Tuesday's Morning with Monday's Photos

So, here's the rest of the photos Blogger wouldn't let me upload last night. Nothing especially new and spectacular, just a few shots of yesterday's morning in the garden. That's the red dianthus, above, making an August return following deadheading.

To the right is the agastache I showed you a few weeks ago, with the licorice-y flowers and leaves. It's become a tidy little plant this summer, but I wonder just how tall it will become before we wrap for the season.

In the distance there, you can see the pale purple thistle flowers. I've mentioned before how I dug the seedling of this wildflower out of a railroad right-of-way...but I'm pleased with it in the garden. It's populating an area of poor soil other things might fail in and I just love those little flowers. Plus, it's turning out to be a good trellace for errant morning glories.

(Actually, apologies are offered...now that I'm looking at this post on a properly-colored monitor, I can see it's not that good a photo...you should see it in just blue, yellow and black...)

I've had lots of compliments and kind words from the neighbors on Not Wisteria Lane this summer. You can imagine they are mostly happy to have the colorful show on what was previously a bare split-rail fence. But the other night, one of our neighbors - in his 80s, we believe - walked over and grabbed hold of one of the branches of this wild thistle and said "What the hell is this?" (yelling more because of deafness than anger, I think...) I replied it was wild thistle. "You planted this? It's a weed!!" I tried to explain about a plant out of place, but that generation knows a weed must be eradicated. He shook his head in something like disgust and walked away.

Ah well, you can't make everyone happy.

It's a beautiful day this morning. There's bright sunshine from a brilliantly blue sky, with an assortment of white puffy clouds here and there overhead. The temperature is an even 70 degrees, but there's not a hint on humidity in the air.

In fact, it feels a little like September.

Brand New Day

That Magical Light

There is much written about the quality of light here on Cape Cod. Because we are surrounded on three sides by water, there's an extra reflected light that plays across everything. This is particularly evident in Provincetown, where the water is so close on every side.

It was this light, after all, that inspired the modern impressionist painting movement that took place in PTown in the early days of the last century, which in turn was one of several factors that transformed that fishing village at the very tip of the Cape into an artist colony.

Every now and then, I come across a bit of this magical light and it seems to transform every image I capture with the camera into something almost unreal, too beautiful.

My photographs end up looking more like paintings than more realistic depictions of the world around me. It's pretty amazing.

Today was one of those days, morning and evening, when the light was just incredible and I was a little dumbstruck at some of what I found on my camera's memory card at day's end. You get the best effect when you enlarge the images, so go ahead and click 'em.

By the very nature of it being June, there's tons going on out there in the garden. Although that blasted "witch grass" is staging a massive comeback almost everywhere, there are also plenty of other seedlings taking hold.

Every morning I spend at least a few minutes carefully teasing at some of the grass, trying to get rid of it. It will clearly be an ongoing project.

Meanwhile, here's one of a number of bachelor button seedlings I am seeing here and there. I've tried to be extra careful about weeding out the grass too fervently, as these guys are a little thin and strappy in their early stages, and I've been known to accidentally weed all but a few out in early June purges in past years.

In the past two days, I've noticed that some of the snapdragon plants have doubled in height, surpassing that lower fence rail as flower buds appear at the top of their stalks. It will be interesting to see which color is going to bloom first. I suspect it will be the yellow ones, but the next few days will tell.

In addition to a few more milkweed seedlings, I've also spotted a few rosettes of evening primrose foliage. It's sort of weedy around these parts, growing wild here and there. Last year I had some good luck with chopping it back fairly hard to get it to branch out more, so I'll try to remember to do that sometime in the next day or so. I've noted the oregano plants are ready for that, too.

On the chosen fence posts, the morning glory seedlings are doing quite nicely, making some nice headway in their climb toward the sun.

In the bedroom window are a last six or seven of them, started later for a second wave of bloom as the summer progresses, which are ready to be planted out adjacent to these.

On the side of Mount Dump-It (that lumpy little hill in our backyard that houses the septic system), several massive clumps of tickseed are thriving, their golden flowers glowing in the bright morning sunshine, bobbing easily on the gentle breeze.

In another part of the forest, more of these red roses open every day. I'm just thrilled with the way this rose bush has responded to being trained along the fence. I've mostly read about working/playing with roses and rarely had the conditions to really see what they could do, which makes this season kind of exciting to me.

Also, between these and those ubiquitous little white roses, the air is so strongly perfumed this week that it almost makes me a bit giddy to walk out into the front yard, morning or night. Isn't it fascinating how this product of attracting pollinators in turn makes us all a little gah-gah, too?

The season of love, indeed.

If you enlarge that shot above, you can see in the background some big shiny leaves just above the top rail of the fence...which would be the sunflower seedlings. They are really too big now to be reasonably considered "seedlings", but they are still my babies.

