Summer Daze

The verbena bonariensis just keeps on blooming and blooming. This plant is a wonderful staple for the garden and I just can't recommend it to you strongly enough.

I've cut a little for a bouquet or two, and had to trim off a flowerhead that had been damaged...but that has only caused side shoots to begin blooming. The rest of the flowerheads just continue on and on, producing ever more of these tiny purple flowers. And there's just nothing at all wrong with that. Plus the butterflies love them.


These purple pansies are continuing to bloom regularly and their cheery faces never fail to make me grin. For that alone, I'm grateful that they are continuing to bloom, nestled amongst the neighboring overgrowth of allyssum.


The lamp post garden is doing well, despite not being in the zone serviced by the soaker hose. There's a whole lot to see here, starting on the far left with yet another sunflower climbing toward the heavens.

Moving right, there's shasta daisies, allyssum, down low is a slight flush of pink in the form of some sedum only just coming into bloom, and further back is a yellow african marigold.

In the background there's some corn...and more sunflowers...and then this massive cloud of morning glories where there once was a fence post. All the way right are yet a few more sunflowers and the morning glories are just beginning to reach out to twine themselves around these latest tall stalks.



Speaking of the sunflowers, here's yet another cheery flower from one of those first plants who began growing on my bedroom windowsill way back on the first of April.



In talking about things that were steadily blooming yesterday, I may have done a few of my favorite plants a dis-service, including the dianthus. While they are not blooming as heavily as they did early on in spring, they are continuing to offer a some color down low, where it is quite welcome.

Additionally, the loosestrife continues to put out its tiny star-like flowers. I'm a little sorry to have discovered this plant's identity, as I became quite fond of it before realizing it was the dreaded invader.

Here it shares the stage with one of the legion of bachelor's buttons blooming all along the border.





There are several lychnis plants along the fence as well, which have continued to bloom steadily throughout the summer, moreso when I remember to snip off the faded flowerheads.


Badum is a pretty good natured kitty. He generally spends his life alternating between the pretense of a sedentary lifestyle, and tearing from one window in the house to the next. No doubt, the regular parade of chipmunks, birds, bunnies, wild turkeys and who-knows-what-else through the yard keeps him happily occupied with plenty to watch.

This afternoon I happened upon the gardener's cat peering out the window. "Hey, buddy, what you lookin' at?" was met with the withering feline disdain no other species can quite muster, as if to say, "It's cat stuff. I wouldn't expect you to understand. Please don't crowd me at the window."

Of course, it was a little finch foraging in the lawn outside that had his attention. But I concede there were probably also a dozen other things vying for his attention that I couldn't possibly have noticed.

Heaven knows my own attention was challenged today. It was my first full day off in about two weeks, and with such lovely weather (bright and sunny, with temps in the high sixties), the temptation was to let my senses lead me through the day, or maybe just find a patch of sun or shade and settle in with a good page-turner.

Alas, there are other things I really needed to spend some time working on...and so I made my best effort to focus on some of that, spending some time up in the steamy attic, as well as working on other less lovely, but important projects.

But it was the sort of stuff done in small doses, and so I was happy to walk away regularly to explore the garden at different times of the day, playing with the camera as I found new subjects and different angles and the varying lighting effects that an ever-moving sun provides.


This bumbler was happily plundering the remaining blossoms on the agastache during one of my breaks. And while I was out there, I spotted a hummingbird buzzing along the border, exploring and examining the sunflowers and morning glories and corn plants before taking a breather on the power line high above.

I wish the canna lilies would start blooming - they are certainly tall enough now - and I think their red flowers (if indeed they are a red-flowered variety; I realize suddenly that I'm not certain of that.) would be a welcome addition to the garden, as far as attracting hummingbirds.


The Burpee Big Boy tomatoes are beginning to ripen, so I am continuing to hold hope that a tasty and sweet tomato sandwich is in the cards for me sometime real soon.

I ended up getting a fair amount accomplished today, in between exploration breaks, and so I felt the deep nap I stumbled into at the end of the afternoon was well-deserved.

It also allowed me to miss the newstime spoiler reports of the latest event results from the Olympics. Not knowing how things will turn out always makes watching a little more interesting, I think.

