Weekend Wrap-Up

This coneflower rudbeckia was apparently a new seedling in the Harwich garden, as it was only just coming into bloom last week when I went back to move a few plants. That was all the encouragement I needed to pot it up and bring it along on the adventure.

Same goes for this chrysanthemum, which is just now sporting buds. Both of these, as well as the coreopsis seen in the background above were planted just outside my new front door, alongside the driveway...not far from that pink rose hedge.

Sunday was a rainy day, though not as much of a rain-out as Saturday had been. It was a day off for me...the first true one since the move and I spent most of the day painting in the bedroom. Still, there was a break in the showers around noontime and while the clouds lingered throughout the day, I couldn't resist a little ramble around to explore the new yard a little more closely.

Here's a shot of the nest from the back yard, the deck-balcony clearly visible.


Found a nice stand of goldenrod at the back of the property. I just love this stuff, it's bright yellow festooning our days just as other plants start to think about winding down for the season. It's always a nice flash of gold on a gray September day.

I also wandered over to the gardens at the property next door. They are primarily summer residents, so it was cool to be able to walk around in their yard without feeling like an intruder. Pretty gardens, too.



Ah, but it's the painting you'll want to hear about...and I will admit that this was one of those parts of the project where I wasn't sure it was going to come out as I'd imagined...and it took a lot of control not to second guess myself, as I began applying crazy, curly-edged flaring stripes of the purple Field Of Heather over the base coat of Cape Cod Gray, which is sort of a blue-green, turned a little more greeny by the close proximity of the purple tones for contrast.

I wanted the vertical stripes, to give the room a little more feeling of height, but the curly edges soften the rigidness of the stripes...plus making them uneven in size and flared a bit toward the ceiling also gives the room a slight illusion of being a little bigger than it is. All justification, when really, I got the idea for the un-uniform stripes by considering the idea of being inside a flower blossom.

Anyway, once the whole room was done and dried, I liked the look a lot more. There's a sort of whimsical "Dr. Seuss designed me some wallpaper" look to it that I think is sort of comforting for a sleeping room...and anyway, this is just stage two. I think you'll like it when it's closer to finished, as I am liking it more and more as I continue to work on it.

As the weekend drew to a close, we prepared to welcome the latest full moon. Here's a shot of it from the deck/balcony, as the wind drew thin wispy clouds quickly across it's face.

(Yes, I'm still running a little behind here. There's more of the painting project, and other household news to share, but we can leave that as a comfortable source of suspense until next time, eh?)

Pretty Things

I imagine you all thought I was kidding when I said it was nice to have the chair so Badum would have a place to sit...so I thought I'd share this image with you. I'm sure if I'd gotten there first, things might have gone differently.

But I was hard pressed to sit still last night, trying out the new Swiffer, playing the sliding tile puzzle game with all the boxes, cartons, milk crates and laundry baskets full of stuff, so I could Swiff (is that that proper verb form here? I'm new...), rearranging furniture, etc.

Anyway, he looked too comfortable to move and when I did sit down, I had color swatch charts spread out on the floor around me.

What fun to have carte blanche with colors! I think I've come up with the Plan of Attack, and might even be getting a start on the painting this evening. It just makes sense to try to do as much of it as possible before actually unpacking too much.

Of course, once I was reminded on the radio of the good possibility that the world as we know it might be sucked into a black hole when they turned on that particular accelerator in Switzerland, I did settle down a bit. No point being all exhausted when I get to the Hereafter, I figure. Considering I'd just found a great apartment and paid rent, it made perfect sense that the world might come to an end, at least according to the laws of Murphy.

Still, I was quite happy to see this morning that it had not. Hopefully, those scientists will be able to learn incredible new things about the birth of the Universe without all the trouble of those pesky black holes or dark matter. I can get all that in comic books, for gosh sake.

Considering the last few days, though, I am a little tired and not sure I have loads to say today, so I thought I'd give you a break from all that (and me, too), and just share with you some pretty flower pictures, which have been a bit minimal for the last few days. There are some nice shots from my visit to the garden on Monday that I think you'll all enjoy.

Oh, but I did want to show you first, one of the cool features of the Gardener's Nest I hadn't shared with you yet: this cool, plaster light fixture on the living room ceiling. Not having a supply of spare bulbs, I've not had the chance to see if it works yet (on the list of things to do this evening), but I sure hope it does.

