Decorating Our Back Porch with Spring Touches

Hello and welcome to this month’s Design Challenge! I am loving the freedom of our new challenge’s format, how about you? For this month’s inspiration, our host Cindy from County Road 407 has chosen a beautiful spring porch for us to emulate. I have decided to decorate my back porch for the season with this challenge.

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If you are visiting here for the first time, welcome! Wasn’t Missy’s porch over at Sonata Home Design just perfect for springtime? Love the huge door bouquet!!!

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Spring Porch Inspiration

Our inspiration photograph this time comes from Tina & Taylor over on Instagram at Velveteen & Grace who decorated their front porch with so much charm!

What I love from our inspiration

• stone rabbits
• beautiful bench with pillows
• Boston ferns
• potted plants with pops of color
• white flowers in a basket on the front door

Our front porch is really a stoop and pretty small. I have shown it before, but we haven’t been out on the back porch since a design challenge several years ago.

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Spring touches on my back porch

Nothing is difficult to replicate here, friends! I am jumping right into our back patio/porch area with this favorite French-style bench as the primary piece you see when walking out from our kitchen and dining room areas.

I bought that bench while we were living in our RV up in Sanger, Texas. It was a turquoise blue back then, but the paint quickly flaked, so I sanded it lightly and spray painted it this soft black. Love it still!

Adding a few French style pillows really adds that cozy spring vibe to each seating piece.

This winter was so mild we kept all of the furniture out on the patio, so with a quick hose-down and bringing out these thick blue and white cushions from the garden shed, we were in business!

I swap out which cushions to bring out from year to year. Last year we had the Hawaiian-style ones on these two faux rattan chairs. Nice change. 🙂

Here is a look from bench. We found this all-weather rattan set at Lowe’s end-of-season sale a few years ago and they are holding up well. 🙂 I brought out these linen pillows from the house to set out here for spring. I love their soft romantic look as a contrast to the quietly French country pillow covers on the settee opposite.

For greenery on the patio, I moved the two Boston ferns along with these white geraniums out from their overwintering in the greenhouse. I have been feeding them all fertilizer since late January and they are rewarding us with early gorgeous blooms and a lot of growth.

I mimicked our inspiration photo’s white flowers here with these potted geraniums.

For the bright pops of color, we have red geraniums tucked amongst the roses in pots just off the porch.

For some complementary blue, I found this beautiful mophead hydrangea at Costco here about a month ago. As soon as I got it home, I quickly potted it up.

This hydrangea has loved its life over by the shed, but it needed to come over here for a bit to get away from the 90 degree heat we have experienced this weekend. 😉

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More spring touches

I brought over two cement rabbits like those in our inspiration piece. Funny, when I saw the rabbits in our design challenge photo, I thought, “Perfect!” since I knew I had these big guys.

And this little coconut fiber cutie decided to come outside and play, too…

This triple ball eugenia dried out last summer and struggled hard to rebound. I cut off all of the dead branches last fall and it has really come around! I have been feeding it with fertilizer all winter inside the greenhouse. Mr. Ethereal brought it over to the patio for me for this backyard patio shoot. This is its usual home until late fall. 🙂

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Pro tip to regrow branches: Gently scratch the camber along the main tree trunk in a few spots where you’d like new branches to grow. That all you have to do! I learned this tip from a gardening channel on YouTube. Sorry, I can’t remember which channel or I’d give the channel credit.

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Two new branches are growing out from the open area where I scratched the trunk last fall. I just scratched a few other spots to get more brances growing in those bare spots.

Part of the view from our back porch features this fence pantel we put up the first fall we were in this house creating a feature wall. I wanted it to sit behind our Garden Maiden and it really is stunning with the brick wall behind it. I was completely enamored with brick homes after living in stucco homes for years.

Our garden area is a construction zone half of the time, plus it includes storage for future projects. Some boards and 4x4s for house skirting and fence needs sit behind the smoker bbq to keep dry rot away. Some of my mother-in-love’s old chairs are still sitting along the brick wall from when she moved. Time for more donations. 😉

It’s always a bit of “strategic photographing” around here. More to do, always!

Even with the stuff tucked here and there, I love having a slightly elegant French country style to my decor and I think this spring patio hits that mark. What do you think?

Thanks for stopping by today, y’all! Decorating our back porch for spring just makes my heart sing as we do enjoy sitting out here when the weather is good ~ which is right now and again in the later autumn.

Next up is Cindy from County Road 407 whose porch is just as pretty as a picture! Her green bunny is adorable in it’s little green wreath!! I love that Cindy shares ideas on how to decorate a small porch as ours out front could use some TLC. 😉 Enjoy everyone’s porches and patios linked below!! Thanks again for coming by…

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Happy spring,