Sunday Garden Report

I have completed the Dragonfly Trifecta!

In July, Patrick danced with dragonflies and Joe had cocktails with one. Today, one of these garden visitors decided to stop teasing me and posed on the faded head of a plantain flower. And what a chance to see what the new camera could do.

Do click to embiggen and admire those wings!

Yes, there's a new camera. It's been a tax-free weekend here in Massa chusetts and I'd been saving up some money saved from not smoking (30 days today!!) and such since my old camera went on to its reward back in the spring.

So now I'm experimenting with something new, an Olympus FE-310. So far, I'm having a great time with it, though I'm not sure I'm interested in the photo program that came along with the camera...my PhotoPlus 6.0 does all I need it to for developing purposes.


The first tentative photos were taken at that house party I visited last night. To the left are Vera and Chicao, two of our hosts...and down below is the whole bunch of us.

There had been other guests earlier, whom I unfortunately missed, but it was still fun to hang out for a while with everyone who was there when I arrived after a long night at work. Good tunes, a little dancing and Vera's special Brazilian potato salad!

Mmm mmm.


Here's me with Maria Paolo, Rocio and Katerin, who are all here on work visas from Columbia this summer.

By day, they are working as chamber maids, but in the evenings, the make the best team trio of dishwashers our restaurant has known in years! Plus, they're funny and sweet and great to party with!!


Despite the late night (it was around 2 a.m. when those pictures were taken!), I was up pretty early this morning, since I couldn't wait to get the new camera out for a spin in the garden.

A fresh round of bachelor's buttons provided some nice camera fodder. These little flowers - each one's about an inch across - just keep coming and coming...and in a great assortment of colors.




I just love the blue ones, but there are many of them up and down the fence garden. Naturally, I'm being won over by the purple ones in the color range, which were part of a range of about five different colors, so they are fewer in number.


The dappled sunlight behind this pair of purple pals is pretty delicious, too.



There's lots to learn about the new camera, so eventually I will have to sit down and have some quality time with the manual, to make sure I'm making full use of everything.

But I'm happy to say that its also pretty intuitive, and I've been having fun exploring some of the different settings.

As you might guess, my favorite, and one of the most appropriate to the Midnight Garden, is the macro-focus...and this camera also has a super-macro focus, and to celebrate I managed to stalk a few bees who were visiting the border this morning for your entertainment.


As you can see, sunshine made a full return to the Cape today and it really felt like summer. Looks like that'll be staying with us a for a few days, which is a comfort, since it's clear now the summer season is in decline.

In a moment typical of the sort of Charlie Brown-y moments which punctuate my life, last night I finally discovered my official cocktail for the 2008 Summer Season.


It's light and refreshing and mellow enough to enjoy more than one without falling down on my face. Being a frozen drink, the only real danger is a brain freeze from speedy consumption.

And no sooner did I victoriously hoist that Midori Colada in the air than leaves began falling from nearby trees, signalling the end of the season.

; )



Howdy, pardners! Life brought a straw cowboy hat my way this afternoon at work, when we hosted the annual un-birthday celebration of a local family.

This year's theme was cowboys and they were all appropriately attired, a wonderful Cape Cod mix of cowboy boots and flip-flops...and there were hats for all the staff who worked the party, too!

And just in time for Carnival Parade.

As I tried out the zoom feature, I caught this sunset-illuminated jet plane high overhead. It was flying east, out over the ocean, so I assume it was an international flight, though it occurs to me it might just have been circling around to approach Logan Airport in Boston from that direction.

In between pictures, I managed some serious dead-heading of the garden tonight. As always, lots of spent marigolds to remove, some more allyssum to trim back...a few faded bachelor's buttons here and there.

More of the daisies had gone past, so they were taken out and some of the coneflower rudbeckia was thinned a little, to encourage some late season reblooming.

I also took shears in hand and addressed the business of the now- tower ing spikes of evening primrose, pruning them back to something lower growing.

