Backyard Bling #2 - Adorning Arbors

There is nothing like being on a garden tour to motivate you into action!

Since I was not adding any new garden beds this year, I decided to add a little "bling" to my backyard in other ways.  I have been wanting to add arbors to my side iron gates for a few years now.

Here's the "before" picture of the east side entrance.    

I have an identical gate on the west side of my house.

Every year I grow annual hyacinth bean vine on the fence beside the gates, and it ends up completely covering the gates to the point that it is almost difficult to get through them.

I love using hyacinth bean vine, though, because it grows so quickly; and after the fragrant blooms fade, it produces beautiful maroon bean pods.

And as an added bonus, you can use those bean pods to make a smiling 

garden scan of fall blooms :-)

But I digress.   Back to the bling at hand.

I got online to look at arbor designs and ended up merging a couple ideas together to come up with the design that was created for my arbors.  Although my husband and I have manged to construct a few wooden projects this year without either (a) divorcing and/or (b) losing any limbs, I figured trying our hand at constructing iron arbors might be pushing our luck just a bit.  So I contracted Surles Ornamental Iron to build the custom arbors over the gates.

Here are the finished arbors.   I just love how they turned out.

East side entrance

West side entrance

Here is a close-up of the scroll detail on the sides of the arbors.

The hyacinth bean vines have been planted.  

They seem to be taking their sweet time now, but I have no doubt that they will grow up and over the arbors by summer.    I am looking forward to being able to get through my gates this summer without having to untangle a jungle of vines first.

Stay tuned for more backyard bling...

Toni :-)