Monday morning I took a photo of them to show you they had almost come level with that top cross rail...but by the time I got home in the evening, the photo had become obsolete, as the seedlings were by then several inches taller than the rail of the fence!

Don't get too close!


Not far from that rose, in the shade of a clump of shasta daisies creeps this itty-bitty (it's maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter, if that)orange flower.

Somewhere, I have an old wildflower guide book from the 1950's, which has been pretty helpful for me in the past, in identifying the tiny blossoms like these, which are often a little too obscure for other more general plant guides.

However, that old book is MIA just now, likely displaced during last winter's move and not yet resurfaced. I'll have to dig around, though--I'm pretty sure it'd help me name this one.

On one of the five mounds which are home to the Three Sisters garden project, the first bean seedling burst out of the ground this morning. I noticed by flashlight this evening that several others came out during the course of the day.

It makes me happy to see this coming along so nicely. Once a few more of those have emerged, it'll be time to add the squash seeds...and then the game will be truly afoot.

It bums me out just a little that the peonies won't be blooming this year, due - I believe - to the trauma of moving. They would be making their own heady additions to the perfumey air this week, if they were, their hot pink flowerheads lolling and bobbing on the breezes.


Another aspect of June has things a little busier at work, but fortunately, I'm still able to steal the odd moment here or there to wander into the garden and catch a few images of the magic happening there.

The purple irises have never been more prolific than they are this spring, it seems. Actually, I'm hearing from a variety of people that irises are having a particularly stellar spring. But still, their time will have fled before too long, as they clear the stage for other flowers to have their moment in the spotlight and I couldn't let that go without another look at them.

Here you might note some of that rose grandiflora (I think that's the name of those little white guys I keep talking about, though it could be multiflora), and this particular plant is a good indicator of how vigorous they are.

I've worked at the restaurant for seven years now. When I started there, this particular plant--now better than two feet high, equally wide and smothered in blossoms--didn't exist there, but has arrived via the birds and taken hold rather quickly. Kept in check, it's not a bad addition to the garden.

Did I mention the fragrance?? I do hope you are all seeking out some nicely scented roses to thrust your noses into this week.

It's also fun to realize how much this spirea has grown in that time. I'm wondering if it is the same variety as the ones I have along the fence at home, which are not quite blooming yet.

Those, if memory serves, are a little darker than these, though they have also grown in some high shade areas in recent years. Their colors might've been a little richer for that. We'll see how they do in this year's full sun.

I transplanted these wild daisy plants at the base of the pond wall about four years ago, and they have filled in the whole area quite nicely.

This is their first wave of flowers, but with deadheading, they'll continue to blossom right through the summer. Who could ask for anything more?

I took a longer route home this evening, allowing me to pass by the overlook of Wychmere Harbor, not far from our house. I knew the full moon was low in the sky and was hoping for some decent reflection to play with from the water. I hadn't thought to be lucky enough to find things so nicely lit.

There was also some sort of celebration going on down by the water, with the happy, lively sounds of people and their merriment echoing brightly across the harbor in the dark.

The golden power of the sun, the heart-tripping scent of roses and the goony glow of the moon, could there be anything more magical?

Temperature's Rising...

The rain of the last few days has brought on the flowering of the wild daisies. These guys will actually go on more or less all summer, as long as I keep up with the deadheading. That hot red you see down below this flower is another clump of dianthus that's lately begun showing off.

They probably aren't "wild" daisies, per se. At least they seem fairly well-behaved to me. What I mean is they aren't some cultivated species, like the Shasta Daisies, or the "Becky" variant on the Shastas, with the large flowers we'll see somewhere around the first of July.

I found these growing in some grassy area and transplanted them into the garden, where they have mingled with the other plants. They like to seed themselves around, which is a quality I like in a plant, especially one so pretty. To my mind, a garden can't have too many of these.

It was a grey morning, though we had picked up ten degrees over the 51 we had when I'd retired for the evening and you could already feel the humidity closing in over us at 8:00 a.m., or so.

This pair of cardinals seemed to be enjoying one another's company, as they flitted about here and there along the fence.


As the work day progressed, the clouds cleared away and the sun came out...and it was hot.

Here's a bit of rose campion blooming out back of the restaurant, which I noticed on a break.

That great purple in the background is some more money plant--I told you it was everywhere.

We were at 71 by lunchtime and 81 an hour later, which seemed to be our high for the day. Thankful for air conditioning in the banquet hall.

I'd brought shorts and my new Tevas to change into, so I wouldn't have to suffer the heat in work attire on the ride home. As it turned out, it was around 6:00 p.m. by the time I got free of the office and by then, the temperature was already sliding back down to something reasonable (it's 66 now) and a nice seabreeze pushed the humidity away for the evening.