We'll see how well they respond to this sort of treatment; my suspicion is they will get bushy and stay a little shorter--I wish I'd thought to cut them back earlier in the season.

Once again, I unwound a great many morning glory vines around the re-captured flags on the fence, so for at least the next few hours, they should be able to flap with abandon on the occasional sea-breeze.


With nightfall coming just a little sooner, the deadheading turned into lighting candle lanterns in the garden and before long it was dark, leaving me free to head inside to sample that first Early Girl tomato.

There were two, actually, but I discovered that the second one had a nasty patch of mold growing on the bottom of it, so that one was jettisoned, but this one sliced nicely and was very tasty.

It would've made a nice tomato sandwich - the kind I've been craving all summer - if I had remembered that we had no bread in the house. But it was yummy just as it was...and tomorrow I'll make sure I'm stocked up to make a proper sandwich with the next couple in the harvest schedule.

It's not quite a full moon anymore--that was last night, but that just means I have a whole month to figure out how to take a great moon photo (no wisecracks, you lot...oh, ha ha...cracks...yah, whatever...) with the camera.

This one's not bad, but you can't see Jackie Gleason's face.

Thanks For the Meme-ories

Remember the day around mid-July when I posted my response to a pair of memes here at the Midnight Garden? They were things I'd been tagged on and not addressed for a while, and it was a relief to know I'd taken care of that and could get back to the daily garden photos. Well, for a few minutes, anyway, until I learned I'd been newly tagged by my pal James over at Lost in the Landscape (whose completely different garden blog is another of those daily treasures the blogging world has to offer. Go look at the teasel.).

So, that meme was supposed to be 10 random things about me. I've already done a couple of those and there's the 100 List, too (though I suspect some of that may require revision in future months). James gave me permission (while simultaneously pointing out that the 100 list lacked a #26) to just do six or seven things, because of the meme-convergence.

I decided to go for eight, although you may find that each of the eight points contains more than just one random bit. Meanwhile, I wanted to do something to mix it up a bit, make it more interesting than just another list and so I dug around in some old photo albums to see what I could find. Please cue the Bob Hope theme music and we'll begin.

1) This is a dear old friend: the apple tree in our New Jersey back yard in whose arms I passed many a lazy summer day of my childhood...and thanks to the annual drop of crab apples, a few of those days were spent tidying up the yard, too. To the right of center, you can see two waterspout-y kind of limbs, which were just the right distance apart to serve as a sort of tree seat, where you could lounge with a small pile of comic books in your lap and read in the apple-scented breezes.

The fledgling garden photographer took this photo in May of 1979, just before we moved away to the Adirondacks of upstate New York. A close examination of recent Google Earth imagery suggests that some subsequent owners of the property have removed the tree and filled the tiny space with a swimming pool. The silly fools.

2) That same fledgling photographer took this picture of my Mom's tulips in that same yard, same year. Note how the tulips themselves are out of focus, but the lovely purple violets in the background are fairly clear. That still happens to me...all the time!

3) So we moved to the mountains, which was an interesting change. From a class of 300 in northern New Jersey, I now had 17 classmates, and we were the third-largest class in the history of the local K-12 school.

I'm grateful to have spent so many of my "formative" years in a place of such incomparable beauty and I'm happy to know I have so many friends there still, for when I want to visit in the future!

The town is called Long Lake, as it is situated to straddle the lake of the same name, which is fourteen miles long. Technically, though, the body of water is actually a widening of the Raquette River and thereby not a lake at all. But whatever.

Here's a view of it looking south from over the town beach. That's not the long end, but I forgot to scan that photo.

4) This next view shows the only intersection in Long Lake. No traffic lights there, although there is a yellow blinking light down by the lake, to remind people to turn instead of getting wet.

In the center, more or less, of this image, is the property we moved to, which included a small cottage colony for summer rentals...which also made life pretty interesting, at least between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

I've sketched in an arrow (tho thanks to the monitor issues here, I've no idea just what color that arrow is...) which indicates the site of the very first garden I ever really got to create and tend.