The BMX races are postponed this evening, due to rain in Beijing, which is a shame, because I'm just fascinated by them...and the crazy course the races are run upon. To me, it's quite similar to the moguls skiing events of the Winter Games--it looks sort of painful and wild, but I just can't look away!

Meanwhile, there's been some gymnastic exhibitions. Everyone always performs so nicely when the pressure of competition has lifted a little. Just amazing performances there.

I'd sort of hoped that the rain delay on the BMX might've opened up some primetime space for the kayaking/canoe events, but I suppose that isn't the sort of big ticket thing you broadcast in the evening. I'll have to look online for that.

But also tonight, platform diving! Talk about crazy...I think I may once have jumped (I hesitate to use the word "dive" during this Olympic week, when it is clear I am not worthy to associate with the word) from a high diving board back during childhood swim lessons, but knowing my irrational fear of heights, it's also entirely possible that I just climbed back down instead. And in any event, it wasn't nearly as tall as what they are diving so gracefully from!!

Oh, and what a fantastic way to end the evening's post: Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor just locked up another gold medal for the USA in the arena of Women's Beach Volleyball!!

By the way, I have been remiss in making a recommendation: if you, like me, are enjoying submerging yourself in this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, you may enjoy visiting TR over at From the Faraway Nearby. Tim's working the games over in Beijing, and his experiences in the city have been a fascinating and fun counterpoint to the television coverage. His blog has been one of my favorite new discoveries this summer.

By all means, check it out!

Just Another Day

The annuals really own the garden this time of year. Most of the big ticket perennials have come and gone. Of the fabulous lilies only green leafy stalks remain. Just a few of the former multitude of daisies are still showing their cheery faces. There is still some phlox to tease the eye and scent the air.

But the day belongs to the hardest working residents in the garden: the allyssum, the marigolds, bachelor's buttons and sulphur cosmos.

The other cosmos still have not joined the show yet, though there are buds forming. I can't believe they are waiting so long this year. I think there's some reason behind that I've not quite figured out. The seeds were certainly sown early enough. Perhaps the soil is too rich for them. The plants are tall enough, some of them topping off at nearly four feet.



I hadn't thought I was going to show you any morning glories this morning, though there were plenty in bloom. And then I spotted this bumblebee tight-rope-walking along one of the twining stems, clambering over tomorrow morning's flower buds.

And this pale pink morning glory was a bit of a surprise, since I've not seen any this color before today. At first, I thought it was actually a bindweed flower, but a closer look showed it to be another color of glory heard from.

Pretty, eh?
Here's something for the Big Book of the Minorly Weird: at work today, one of the waitresses was cutting lemons and discovered this lemon with another lemon which had grown inside the first.

Hardly a sign of the coming apocalypse, but vaguely interesting nonetheless.

We heard of a severe storm warning around 1:00 this afternoon, and within minutes it was swirling in on us, thunder echoing in the distance to the west.

In a matter of minutes, the clouds billowed out of nowhere to obscure the sun and the sky grew very dark. It was sort of amazing how quickly it happened. I learned late tonight that there was actually a microburst causing lots of tree damage not far from the Cape Cod Canal at about that time, which explains the speed with which everything was moving.


As the thunder continued booming and lightning flashed across the sky, the gusty winds arrived first and then the rain. At first, it made a sort of fog as it came in contact with the hot pavement and evaporated.

Then suddenly it was falling in sheets and making visible the great gusts of wind that were blowing in a variety of directions.

I understand there was golf-ball sized hail connected with the microburst, but we didn't see any of that in Orleans, just lots of that heavy, heavy rain, sometimes blowing sideways, helping us feel a sort of kinship with our friends and family in Florida who were braving the battering wind and rain of Tropical Storm Fay.

I did download an impressive radar map of the storm's track and another detailing the frequency and location of the lightning strikes...but sadly, I've misplaced those files, so you'll just have to trust me when I say it was a big, unexpected storm.

[EDIT: 8/20/08, 8:20 am: here's a link to more coverage of this storm, if you're interested.]

After work, I stopped by Rock Harbor for a look out across the bay, where it was cloudier than I'd expected, since we'd ended up having a pretty sunny afternoon following the storm. It wasn't until I got home to Harwich that I discovered that they were having a second storm about that time.

It's much cooler this evening, with temperatures dropping down into the low sixties...and now, after midnight, we've slipped down into the 50s. Definitely a nice night for a sweatshirt. I think I'll sleep well for a change.