Tomorrow's supposed to be warmer still. I'll count on the ocean to keep us from getting as hot as places like New York (sorry, Patrick) and Boston, but also count my blessings that it will be a day when I can dress more casually and cooly for my time at work.

Back at home as the sun sank in the west, I poked around the garden a little and spotted some unexpected buds on this clutch of iris. This was a little slow to put up leaves this spring, so I was assuming I wouldn't see any flowers this years, but clearly, i was wrong.

I expect this will be one of those yellow and brown irises, since that was primarily what we had at the old garden and what I expect made the move. However, I'm a little intrigued by the purple streaking down at the base of the leaves, which may indicate a bloom of a different color. We shall see.

A few bits of business: First, my thanks go out to Richard, who emailed from Pittsburgh to suggest a mild solution of Dawn dish detergent and water (just a drop or two of the soap in a spray bottle full of water) to spray on the roses to address the aphid issue whilst I figure out where to get some ladybugs.

I'm very happy to say that I did so Thursday evening and the problem seems to have cleared up already by today! I have a few damaged flower heads and leaves to pinch out to make things a little tidier, but the aphids are gone. How I love a simple solution. Thanks Richard, both for your suggestion and also for stopping by the Garden!

And now, the links portion of the evening: I read a great New York Times article earlier about the phenomenon of "guerilla gardening". Essentially, we're talking about people who have no gardens going unbidden to do gardening work on land with no gardeners...abandoned lots, public places, etc.

The article focuses primarily on the efforts of Richard Reynolds, who's been organizing massive work on this type in London, England. If you go to read the article, be sure to watch the video about how to make a wildflower seed bomb which you can chuck over a fence or a wall into some otherwise unreachable area. Gods, I love this stuff!

Richard keeps a blog about those efforts, as well, which you can find here.

Stay cool, everyone!

Nattering On

Okay, so maybe you're thinking "Greg? Again...? You've posted two, no three...actually, this make four times in the last 24 hours. What gives?"

Just spring, I guess...but also, being a little fussy, I must admit to being just a little less than pleased with the tag cloud I created last night. I hadn't realized at the time that it was going to simple scan the first page of the blog for words. I guess I imagined it would be a grand and glorious garden of words, with the names of every plant I've ever written about in the last three years springing up.

Instead, it captured things like "Chengdu" and assorted other words specifically related to recent events I mentioned briefly, and pulled words like "bleeding" out of the oft-mentioned bleeding heart. Not exactly the pastoral over-view of the Midnight Garden I was hoping for.

I've been thinking about how to fix that(as though I couldn't easily come up with a list of a hundred things more important and/or worthwhile to apply my feeble braincells to), because I really do love these clouds of words. It's such a fun visual thing, but I might need to customize something to work a little more color in, too.

But meantime, I wanted to get a little floral something back up on the "cover" of the blog, and so there's some of those simple and wonderful blue pansies from the front garden, where they are responding to regular deadheading and natural overwatering by sending up ever more and more of these cheery blossoms.

It's an overcast sort of day here. Temp is 56, so not uncomfortable, but the Cape Cod Breeze machine seems to be steadily stirring the air today, so it doesn't feel especially warm, either. But comfortable enough to bring my coffee out to the front yard to review the troops and see what's going on.

Four of the five peonies are looking great. The fifth, much tinier than the others, has toppled over near the tops of its small stems. I guess I couldn't hope for a perfect 5 of 5 for the transplanting thing...but this could be an issue of the peony's crown now being a little deeper in the ground than it ought to be, owing from the level-raising I've done earlier this season. But exploration of this must be deferred for another day, when work is not imminent.

Similarly, the recent flooding has given the soil of the garden a sort of smooth and hard-packed look to the surface in between plants...and I'd love to get out there with the handfork and carefully churn it all up again. Something about the flooding also manages to bring the sand to the top, as well. Fun times. Again, waiting for another day...and in fact, that project - time-consuming as it will be - will have to wait until I've finished the lamp-post bed and gotten some vegetables underway.

Which reminds me, I really MUST stop by a nursery soon and choose my tomato plants for the season, before the crazy seasonal hordes show up at week's end for Memorial Day, when they'll be opening their second homes and clogging the highways (but also, hopefully, eating at the restaurant!). I know from past experience that new deliveries of plants arrive on Thursday, and also that, by noontime on Saturday, those same new arrivals will have decimated the nursery supplies better than any locust swarm.

And speaking of them, we still have yet to see any sign of the cicadas. I'm not sure if that's because they are not as prevalent out at this end of the Cape, or perhaps because it's remained a little cool and our ground temperature hasn't quite reach their trigger level of warmth for emergence. I'm not saying we're out of the woods or anything on the subject, but nothing yet. On a slightly related note, emails from the Adirondacks have me grateful that we do not have to deal with those great flying piranhas, the black fly.

