A card, the flower beds and something strange...

Hello!
Just thought I'd post a couple things today. First off, this card. I actually made a few of them - this one is for one of the girls in our youth group who is moving to Alberta this week. I just changed the sentiment for the others so I could use them as "thank you" cards and I also made one into a wedding card. I used last weeks cupcake sketch on Taylor's blog - I thought it was a fun one to work with. On this card, I used a tag for the sentiment, but I since got a new template for my circle cutter, allowing me to make 1/8" matts, so I used that for the others instead. The big circle is cut from chatterbox scrapbook walls paper and the rest is either bazill or some other scraps I had. The ribbon is from my big box of ribbon I got at Costco.
As for the flowerbeds - here are some pictures of the front garden. I'm not the greatest photographer, and the flowers are just starting to fill out, so it's hard to give you a good idea of what it all looks like, but we're happy with how they look so far. We've started putting in a bit of a sprinkler system in the front beds to help us keep them watered well... and that's a project that we'll add to over the next few years. Just in case you want to know - we planted impatiens in the corner with the barrel... and the bed by the tree and our welcome sign as red salvia circling around the tree, yellow marigolds and a few purple wave petunias in the middle, and then alyssum (spelling?) around the edge.

As for the strange thing...
When we bought our house, most of the landscaping was in bad shape - and we pulled almost everything out, except for a few things, including two "rose of sharon" bushes. We haven't really done a whole lot with them, just pruned them back each year, because they seem to grow really quickly. Anyways, this year, for some strange reason, only half of this bush/tree is budding! We didn't do anything different to one side compared to the other - we can't figure out what happened! Oh well... it'll be interesting to see what happens to it next year!
Well, that's all for now. Tomorrow we are going hiking for the day - we're going to check out Needle Peak. Should be fun! Hiking is something we've talked about a lot, but not really done much of. It'll be fun to get out there and actually do it!