto the back of this boxwood, and that was what I determined was killing it. Once I moved the shovel, yes, Detective Linda, there quit being a problem. Now, I should have intuited that earlier, but I just kind of liked that little shot of red right there, but nevertheless, that is another thing to just exercise good common sense of why something may be dying, and I don't know, just kind of channeling your inner Nancy Drew. I want to take a couple of moments here to appreciate two different things. Number one, you may recall how destitute I was when my Chinese snowball viburnum did not bloom last year, or this past spring, I should say, but it has all sorts of fat buds on it right now, so unless we just get extremely, extremely frigid temperatures, it should bloom beautifully next spring. The other thing, I am just loving this effect, and that is the way the pink carnation encore azaleas are starting to get tall enough, and their branches are protruding through the flower heads of the moon dance hydrangeas, so everything is happy here. There seems to be just the right amount of competition as these things mature. I will have to cut them back a little bit so they don't impede the path, the stone path to the back, but I am loving this effect, and I'll love it even more as they continue to mature and bloom. Okay, the garden is full of surprises right now. The biggest surprise probably being rain in August and cool temperatures in August, so you guys know that earlier in the year, I was really, really mourning the fact that I didn't have any flowers on my snowball viburnum. Now, I have lots of buds now, but interestingly, another surprise. Look here. I've got blooms, and I think I might have some blooms over here before too long. I really don't want them to bloom right now. I want them to save, I want them to save it for next spring, but hopefully there's enough tiny little buds that there'll be some in reserve for spring of 2026. Meanwhile, the work over here continues, and they've just about got this whole section excavated. Trust me, this is a lot easier work to do on a day when it's, the highs probably are not even up to 70, than it would have been on a traditional Oklahoma August day with temperatures around 100. Of course, you already know that. It's so interesting. There's just no substitute for real rain. We can water all we want, but there is no substitute for what comes out of the sky, and the seasonal color is already starting to perform. It looks a lot, a lot happier, and boy, those figs look pretty happy too. So, once the heavy work is done, then I can start playing back here and putting what I'm hoping will be most of the final touches before the garden tour on October 4th, and I will be putting up a link so you guys can buy tickets. They're sending me something from Eventbrite, and as soon as I have a link, they're doing all of the publicity on this. OU Breast Institute will get that out to you. So, as is my practice, we are filling up the bottoms, which all have good drainage now, with a bunch of garden debris, just garden trash that will break down over time, and then we're making up our own blend of about 50% compost and 50% potting soil. And you can see here, this is the shape that I'm going for, kind of an egg-shaped almost, and hopefully all of them will be approximately the same scale running up and down the steps. I may or may not underplant them with anything. That remains to be seen. Now, this is the part that takes the longest. It's for me to decide what goes where, what things look out of proportion, which will look in proportion once they get some other things around them, but boy, all of that green is just gorgeous. And, of course, we have to mulch the tops with gravel. Lots and lots, well, it's like a puzzle, lots of different pieces moving around. And the work continues. There is lots of, it's like moving furniture, and I'm so fortunate to have these gentlemen with their strong backs, but boy, all of this green is just lush. Now, some may argue this is too many boxwood, but I personally think you can hardly have too many boxwood. Now, what it does need will be some accent color, and that will come, well, let's just say that will come with a little bit more sun, but we do need that sun to get that kind of color intensity. But before long, the sun will come out, and this whole area will look a little brighter. So many of you have asked me, what mulch am I using now that I'm not using happy grow? Well, you know that I used to use happy grow as mulch, and then the formula changed pretty much when the bags changed, and it was more woody, it was paler, and it just wasn't as good a quality. Well, then one of you said that it was back, and so I am trying it again, and what is in these bags now looks to be far superior to what was in these bags last time. So I'm not sure, it's just, it's just one of those risks you might have to take. It is in a different bag now. It's in this happy grow bag. I got it at Lowe's. It is about four dollars a bag, I think, and so far I'm liking it, and we're going to put down some more of this mulch in the front. Now, Victor was commenting that a lot of his customers, they like to use it as mulch, but to them it doesn't look like mulch, it just looks like dirt, and they want more traditional mulch that looks like hardwood mulch that will last for a long time, and I guess I'm just the opposite. I like this look much better. We're also amending our potting soil with it because it is just a wonderful soil conditioner, and it's just a lot more receptive, I think, to things that go to seed for root development, and I just think it's more attractive. So that's kind of like a very personal thing, a you do you, I do me kind of thing, but right now I am back to recommending this mulch again. It is happy grow. Here's something else that I wanted to do, and today is the perfect kind of weather to do it, and I have two pota tins or pots of thyme. It's just this standard creeping thyme, and I'm going to fill in that spot right there, and then I think I'm going to start it over here a little bit. There are several tricks to getting this kind of ground cover to really look good, and