This is the time of year when my chrysanthemums go nuts, and I just love it. I discovered a few years ago that mums do really well in our soil and with our southern exposure. They swell and grow all summer long, getting bigger and greener, and by October, they're really spectacular.
I had two enormous white mums right by the path to the front door that were always at their peak at Halloween, and several years a few of the trick-or-treaters would pet them as they passed. They did look like big fluffy dogs. But one died this spring, and the other is about half-dead. Fortunately, I have another one nearby that has become just as monstrous this year:
I planted one last year that I think is like the Cadillac of chrysanthemums...red with yellow centers. I'd love to find some more like it:
The last several years, I've been buying mums in pots for the front porch steps and then planting them in the flowerbeds when they've faded. This year all I found were white, yellow and purple, nothing too exotic. In my experience, the white ones really thrive and the yellow ones are more half-hearted. I'm not sure about the purple ones...I don't think I've had any planted long enough to tell yet. I just love a plant that gives you plenty of bang for your buck: lots of growth, lots of flowers, and several years' worth of both.
We had a very nice Halloween; our friends Cheryl and Chris Potthast and their son Matthew came over for baked potatoes and hot cider. We sat on the front porch for a while and handed out candy. Not a lot of trick-or-treaters this year...my estimate was about 40 kids. This means we have a pile of Tootsie Roll pops to dispose of...somehow.
I really don't mind winter, especially Virginia winter, which is "winter lite" compared to other places I've lived (Idaho, I'm looking at you!)...and even though we've had a harsher winter than usual this year, it pales in comparison to the mountains of snow my friends and family elsewhere are dealing with...and yet, I think I am ready for a warm breeze and some COLOR!
Most days I can find a kind of muted beauty in brown grass, brown leaves, brown tree trunks, and a gray sky, but not today. So here are the tulips I bought last week...gone now, but remembered fondly. February is the perfect month for tulips.
I went out on a limb and combined red/yellow tulips with hot pink, and I thought the result was wonderful. The pot is a McCoy pot I found at my favorite antique store (which isn't saying much since there are about three antique stores in all of Hampton Roads, but this one really is terrific)--anyway, I LOVE it and it was perfect for a big fistful of tulips.
I think I might need to go out and bring home a new fistful of tulips to look at...because color is good therapy in February.
(Sounds fancier in French.)
I cooked up a whole bunch of things the week before my surgery, and we're still digging down to the bottom of the freezer and enjoying some of them. This is one of the things I cooked...I got the recipe from a Pea at Two Peas, and it is unbelievably good. While it's cooking, it smells like my great-aunt Helen's house when we used to go over there for Sunday dinner when I was very little. Pure essence of pot roast, only better.
Italian Beef Sandwiches
1 envelope dry onion soup mix
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 tsp. basil
1 tsp. dried parsley
1 large garlic clove, minced
3/4 cup water
3-lb. rump or chuck roast
You just plop the roast in a crockpot, pour the water and spices over it, and let it cook all day on high, or till the meat's tender. Then you shred it up with a fork and let it simmer for a few more minutes, then eat it on a nice soft steak roll.
I like horseradish sauce on mine, but Todd prefers steak sauce. Apparently some people like to put banana peppers on the sandwiches...personally, I think a pile of grilled onions and peppers would be delicious on top. You can add provolone cheese or not--we didn't.
Todd thinks the meat is too spicy, so next time I make it I'll probably just use a half-teaspoon of red pepper flakes, but I think the heat is just right. And if I can find a reduced-sodium onion soup mix, I'll use that in the future, again for the hubby's sake. But boy, is it good.I'm feeling slightly more energetic today. My body has rebelled and refuses to sleep on its back any longer, so I've had to contrive a way of sleeping on my side with lots of pillows under and all around me. I don't think it's the greatest thing for my incisions, but I'm compelled to do it. I've never had my body wake up in the middle of the night before and force itself into a position--it's like being demon-possessed. Very weird feeling.
I have a few randomly-connected pictures to share...my aunts put together the most beautiful bouquets for the church windows at my grandpa's funeral last week. They pulled together garden flowers and wildflowers and added cattails at the last minute, and it looked like something we could have picked on a random summer stroll around my grandparents' property 20 years ago.
Speaking of my grandparents' property, one of the items my aunt Molly salvaged from there was quite a bit larger than the odd chair or table. She took the summerhouse that stood right outside the front door and had it moved to her own yard a mile or two away.
Molly lives in an old brick schoolhouse, where my grandma and her siblings attended school, incidentally, and the summerhouse fits into her yard as though it had always been there.
She's having it painted and refurbished a little, and her neighbor gave her a wonderful old door with etched glass panels that will replace the original door. It's going to look great. But I think it looks nice, now, too. Here's how it was at my grandparents' house, painted blue to match their house:
Grandma had wildflowers and mint growing around it in the back, and rosebushes and other things in the front of it. I can't wait to see what Molly does with it!
Todd and I dropped in at an estate sale on Saturday that reminded me a lot of the sale we had at my grandparents' place last September. It was an old house with a barn where the parents had lived for 55 years, it was their large family of descendants holding the sale, it was piles and piles of very old junk that no one had thrown away for decades. And the family was Mennonite.