Of course, it didn't exist until we sold and moved some of those cottages.

By the way, these two photos were also taken in 1979, by the same young photog, during the only fifteen minutes of my life I have ever been aloft in an airplane.


4) Once those cottages were removed, there turned out to be more than enough space for a good long border garden in the corner of the property. In time, the garden looked like this. Here it is around 1995 or so.

It was my first real chance to play with something other than annuals. Of course, since it was USDA Zone 3, the choices were still somewhat limited.

A few of the perennials in this garden (the Shasta Daisies, the Garden Heliotrope and some tall garden phlox) are plants which made the move with me, eventually and still live.

They are now planted in the fence garden I feature here every day.

5) When I moved to Cape Cod and settled in Provincetown in 1997, I lived for a time in a second story apartment where there was no garden. However, there were gardens a-plenty all around and I enjoyed walking or biking about town to admire them all. This also gave me a little time to study just what it was possible to grow in this different climate, USDA Zone Coastal 7.

I did, however, use a stash of old theatrical lighting gels leftover from college and some black electrical tape to create this faux stained glass window in the apartment, which I still think was pretty damn cool.

Like so many of Life's most interesting things, it was very temporary, since I hadn't thought to create it on a piece of plexiglass or anything like that which I could actually have moved. Only this photo remains.


6) When we first made the acquaintance of Emily Grace, we weren't really sure of her age. But we knew she was incorrigible.

She was a wild, untrained dog of great strength and will who'd been to the pound three different times before our paths crossed hers. While our relationship was rocky at the start, to say the least, it was clear that she loved us for our devotion and faith in her.

This image is taken in early December 1998, just two months after she'd joined the household and is truly a moment frozen in time. The doggy bed pillow and "Santa's Helper" holiday scarf were two early-season gifts we gave her earlier that evening.

By the following morning, the pillow was a cloud of white fluffy filling which wafted about the living room.

By Christmas morning, three weeks later, she'd chewed all of the scarf she could reach so that, appropriately, only the letters "Santa's Hel" remained.

7) When Owen and I combined households earlier that year, we also combined gardens, as I added many of my floral friends from my Adirondack gardens to the beds he had already created in Eastham.

It was a lovely show the following summer and nicely symbolic of our new relationship. Which isn't to say that territorial issues about the garden didn't also crop up, as a result of the merging.

We ended up moving the following year, the first of many for us. Many of the plants came along for the ride, but a host of them remained behind. We can still enjoy some of their bloomings as we drive by our old homes each year. Just look at all those lilies.

8) In the summer of 2002, this pair of golden snapdragons in our Wellfleet garden made me cry one hot July morning, as they reminded me of the Twin Towers that had fallen in New York City the previous year and how the world around us was beginning to change.


** This isn't one of the eight points, but just to put this out there, it's now been fifteen days without one of those cigarette things. There's been a few surprise cravings this week, but nothing I couldn't work through.

The Nicodemon, you get him under your heel, but the little bastard is kind of like one of those gremlins in a horror movie that just won't quite die. Oh, but this one will...and quite horribly, too.

Heh heh heh....


As a bonus (but you all can decide if it really IS one or not), here's a fresh look at the Midnight Gardener, who in the heat of late July remembered he was the proud owner of a pithe helmet (just one of the spoils of a late-night raid on the costume store room of the fine arts building of my college way too many years ago.). Since he rarely remembers a hat in the hot sun, this was a good thing, stares from the neighbors aside.

I won't wax poetic or adventurous about hacking through the jungle that is the Weeds of Late July, as Jenn has recently done so to great effect over at Of Cabbages and Kings and I couldn't top that.

It was she who reminded me I had such a hat in my possession, though she knew it not. I also thank her for the chuckles she brings me each day with her humor writing. Laughter is the seasoning that makes so much of Life palatable, and we should just pour it on everything. Well, almost everything. No, Everything. Because good gods, Life is too short.