Purty, ain't it?

Glory In The Morning

Okay, so once again, these are yesterday's photos and I'm a day late getting them up here. If only I could stop myself from taking all these pictures. I mean, you've seen one morning glory, you've seen them all, right? But each flower's so great, I just can't help myself.

I'm a shade annoyed with myself for forgetting to mention something last time around. It turns out that the last post was my 1500th!! Now, sure, that counts a bit skewed by all the individual photos I uploaded here back in the early days of my blogging, before I worked out exactly how to include multiple photos in a post.

But still, it's some kind of a landmark. At the very least it explains the sleep deprivation. Sorry there wasn't a contest or a give-away. There ought to have been, since I have the best readers in the entire blogosphere. I promise I'll try to hit you with something fun for Post 2000; really.

Meanwhile, kisses all around.


Meanwhile, did you know that the bachelor's buttons I love so much are actually outlawed in North Carolina as an invasive weed?

Apparently, even though it was originally called cornflower exactly because it coexisted alongside crops in England, in North Carolina it wreaks havoc with local agriculturalists, who apparently can't stand the sight of a little beauty.

No, no...to be fair, the Carolinas are probably right about that point where the conditions are maybe a little too right for this species and so they tend to take over an area (which bodes well for your success growing them, Java...sssh...). But really, what sweet invasion.



To balance out the recent show of sunflowers, let us focus unabashedly today on the morning glories, the other truly prolific flower in this summer's garden.

Now these flowers, unlike the sunflowers, thrive best without a whole lot of fertilizer and special care. In fact, I've heard if you fertilize them too much, they'll produce all leaves and no (or few flowers).

So I've tried to be careful when fertilizing everything else to give a bit of a berth to the base of the morning glory vines. Certainly they are probably benefiting from some of that adjacent fertilizer, though...which would explain their miraculous and unparalleled success. They are thirsty little buggers, though, so I always try to give them a little extra water, especially when there's heat in the forecast.

Of course, Robin suggested that perhaps they are just growing so well because they know that I love them...and I expect that they probably do. I whisper the words to them now and then, for sure...and they reward me with this incredible show.


It's funny, though, how you can look down the garden border at a certain angle...at many angles, actually...and see that by this point in the season, there is no denying that the sunflowers are ruling the border, have completely wrested from me any illusion that I was even remotely in charge of the goings-on.

Frankly, I'm thrilled with their initiative.


Perhaps encouraged, like the roses, to reblooming by the cooler days and evenings, the honeysuckle is staging something of a come-back and while the show is smallish at this point, the scent is still powerfully wonderful when I lean over to bring my nose a little closer.

(In fact, I can smell it drifting in the open window now, as the katydids roar in the bushes across the street.)



Hopefully, you can bear the sight of a few more morning glories, because I'm making you look at more of them. But you may notice they are not the ones you've seen before.

Now that the registration on the car was renewed, it was time to get her inspected, and so this morning we went off to Nickerson Service Center in Eastham.

One of my annual pleasures is getting the car inspected at this time of year, because it means I get to enjoy the peak of Claire's fantastic blue morning glories, which she plants in twin whiskey barrels and trains up and over the entrance of the garage. Last year, crappy weather early in the season messed up their growth, but I was happy to see that they were restored to their former glory this summer.




She also had some nice zinnias growing in the barrels, as well as some marigolds and other things.





It's always fun to trade stories with another gardener and we did some of just that while I was paying my bill. Claire confirmed something I'm hearing from other local gardeners this summer: it's a big year for bunnies, chipmunks, squirrels and other rodentia.

Some have posited that this is because of a recent decline in the coyote and fox population. But Claire said there's one large bunny in her neighborhood so smart that when he sees the coyote coming, he makes it a point to stand closer to the humans. Apparently gardeners in her neighborhood are so fed up with the munching and the nibbling that they are consider gunning their car engines when they see a rabbit in the road.

I told her all about Liquid Fence and my success with it. Perhaps it will help with their stress levels. It doesn't help anyone if you go all Fudd and it rarely ends well.


I couldn't resist a stop at Rock Harbor on the way to work once the inspection was successfully completed, and the view was, as always, worth the time and trouble.


And in case that hadn't made me smile, there were the delighted cries of this little girl (visiting the beach with her parents, who are just off image), as she had what might have been her first encounters with the big lapping waters of Cape Cod Bay.