I'll be talking about that in another video, but right now I just want to get these in place. A lot of the gravel had washed away or just because of planting and things that it traveled a little bit, so we had extra gravel from doing it within the brick wall on the fence on the potting area side, so we are using the remainder to remedy all of the areas where the gravel had denuded in the past. I consider all of this to be pre-fall staging. I'm not ready to bring out any pumpkins. I'm not ready to bring out any mums, but I am wanting to get everything ready for that fall layer to be superimposed over my steps and over the backyard and the front yard in general. Something else that I've really been waiting to do was to move my fire pit, my solo fire pit, from over there near the air conditioner to over here right by our two chairs right near the windows that we can open and hear the football game that we'll be playing tonight as OU plays its first game of the season at five o'clock tonight. I think they're playing Illinois State. Is that right, Stuart? And so we might be able to light a little fire and open those casement windows, and I think it's just absolutely going to be wonderful, and I'm also ready to start dining outside. You can see I've got my Windex bottle here, and I've cleaned off the table, and I think we'll be able to eat dinner out here tonight. Some of you are going to ask me, Linda, what about the wooden top that used to be on here? Well, the wooden top needed a little bit of maintenance, and we took it off, but then I decided, oh, I'm really liking this lighter look again. So it's one of those kinds of things, tell me if you all are the same way, where I kind of like it both ways. And so just depending on my mood, it can come on or it can, you know, and it or it can go away, but I think it's going to be really nice for this whole area to finally feel as if it has been groomed. I have been clipping and pruning and deadheading my little fingers off, and I think it's going to be really, really satisfying to sit out here, particularly now with my new walkway and my new potting area. It makes me, well, it makes me feel like I've gotten something accomplished. Now, we've got kind of a hiccup in the works of things that may impact what all we can do next week, and when we come back, I'll let you know about that. So we had a little bit of a snafu last week. I did not tell you, because I never tell anyone when my husband is out of town, when Hubs is out of town, but week before last, he was in both Fiji and in Australia, and while the trip was fine, his knee wasn't, and his knee started to hurt him while he was in Australia, and when he came back the following Monday, he went to the doctor, and this was his knee where that he had had his knee replacement in five years ago. It was suddenly swollen, and it really hurt. Well, they did an x-ray, and Hubs is part of a very, very special two percent of people whose knee replacement comes apart, and literally, his knee replacement is just kind of floating around in there. The cement just, I don't know what happened to it. It just degraded or something. The doctor had never seen it before. He was amazed that Hubs, the legend that is Jamie Vaughter, was able to even walk on it, much less make it through Australia to Fiji, through the airports around the world, to finally make it back home, and so next week, he is going to have to have surgery on his knee again, and I'm not sure how that's going to affect our shooting. It may or may not, but knee surgery always is something that can be rather disruptive. Let's put it this way. It's not going to be as severe as a total knee replacement, but nevertheless, it's going to be very, very inconvenient, and it can make Hubs and Hubs' wife kind of a little grouchy at times, so we're just doing the best we can. Thankfully, we'll have some college football, I guess, to keep us entertained while we're convalescing or while he is convalescing. The other thing that I'm doing is, I'm holding a Linda Vaughter Live tomorrow, so please make sure that you join us at 2 p.m. Central Standard Time. That would be three o'clock on the East Coast, I guess, and we would love to have you join us. We'll be talking about the new grandbaby. We are going to be talking about some fall decorating and, well, just anything else that you all have on your mind. I also, next month in September, am going to be revealing a new collaboration of sorts that I'm starting. I'm very, very excited about it, and it is, well, let's just say it is an entity that you are very familiar with. We're really excited about that, and we're also excited to start September, our Get to Know Yourself Better Month, so be checking out my Instagram feed, be checking out the community or the posts tab on YouTube, and, of course, be checking out here because I'm going to be sharing all sorts of fun quizzes related to just about everything, your style, your decor style, the books you like to read, what your personality type is, all of those kinds of things. We're going to be taking quizzes to get to know ourselves better, and I think it's going to be a ton of fun and a great way to kind of segue into fall and, well, just kind of know ourselves better before the holiday season begins. So, there you go. I hope you guys enjoyed this video today. If you did, make sure to give us a thumbs up, make sure to share. Stuart, are you going to tell us about this, whatever it's, what's it called? It's called Hype. It's a new thing that we don't necessarily know everything about yet, but we're working on it. For seven days after a video post, there is and or will be a button near the like button that says Hype, and I'm not even necessarily sure what it does besides somehow hype up the channel. And let us get, I think, help us get more feedback on the kind of things that you like and that you don't like. Hopefully, you will also like my new book that comes out in October. We will put a link right here, and I'll be talking a lot more about that as we discuss fall decor and seasonal flourishes as we live a garden-inspired life through the seasons. You guys, take care, and I'll see you tomorrow.