Scarborough Seashells: spring planting

We bought our house last summer and by the time we moved, painted and settled in, basically everything in our yard had already done it's thing and we figured we'd wait until this spring to start doing the guessing game as to what was growing around the property. These are some pretty flowering somethings I have in my backyard. One is a bush, one a tree and then the little plant thing I have no clue if it's a planting or a weed. Can anyone help me out?

The tree has these wonderful, rich magenta colored flowers with burgundy leaves.

This bush has teeny tiny little white flowers cascading down the branches. My mother thinks it "bridal" something or "wedding" something but can't recall.

And this- bee balm? It's the only thing that even remotely comes across my mind when I look at it but I don't think they grow in quite such a clump do they?...

is not necessarily just about decorating the indoors. When we moved into our house last summer, the yard was pretty bland with some over sized greenery that had to go.

The beds are overgrown, everything needs pruning, the only saving grace are these roses growing over my garage.

Once the heat of summer dwindled into the cool of autumn, we took out the giant pine tree that dwarfed the house and also the behemoth shrub on the corner that stretched up to the gutters.

Then we rototilled some new beds and called it quits until spring.
(Here you can see how empty the yard was over the winter)

Well, my friends, spring has sprung and I am dead sick of looking at my barren dust bowl of a front yard, so as time and money permit, we're beginning to add some life back to our little home.

Today, we tackled the new front bed.

We planted a Cleveland Pear Tree

Some dwarf Japanese Juniper shrubs

A broom plant

Some bottle brush fountain grass (which is the dead looking tuft in front of my giant piece of driftwood- which is there to hide the stump from the pine tree we removed last fall)

Delicious smelling lavender

and some white candytuft

Finally, I dragged my old cement bird bath out of hiding in the back yard and placed it in the front bed to balance out the pear tree and mulched the whole area. We lined the bed with rocks from the beach down the road

Sorry for the quality of some of these pictures, it was getting dark and I was rushing to get the shots. I'll update tomorrow with more photos!

Little by little, getting there!

Oh, and don't forget! Head on over to Low Tide High Style -Monday is the last night to be entered to win a pair of my pottery shard earrings!

updated: a few photos of the finished bed