in the garden...

shoot. we don't know the first thing about gardening. we got away pretty lucky buying the house in the fall, but now that spring is fast approaching, we don't know what to do. all the flyers i get in the mail are for people to either just mow the lawn, or landscape from scratch. what i really need is someone with a green thumb to take my hand and walk me through the garden, explain what things are, what to do with them, and when to do them. but i can take pretty pictures in the meantime.










take these for example - are they weeds? i can't even tell! and then there are a lot of dried out growths around, some are sprouting leaves all the way up the stem, some, however, have greenery erupting from the ground which makes me think i should chop the dried growth down?




i can't even tell if the little plastic signs in the ground are for annuals of years gone by or not. i think the "hardy garden flox," above, is indeed this plant at the left here, from a photo i took when we were closing on the house in the fall. so do i chop it? in the front we have a tall flowering section, probably 3-4 feet high with purple flowers that hummingbirds love. right now it's just a bunch of twigs, but i can't tell what type of flower they were or what to do with them. the plastic thing in the ground says azaelia but i think it's referring to the bushes below. i'm tempted to say they look like this salvia sage, but i don't think they're "sage." they look like this cardinal flower, but they're purple...