I'm tempted to tag a bunch of you, but it's no doubt a somewhat more complex meme now that I've added the component of having to scan old photographs, so I don't want to be the source of that burden. However, if you've got some old pics you wanna share and a few interesting things to say about them, well, I bet it'd be lots of fun to see what you come up with.

Hope it's a great weekend for you all!

Meme-Day

Having posted at a reasonable hour last night, I thought I was going to get to sleep at a reasonable time, too. But then I installed the Babel Fish widget, in hopes of being more welcoming to foreign blog-readers...and then stayed up entirely too late seeing how cool the Midnight Garden looked in a host of other languages. (Sorry, Sh@ney: I tried to get one for you Aussies, but they say it's the same language! Who knew?)

Although I'd heard the lightest shower in the night, everything was dry this morning and the sun shining bright, despite forecasts to the contrary...so I tended to watering as usual, with coffee in hand.

So, Java...dear Java (whom I hope to someday visit, perhaps coordinated with a visit to the Park Seed company, since she is in their neighborhood)...has meme-d me. I'm not always a big fan of these, since they can encourage us toward that whole business of Too Much Information the internet spawns with its faux anonymity.

But they can be fun, too...and an enjoyable way to get to know interesting tidbits about fellow bloggers. Or is it? And so, here we go:


THE MEME OF FIFTEEN

1. What did you want to be when you grew up?

A railroad engineer. Then one of the Kids From "FAME".

2. What are you now?

A catering director, a gardener, a blogger and an aspiring beach bum, among other things.

3. What fictional character(s) did you identify with as a child?

Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, for their ability to hide their secrets while still doing amazing things to benefit the world around them.

4. How about now?

Those three, still. But also Mole, from The Wind in the Willows, who is good-natured, easy-going and somewhat uninitiated in the ways of the world.

5. What is your "Gay Pride" song?

"Go West", by the Village People. Which is funny, because I actually went East.

6. What is your drag song (we ALL have one)?

Ha ha, easy: "Le Jazz Hot" from Victor/Victoria.

7. Earliest memory?

Hard to be sure, so many have been supplemented with lots of photos, home movies and family anecdotes over the years that I find myself at a loss to really think of the first thing I truly remember. Perhaps t'was walking around in the grass outside the apartment building, something about dandelions. Or it might've been trains.


8. Memory you'd like to forget?

A hot night spent in a cold, uncomfortable place, as the Universe tried to tell me things I refused to hear. If only I had chosen differently.

9. If you ran for a seat in political office, what would be your platform(s)?

I'm more likely to run for a seat on a trolley. But I'd want to address health care for everyone, a revitalized transportation infrastructure (railroads made this nation great and can return its former glory if given half a chance), greater support of education and the arts...and gardens and seed for everyone!


10. Winehouse. Want her to succeed or are you over her?

The "Rehab" girl/singer? Not sure I know enough to care, or care enough to know, really. Next.

[For the next three answers, "Love" being such a complicated business, I've decided to defer to some of our modern age's philosophers and poets. Can you name them?]

11. The first person you thought you loved?

I was sleeping and right in the middle of a good dream, like all at once I wake up from something that keeps knocking at my brain. Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head and spring up in my bed screaming out the words I dread.


12. The first person you actually loved?

I'll make you happy, baby, just wait and see. For every kiss you give me I'll give you three. Oh, since the day I saw you, I have been waiting for you. You know I will adore you till eternity.


13. The person you love now?

And maybe love is letting people be just what they want to be. The door always must be left unlocked. To love when circumstance may lead someone away from you and not to spend the time just doubting.

14. If you could be, do, have, own, or possess anything you wanted, what would it be?

A quiet place in the country, maybe alongside some railroad tracks. Nothing big, a small house with a big porch, a little greenhouse and just enough land to have a few different microclimates for creating different kinds of gardens and habitats to wander around in, and being able to look up now and then to watch some trains going by. Put another way, "a tracthouse of our own, somewhere that's green."


