Face To Face

Sometimes, you just can't go wrong with some beautiful zonal geraniums for annual color. These are potted up in the greenhouse section of the restaurant dining room, where Leslie's been doing a great job of bringing some seasonal color to the decor with container gardening.

It was a long restaurant day today, too, with a breakfast event getting me there at 7:00 and a lunch to follow shortly after that. No worries though, really: it wasn't one of those weather days you minded missing particularly, what with the damp, almost-raining-all-day quality and the temps barely hitting 60 (It's 55 now...).

I'm not sure if I've never noticed these two doing this before, but I had it in my head that the roses and the azaleas didn't bloom at exactly the same time, usually. I suppose I ought to have been paying better attention.

The day went well and fled before too long. I made a sidetrip to the nursery on the way home. I needed (not wanted, but required really...)a sixpack of portulaca for a particular spot and since I was there, I picked out a young golden sage plant to replace the one that passed on last winter...and they actually had a pot of verbena bonariensis.

I'll hit you with some photos of mine later and no doubt throughout the season - this is another of my Top One Thousand Absolute Favorite(you can make me choose, but you can't make me choose just one) Plants, with it's squarish stems and pointy jagged foliage and lovely little deep purple blossoms! I squee a little just thinking about it.

I countered the grey weather with some showtunes in the car: Showboat today, and it was "Old Man River" that had me taking the long way around our circle to get to the house (you just don't shut off OMR before its through!), when I had to stop short for a pair of cardinals...possibly juveniles, who came crashing onto the roadway, seeming to wrestle with one another, more at play, I thought, than any real show of agression. There was a tiny purple finch on the scene, too. A referee, perhaps.

It was positively Disney-fied.

Which perhaps set me up for what would come next.

As I was changing, I looked out the bedroom window and saw Him. My Nemesis. The Nibbler By Night. The Hungry Hare. The Bunny Bane of my tulips and crocuses.

And damn if he's not adorable. Of course, I knew he would be.

However, he also wasn't in the garden itself, except in the way that British folks refer to the whole yard as The Garden (which I rather like, while we're being tangential and all...), but peaceably grazing on the diversity that is our "lawn". I snapped the first photo through the window, but then finished changing and went out to sit on the front step.

He (again I'm assuming gender...but what's wrong with boy bunnies, anyway?)regarded me with frozen concern at first, retreating to be closer to the shelter of the hedges if things should turn ugly.

After a few pics, I set the camera down and let him see my hands were empty and I meant him no harm, because really, I don't. Provided he's not eating all my bulbs, it's kind of an honor to have him visit. It didn't take him any time at all to dismiss me as a harmless rube and return to the grazing.

Perhaps there's something to this "Liquid Fence" stuff after all. Or maybe there's just something really tasty growing amongst the grass. I'll have a look-see in the morning.

After he'd gone and I got something cooking for dinner, I went out to plant my new additions, and also to do some more weeding and seeding, this evening adding the rest of the everlasting strawflower seeds, a packet of Pacific statice and teensy pack of red poppy seeds.

As for earlier seedings: the allyssum seedlings, the first to be scattered in early April, are now approaching blooming size, and are adding more tiny white flowers to the lowest edges of the garden bed. There are sunflower seedlings popping up all over the place and possibly the first of the bachelor buttons. The seashell cosmos have now begun presenting their true leaves, so they are well on their way, as the garden as a whole seems to be.