Garden cheesecake!

Peter mugs for Grace's camera. His comment: "Dose are mees!" Yep, they sure are. :)

Grace's close-ups

Petunia, hydrangia, salvia, a detail of some garden art we salvaged from the trash, and some lilies just about to bloom.

I know, let's buy hundreds of pounds of rocks!

These images are, in my opinion, so vivid that they almost don't need commentary. But what the heck. We went to this combination rock/garden store and picked out a couple of nice bits of granite for the kids to sit on at the edge of the garden. Lovely! Then we got them home. The smaller (100 lb) one was not so difficult to wrangle; the larger (225 lb) one involved some tipped wheelbarrow moments and a lot of manuvering. But once we got them in, they looked pretty good. It feels like the garden has some bones now, and I dragged some other, smaller rocks from the backyard to fill out the look in other parts of the front garden. Photo credits go to Grace, who has no reluctance to take pictures of people's fannies.

Bonus Track

Yes, this is what we sometimes do on weekends. I could have tied it in beautifully with the blog if only I'd gotten a photo of our fellow protester Nan with her sandwich board, which reads "War is harmful to children and other living things" and has some flowers on it. But take heart: we're going to march in the 4th of July parade in Homewood, and it's Nan's all-purpose protest sandwich board, and we'll be sure to get a photo then.

Sometimes, we travel for flowers!

In this case, we hauled the bikes and the bike trailer to a bike trail near our house. We did a three-plus mile loop of very nice trail, complete with some really beautiful trees and some vivid wildflowers. Grace insisted on taking her own pictures of the flowers, which were much better than mine. The question remains, however: "Why are those black-eyed Susans blooming when ours aren't yet?"

Primroses like shade!

I have a pretty little shade garden, which I've had a lot of fun with because it's small and I like shade plants. It has some ground cover that's working pretty well, a peony which needs transplanting, four or five kinds of hostas, some ferns, and a couple of other shade plants. What it didn't have until recently were flowers, because there just aren't that many flowers that like shade. Primroses are just ending their season for blooming, but they start early and are perennials, so they're a good addition to this spot.

Next year, this ground cover will cover the ground!

I was struck this week by how much of gardening is about next year. I got drunk and bought plants again [which is a joke. For one thing, the logistics would be complicated. How would I get the plants home? It's kind of a metaphor for the feeling one gets, when one goes to the nursery and sees all. those. plants. and just buys maybe a few, and then a couple more, to round things out, and comes home, and finds that one has a good hour of planting to do, because one somehow bought thirty different plants, *again*. Anyway.] and this time I branched out a bit into perennial ground cover suitable for sun. This is a tricky category. There seem to be more shade-loving perennials than sun-loving ones, and despite my best intentions, these are fixed categories. Shade-lovers don't do well in strong sun, even if you ask nicely. And I have a big, sunny front yard that needs some more plants to keep it from looking bare.

So I looked at my neighbors' garden, which I keep meaning to talk with them about because it's so beautiful and well-planned, but I'm little shy about introducing myself to strangers and demanding information about their plants. Plus, I never see them outside, which is a little mind-boggling considering how lovely the garden really is, but it's a mystery I have yet to solve. At any rate, they have some of this yellow stuff, and I like it so much I bought some of my own. Unlike theirs, mine is new and kind of small, but in a year or two it will fill in the spot I put it in and look great. And the same with the pink stuff! In a year or two, it's going to spread nicely, and then the problem spot under the tree will be carpeted with gorgeous pink flowers and nice green leaves.