15. Even if you are in love with someone right now, who are you/could you be crushing on right now?

Are you kidding me? This is where memes collapse to like the Fifth Grade level. (Who asked you to ask me this?) No, really; it would be indiscreet to say.

I'll just go with Carter Oosterhouse. Are you kidding me? That smile, those eyes, that hair...America's Favorite Handyman, indeed!


While I'm on a roll, Mary of City Garden tagged me back in June with a meme I haven't come through on, yet...so with no further adieu:

6 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME

1. My first dog was a beagle named Popcorn. She was a bad girl. Because of the predominance of dogs in our neighborhood named for snack food, someone once remarked that a summer evening on our street was like being at a baseball game: "Licorice! Candy! Popcorn! Taffy!"

2. I think the best dessert in the whole wide world is trifle. You've got cake, pudding, fruit, jam and booze. I ask you, what's not to love?

3. It simply wouldn't be Spring without a host of cheerful pansies in a raft of wonderful colors.

4. I think "Brokeback Mountain" was a pretty terrific movie. The soundtrack from the film always leaves me a little sad and wistful, but in a good way.

5. You know that screen saver with all the multiple-lined polygons that swirl and bounce off the edges of the screen and is constantly changing shape and color? I could watch that for days.

6. Every time I hear the rumble of thunder, I go take a seat on the porch area out in front of the house. It's under the eaves, to keep me dry, but I love a front row seat for a good lightning storm. The storms always seem to fizzle before they get to us, or turn and go in a different direction.

(Thanks, Mary, for your patience with me. It was June when you tagged me and there was so much going on in the garden.)


I suppose I'm a spoil-sport for not tagging anyone to carry on after me. If you'd like to pick up the thread of one, or the other, or both memes, at your blog, have at it!


Of course, all this meme-ing might lead one to believe that there's nothing going on in the garden worth talking about, and mostly, that might be true.

But I'm happy to share with you this first yarrow flowerhead. I found this seedling in the lawn early this spring and carefully transplanted it into the garden bed. I have since, on no less than three different occasions, accidentally dug the thing up and had to replant it...so I give it major props for having bloomed for me. I hope it will be the first of many.


Here's a few of those chamomile seedlings which I'd spotted recently. Really, they have moved past the point of being "seedlings", I think, as it looks like some of them are fixing to bloom.

Anyone care for a spot of tea?


The day came and went without rain until this evening, when we had a bit of a shower for about fifteen minutes. It was probably just enough to cool down the pavement and the plants. If we don't get more overnight, I'll still need to water in the morning.

Before it rained, I did grab a plastic pot and some shears and spent some time deadheading the border. It's fairly time-consuming, that's true, but for every fading flower I snip off, there'll be one or two new ones. It's mostly marigolds and pansies in there, but also some allyssum, a few daisies, a bit of lychnis and some dianthus...and a couple fading lilies from the red asiatics.

There's more to do, but then again, there always is.



Hey, you know that July 14th is Bastille Day over in France, right? It commemorates the overthrow of the monarchy of King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette and the birth of the republic of France.

And I'm just peasant enough to celebrate with a nice big piece of cake.

Sun Day

Despite last night's cooldown, it was hot from the get-go this morning, as we hit 81 around 9:00 a.m. I got right out to the watering before that, to make sure all my green friends were prepared for the day ahead.

This patch of dianthus is one of those flowers where it's hard to capture the flower color correctly, depending on the light conditions. It's actually, to my eye, just a little more toward the orange than the pink side of the spectrum, as reds go...but I'm having a heck of a time getting it right. Ah, well...lovely just the same.

I was happily surprised to see that this cleome seedling has developed so quickly. I think it's benefitting from its location along the route of the soaker hose, not to mention the hot golden rays of the sun.

Here's a pair of seashell cosmos seedlings at the feet of a clump of veronica (left). I'll need to transplant them so they're a little further apart, since they both look like good healthy plants.

Now, in the fish pond, you may have noticed we have a potted iris. You'd probably just have noticed the sword-like leaves coming up out of the water, really, but you might have guessed iris.