There's still some fast moving clouds passing by overhead, and I didn't find the right setting to capture those crisply on the new camera yet.

But really, I wasn't so into photography tonight and mostly just sat in front of the TV and enjoyed some more Olympics coverage. Men's diving, women's gymnastics, BMX bike racing, more running and hurdle-jumping.

It's all good, though I am often a little disappointed that, in trying to make sure we see as much of the games as possible, some of the "lesser" contenders don't get their televised moment of glory. We see all those countries' athletes enter the stadium on the first night, and many of them are never seen again.

Succeed or fail, they are all part of the beauty of the Olympic experience.

Gold and Glory

It's a good thing I gave you a one day break from the morning glories, because they sure figure prominantly today. But look at these colors and decide if you can blame me.

Once again, I am running a day behind and these are photos from Saturday morning's garden.

We had a late-night party at work (I expect that often sounds more fun than it is, though this was not an unpleasant evening by most accounts), so I didn't actually get out of there until well past midnight...and then stopped in briefly at a friend's house party, so my arrival at home was rather late and I really wasn't up for posting at that particular hour.

I didn't even get to watch much in the way of Olympic coverage yesterday, though I was finished with my shift in time to catch the medals ceremony for the US Swim Team, including wonder-aquaman Michael Phelps, who earned his eighth gold for these games, breaking Marc Spitz' old record of seven at the Munich Games in 1972.

(thanks to Afod for IMing me in the office as the shift wound down to let me know of Phelps' latest victory!)

Is it strange that I remember that? I think '72 was the first time I watched the Olympics. I'd have been seven years old at the time. Of course, those games were marred by awful things, so perhaps that burned it in my young memory, as well. But I remember Mark Spitz' poolside moments, too.

In an interesting bit of foreshadowing of Phelps' Olympic glory perhaps (because it's always easy to see the foreshadowing the next day), one of the sulphur cosmos plants - which had previously only been producing blooms in electric orange - began blooming in yellow...or maybe we should say, gold.


The garden is a wild patch of chaos still. No amount of deadheading will change that, though at least I can keep the blooming going.

Any serious attempts to weed things out at this point would probably leave big patches of emptiness and cause instability for the plants that would remain, as everything has grown together into something larger than themselves.

Which is fine by me: between work and life there's plenty to keep me occupied away from the business of obsessive garden tending. I'm afraid every August finds me leaving it to its own devices to some extent.


I have now harvested the first couple of Early Girl tomatoes, since they had finally come on with some nice color. I haven't tasted them yet, though, so I'll have to wait to give you the remainder of my review of them...and we'll see if mine are any tastier than other garden bloggers' reports.

Finally, I'll deflect your attention away from the garden for a moment, to show off my African violet, which is merrily blooming its little head off by my bedroom window.

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

Stormy Dark. With Yellow

It was a dark and stormy night.
Suddenly, a shot rang out, a maid screamed.

It is a dark and stormy night. No, really. But I'll get to that shortly. But since there's a break in the weather just now, I'm doing a little blogging as I watch the shot put events at the Olympics.

Yes, I'm on that schedule lately, since so much of the events happen live during our east coast wee hours. If Freestyle Snooze Alarm were an event at the Summer Games, I'd be in contention for a medal.

Anyway, the Garden. I'll lead with this new snapdragon that's begun blooming at the edge of the thistle cloud. It's really the only color other than yellow I'm offering today(and so, James, if you need to scroll down, I'm okay with that...).

It's not that there weren't other colors. As you can see from the long shot below, there were plenty of morning glories, but you know, we've been seeing those everyday for a while.

But yellow seemed like a good idea for this gray morning and so that's mostly what I seem to have captured. The glow of Apollo made a few sporadic appearances during the course of the day...most notably in early evening, when the deep orange light made long shadows outside of work.


But considering how gray the morning was, I think you can understand my wanting to focus on the yellows, like the evening primrose and marigolds above.

Soon there'll be new flowers and colors to share with you, as I've now officially found the first cosmos bud on one of those seashell-flowered plants.

The rain we're getting tonight should be an encouragement. I wonder, probably Sunday morning it will open.



In six or seven different places along the fence garden, you'll find clumps of this threadleaf coreopsis, regularly providing fresh little flowers as long as I remember to deadhead the old ones.