Arrivederci August

Weekend Jumble

So here's one of those honeybees who were so elusive at summer's start. This weekend, I've been seeing them everywhere...so I'm happy to say that reports of their death may have been somewhat exaggerated. That's a flowerhead of Autumn Joy sedum he's dancing about on, only just coming into bloom as Labor Day weekend gets underway.

Yes, it's that last weekend of the summer, here already, proof that Time doesn't only fly when you're having fun.

I want to say thanks to all of you who've written me your comments or private emails of support, in regards the situation with Owen and I.

I can only really skim the surface of letting you know just how much it means to me...and how important its been to hear from you.

This is probably the last thing I ever wanted to happen; ten years is a long time to be with someone and I know and love him in ways that I don't know many people. Which makes it sadder still that he knows so little about the way my brain works and what has value in Life to me.

You might guess I would be quite happy for us not to have reached this point. And that wish makes me want to be swayed, won over by the somber attitude and thoughtful demeanor I have been subject to this past week. But I know from past experience, and from other peoples' too, that this is a temporary fix...a band-aid on a bigger problem. And thankfully, every time I start to get a little weak in my resolve, one of your comments or emails appears, just in the nick of time.

I really don't want to beat a dead horse, I'm not even sure I'm prepared to declare the horse dead...but there was something else I wanted you to know.

The gardening it seems I've always done...and the blogging started just to show my long distance (and local) friends what I was working on in a secret garden not easily seen from the road...but as you all have discovered it in the last year and come back to visit over and over again, this blog has truly helped me to remember that I have a voice worth listening to, that I am important to the world, in some small way. And that, as much as everything else, has encouraged me to seek a little something better for myself.

So when I say thanks, I hope you know I mean it.

Now sweet Jesus, can we please talk about the Garden again? I am so sick of being on the edge of tears lately.

Here's a Nursery Spider we found in the kitchen sink the other day. I don't believe we have much to fear from them, which didn't mean we both weren't startled to the ceiling when it jumped over a foot to get away from us.

Yikes...

I have made a mental note that next year, zinnia seeds should be started indoors before the season gets underway, or at the very least, planted in the ground the week before Memorial Day weekend.

These guys are only just beginning to reveal their first flower buds and while they are pretty wonderful, there could be so many more by this point.

To the left is a photo taken on Friday. Below is the same flower as seen on Saturday. The whole idea behind the Jumble thing starting to be more clear?


Here are some of those fancy marigolds I bought for the lamp post garden in the spring. In the background there, you can see one flower still bears the distinctive red coloration that caught my eye in the first place.

However, it seems the rest of the plant is a little weary at this end of the summer (I wonder if it needs more water, or maybe some fertilizer), since so many of the other flowers are just plain yellow now.



I don't know what these bamboo-ey like plants are. I know there are a great many of them growing on the side of Mount Dump-it in our yard in Harwich; I see them out our back windows.

Today I noticed this cluster of the same plant out behind the restaurant, in between dumpsters...and noticed for the first time the spectacular clusters of tiny white flowers.



They aren't memorably scented or anything like that. But the flowers themselves are tiny, but kind of exciting when you look at them up close.

Perhaps you don't agree, but there was a crowd of bumblebees and honeybees who couldn't get enough of them





Here's one of the center pieces last evening's custo mers brought for the tables at their Rehearsal Dinner.

I think my favorite arrangements are the ones that don't hold to a particular color scheme, but instead engage all the colors there are. These did that wonderfully, and featured a terrific assortment of flower varieities, too.

I do enjoy the Gerbera Daisies and was a little disappointed that my budget dried before I had a chance to pick up a few for the border this summer.

I used a few as bedding plants in my first garden on the Cape all those years ago, and the effect was pretty terrific.

I have no idea what that orangey-thistly flower is, but it sure interests me. I hope to stop in at the responsible florist and see what I can find out sometime this week.

In just a little more time-travely-ness, here's what the sky looked like over Not Wisteria Lane this past Friday evening.
Thinking of everyone in New Orleans this weekend, as the third anniversary of Katrina's devastation comes and goes, marked mostly by a new evacuation in the face of a much more terrible looking storm called Gustav.

Everyone down there on the Gulf Coast (not to mention all those lives touched by this storm already as its passed through the Carribbean) has my thoughts and prayers for their safety...and hopefully yours, too.