Anyway...the thing hasn't bloomed for us for about five or six years, as it seemed to have gotten pot-bound...and also didn't have a good strong sun location to thrive in.

When it bloomed last, it looked something like this, so you might imagine how psyched I was to see a pair of buds on the plant last week.

I didn't mention it here, because I figured it'd be a great Purple Flower Surprise to spring on you (get it? 'spring on you'...heh) when the time came.

Except, that time came this morning, and as you can see, the result was something different than anticipated, though clearly, there was still a surprise.

I'm not entirely sure what happened here. Plants rarely just change their mind about what they're going to look like, after all. (Do they?) The results of my online searching have suggested that both are most likely Louisiana irises.

I wonder if maybe we got two different kinds of roots at the nursery and when I divided the overgrown plant a couple years back, I gave more room in the pot to a root which hadn't been blooming before. Which makes me wonder if we'll still see the blue/purple one.

Anyway, lovely, isn't it?

Here's a look what everyone else at our house was doing as I headed out for an afternoon at work.

No, it wasn't exactly my first choice for a location on a Sunday afternoon, but there were things to be done and also, air conditioning!

The clematis vines on the lamp post really are an eager bunch. I wouldn't want to try to untangle them at this point, that's for sure. And they are covered in flower buds, which should be fun to watch over the next week or so.

It being June and busting out all over and such, there are plenty of things to see getting ready to show off just about now, like this foxglove flower spire, which is climbing and beginning to reveal its flower buds. It looks like there'll be several other flower stalks rising from this same patch. Yay!

In another part of the border, the sweet William is showing its spikey little flower heads now. Have you noticed there don't seem to be many plants named after guys? I mean, there's this William guy, and of course, Narcissus...and maybe Stephanotus (am I spelling that right?) but who else? I'm not thinking of any others off the top of my head just now. The rest, I'm pretty sure, are all girls' names. Doesn't seem quite fair, does it?

In other news, look at this sunflower seedling. Remember when they were crowding my bedroom window, what seems like forever ago? This one is also very close to the underground route of the soaker hose, and clearly thriving for the regular moisture to its roots.


Not far away, it gives me great pleasure to point out that this carnation plant, which managed to avoid being nibbled by my long-eared friend, has some lovely flower buds bobbing on curling stems. The plant that did get nibbled, though, also seems to be giving it another go, since I also see some lower flower buds appearing there, too!

And here's another look at that new arrival, the verbena bonari ensis, and it's flower buds. I love these long, thin jagged leaves. And there really aren't enough plants with square stems.


Meanwhile, summer seems to have arrived on Not Wisteria Lane. You can tell because these siberian irises down the street are now suddenly blooming. But there are other signs, too.

Now that everyone's windows are open to catch the breeze, it's become clear that almost everyone on the street watches "Jeopardy", since you can hear the Ding tone that signals a correct answer in super-quadraphonic sound when you're out in the garden after 7:30 p.m.

Also, the hard-of-hearing lady two houses down and over, watched Airport '75 last night. I know because I was able to sit inside our own house and listen to all my favorite Karen Black and Helen Reddy scenes quite clearly. ; )

Oh, and the most important sign of the change of the seasons: the Ice Cream Man is COMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm always eager to have a new photo of me, but am rarely happy with my results.

Tonight I was playing around with the bug-repellent tiki torches as a light source, and I thought this didn't suck.

Hi everybody!!

I was still dripping a little from a brief visit to the hot tub, which, surprisingly, did help me cool off a little.

Great cloud formations at sunset this evening. This one caught my eye. It almost looked like there was (Great Hera!!)an Invisible Jet swooping down out of the sky.

Although I began this entry well before midnight, it's now 12:28 and the temperature is still 74 degrees, so the sea breezes seem to have abandoned us. It looks like there's a slight chance of a storm overnight, which could be kind of fun.

Meanwhile, I think I need another ice cream sandwich.