I do think this little guys are pretty enjoyable and I'm always amazed to remember that they have grown so prolificly from the tiny little side shoot that I dug out of my friend Paul's Wellfleet garden back in 2001.

Down below you'll find one of the tickseed coreopsis, re-blooming in a smaller fashion than earlier in the summer. As with most yellow flowers, I think they are pretty terrific, but I do think they are at their best when they mingle with other colors for contrast.


On the way home tonight around 11:00 p.m. was when I first spotted the lightning (I'd stayed to have a bite to eat while I watched the Mens 100M Butterfly swim with Michael Phelps on the bar TV. One more gold medal--this guy is amazing. But I'm not addicted to the Olympics. I could stop any time I wanted. Really.). By the time I got home the storm was ramping up pretty nicely, with some big lightning and heavy rain.

I stayed in the car in the driveway for a few minutes once I'd arrived. Partly for safety, but also to watch the lightning dancing across the sky.

When I was finally inside, I got a few candles lit. The power doesn't seem to go off too often here in Harwich, but I like to be ready when there's a big storm. And the radar map was making clear that this was a big storm.

It has been a lightning filled early morning, some of it pretty dramatic...and only hinted at in this latest series of screen caps.





Since it looks like a dreary mid-afternoon, I do feel the need to remind you that this last image was captured at about 12:35 a.m.
It's very quiet now, as the storm has moved past, a quiet darkness of dripping and crickets, punctuated by a distant roll of thunder receding in the distance.

Oh, and the crack of a starter pistol on television for the one of the races of the Heptathlon (Which always makes me think of the contest they had on Paradise Island to decide which Amazon would be Wonder Woman.). Time for bed!

Gold Medal Monday

I'm playing catch-up a little this evening, as these are all Sunday images, starting with these noon-time portulacas. I hadn't share any in a while, and this was a nice trio.

I'm glad I held on to a few pictures from Sunday, too, since today was a pretty rainy and gray day and I didn't actually take any. Rain was really heavy as it moved through in waves this afternoon, and we saw a kicking thunderstorm roll through earlier this evening. I did let the camera roll there, but haven't yet checked to see if I got anything worthwhile.

With all the events at work this weekend, I missed the start of the Olympics and hadn't really gotten into the routine of enjoying the coverage until this evening. I still haven't had a chance to track down the video of the opening ceremonies, which I've been hearing were quite impressive. Tonight I have been watching, so I was able to watch Michael Phelps get his ninth gold medal this evening, and I'm enjoying the men's gymnastic coverage as I write. Woo hoo!! Go USA!! I'm by no means an athlete, but every time the Olympics roll around, I can't help but be inspired and thrilled by these kids and their ability.

Last night, however, I was watching Moby Dick on PBS, with Gregory Peck as Ahab. I was watching the scene where the whalers harpoon the great white whale and then get taken for a wild ride...and it occurred to me that sometimes walking Emily is a bit like a Nantucket Sleighride.

Both of these hydrangea pictures were taken on one of those walks, so that they are in focus at all is a testament to her patience with me.

First up are these pristine white blossoms of Peegee hydrangea. There's a whole hedge of this stuff down the street, probably about eight to ten feet high. It's interesting to note that these plants, in a semi-shaded location, are so much further ahead of the same plant in full sun outside the restaurant. That one's flowers actually turn pale shades of green and red come September.

Across the street from those peegees, are a few absolutely beautiful purple and blue flowered hydrangeas. How could I resist sharing one of those with all you purple-lovers?!

Knowing that there was so much rain in the forecast for this week, I had been thinking that last night might be my best chance for a look at the Perseid Meteor showers...but sadly, the clouds moved in across the sky even before it was fully dark, obscuring the half-moon and the rest of the sky.

This evening, in the cool night (current temperature of 63F) following the earlier rain, the crickets are singing all up and down the street.

Skies remain dark and cloudy and our forecast advises us that thunderstorms remain possible well into morning. I might even be hearing just a little distant thunder now. Actually, the Olympics have just been interrupted for an EAS warning about a Severe Thunderstorm Warning. So, I think I'll be posting this and shutting down the computer.

However, there's some sunshine in the forecast for mid-week, so I'm hoping I'll get to see a few meteors then. Have a good night everyone.