And I was looking at the columbines over at Butch's Banter and also at It's a Dog's Life (those seem gi-normous!) and wondering if they get taller in sunnier conditions because they are trying to fling their seed back into shadier areas. I ponder all this because I've moved several columbines from shadier areas in Eastham to plunk them down in full sun here in Harwich, and I'm wondering what the results may be. Always interesting to see.

While giving things a once-over, I discovered that some of those wonderful wild daisies, with their smaller, earlier flowers have hitch-hiked to Harwich with a clump of shasta daisies...and are getting ready to start flowering, I think in time for the long weekend. Whoopee!!

I hope you are all having good days today, and finding time to enjoy the world around you. I'll be back to natter at you about the garden some more later on.

Hazy Afternoon

Here's our meadow on this hazy afternoon, as seen through a pair of yucca spikes which are climbing toward the sky.

This is a nice assortment of wild daisies and dianthus. I look forward to seeing the two spread and grow together.

Summer's heat came home to roost today, and it sounds like it'll be with us throughout the coming week. The tomato plants are sure to be happy. They all seem to have taken a giant leap for Tomato-kind in my absence.

New blooms are appearing on the largest of the peony plants. Many of the old ones look good, though certainly they accounted for just some of the dead-heading that was needed following my weekend away.

Now, by dead-heading of course, I mean removing the spent flower heads to encourage more bloom, not dancing around the meadow in tie-dye and cargo shorts, with a doobie in hand. Although, it being the Midsummer Revels, all celebrations are welcome!

And here's a nice bouquet I put together for us, featuring the tickseed, some daisies and two of those great red roses from the trellace out back.

A Garden's Comfort

While I don't really care to blog about the specifics, Friday evening saw Life handing out a fresh helping of Disappointment, making Saturday's time off a little less fantastic than I had originally hoped.

Still, the garden's looking quite lovely this year over-all, and I found plenty of quiet pleasures to bring comfort and distraction out there.

As the days get a little warmer and longer, we are seeing a few more pollinators, such as this bee digging around in one of the wild daisies who've begun to pop into bloom here and there throughout the back gardens.

I found this blue columbine where I hadn't expected one, in the woods between the gardens and the house. It's got that brilliant deep blue color I've loved in the one or two plants near the foundation of the house, but the shape and upright form of the pink columbines of the back garden. It's just fascinating to see the various combinations that are resulting from cross-pollination.

In the long central bed, a great clump of The Oregano That Ate Eastham is nicely incarcerated in the grapevine fence I built last summer.

Some of the morning glories I planted on Memorial Day weekend will trail up through here as the season progresses. Those seedlings, by the way, have emerged and are looking pretty decent.

I also spotted today a great many tall sword-leaves where recently I planted gladiola corms (bulbs?).

Well, they are growing on me. I must admit I wasn't the hugest fan of these yellow and maroon irises at first, since the maroon sometimes reads a bit brown and blah in certain lights. But they are flowering like mad, and over a pretty lengthy amount of time, both of which are helping to endear this particular variety to me more than I'd originally thought possible.

At the foot of the former TV antenna grape trellace, the wild strawberries have begun to reveal their fruit. These are barely half an inch across just now, and not really ripe just yet. Still, they taste pretty nice and once the birds discover them, well, it'll be "see you 'til next year!"

African daisies, back-lit by the late day sun.

More and more spires of foxglove are coming into bloom now. The new bed in progress where the poison ivy ambushed me remains to be finished (that affliction, by the way, seems finally to be fading...), but a great array of pink and white flower spikes there, glowing in the sun.

That southern end of the "garden field" also hosts a great many stalks of milkweed, which are so important to the monarch and other butterflies. Since they are so prolific there, I didn't feel badly about selectively weeding some of the great shade-making monsters from the southern edges of some other parts of the garden, where they were competing with some of my favorite things (but we won't sing about it, okay?).

Not far away, this bumblebee plied his trade through the flowers of some berry canes.

In addition to simply exploring through the latest blooms, I also finally got the canna and daylilies from last weekend's plant sale into the ground down at the southern end of the central garden bed. And another of those fancy-lookin' picotee cosmos blossoms opened today.



As I was wrapping up my day out in The Green, I was very happy to see the rose breasted grosbeak again. It seems he wasn't just a migrating visitor passing through on the holiday weekend, after all.

It would also appear that a pair of chickadees have staked a claim on one of the nesting baskets I hung in the apple trees last summer. This could hardly make me happier.

Returning to the house, I couldn't resist stopping for a moment to enjoy the purple columbine blooming against the tree by George's rabbit cage. It's blooming more heavily than the original blue-flowered plant in that area, promising plenty of seeds to be scattered around later in the season. Now that I've seen how easily these guys cross-pollinate, I'm very interested in introducing a few new color variations, just to see what sort of permutations pop up!