I had a very nice chat with the daughters, who are the same ages as my mom and her sisters, and picked up a few odds and ends. I got these three cream bottles from a whole huge box of saved bottles and decided to throw some garden flowers in them for my kitchen windowsill.
Can you see the price molded into the top of the bottle? Those were the days.
Just a couple little things that are coming up unexpectedly in my garden...
I remember throwing a couple packets of seeds on the flowerbeds last year, but I can't remember if hollyhocks were among them. Seems unlikely, but here are two big tall flowers coming up in front of my picket fence, right next to the daisies. Are they hollyhocks? Color me dumb, because I don't know. But it was a nice surprise to glance over there the other day and see this unexpected splash of pale yellow. I love pale yellow!
Last year when my grandparents' home was sold, my dad dug up some of Grandma's mint for me, and I brought it home and planted it in the only place I could think of that wasn't too hot or too shady. I thought it had croaked over the winter, because it died back to absolutely nothing, and because I have never had much luck growing mint on my own, but here it is coming right along:
I have never been able to find a mint at any nursery that smells and tastes quite like the mint from Grandma's house, so I am thrilled to see this one taking root. I hope it takes over the whole little bed where I put it, so we can have gallons of mint tea all summer long next year! Not even enough for a cup of mint tea at the moment, but enough to pick a couple sprigs and think of Grandma.
Grandma fell and broke her hip week before last--this is her second broken hip and we don't know if she'll bounce back from this one the way she did from her first one. She's 89 now and not as mobile as she was then. Think a good thought for her if you would.I have two grandmas, with three broken hips between them...my other grandma, in Missouri, had quite a few health struggles after her broken hip last fall, but was able to leave the nursing home and go back home this past spring, which was so important to her. It's amazing to me how much they can do to bring elderly people back to health, or if not all the way back to health, at least back to some good quality of life. I'm really grateful for that, because both of my grandmas are precious to me!
It's a nice day here--the clouds are moving in and I have my fingers crossed for rain, but the Weather Channel disagrees. It's just nice and warm, not hot, about 80 degrees.
I visited the library for the first time in at least two years this morning, looking for a couple of audiobooks, and I found Julie Andrew's memoir, read by her, which I've been wanting to listen to since it came out. I just love that lady. She wrote my all-time, numero uno, top of the list favorite book when I was a child, Mandy. I think my love of cottages and cottage gardens comes directly from that book!
Off to do some kitchen cleaning and plan supper. What sounds good for supper?
I've been feeling a desire to do some kind of needlework--it's been a couple of years since I've stitched anything--so last night I dug through my sewing box and found this:
I started this unicorn needlepoint when we were living in Idaho--say, about 1994? It was a big splurge: I bought a brand-new (then) hardcover of Flowers, Birds and Unicorns: Medieval Needlepoint by Candace Bahouth for the pattern, and a big canvas, and a huge pile of wool yarn. A large expenditure fifteen years ago, when we were still practically newlyweds.
Todd was very much into the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) then, a medieval re-enactment group which had a very active branch in Idaho Falls, so we had a lot of medieval books and such, and I was very much into cross-stitch then, so when I found this book and was able to find all the supplies at the very nice needlecraft store downtown, it seemed like the perfect project. I think it was the third (and last) needlepoint project I ever attempted. Here it is in the book, completed as a pillow:
I got it about 70% done, and then abandoned it for fifteen years, crumpled in the bottom of my sewing box. Every now and then I would paw through and think "I should finish that," but never seriously. Somehow something just clicked last night and I pulled it out and started stitching and am having a grand old time with it. I like needlepoint a lot--it doesn't seem to age as badly as counted cross-stitch has. And I'm not sure why. Cross-stitch's heyday seemed to coincide with that cutesy-country period, and so there's a lot of just lousy cross-stitch out there in the yard sales and thrift stores. Needlepoint seems to have a more timeless look--except of course for plastic canvas. *shudder*
(I do have to say that I have made a lot of really terrific cross-stitch projects that still (in my opinion) look good, and the wedding sampler pattern that my mother-in-law stitched for us still looks quite up-to-date 17 years later. But we won't talk about some of the odds and ends at the bottom of my sewing box...)
One danger of abandoning a project for that long a time is that you won't find it appealing or to your taste after so long, but I do still find the unicorn and the design really beautiful, even if we're not quite as heavily into all things medieval as we were years ago. And the colors will still work in several different rooms in our home.
Sometimes when I look at a piece of stitching I've done, I can remember so clearly which apartment we lived in, and which of our old couches I sat on, and can pinpoint the year from there, but not with this. I have no clear memory of working on it. But it does stir up a lot of memories of the three-and-a-half years we lived in Idaho. I miss the big sky and the foothills of the Tetons you could see from town. Maybe someday I'll dig out some pictures from that era and post them here--that would be fun!
Anyway...here are a few other things from my life right now...the first two roses from my rosebush out front:
Once or twice a day when I'm in the kitchen, I just pick them up and take a few deep sniffs. Mmmm.
I bought this little Homer Laughlin bowl for $3.00 at an estate sale a few weeks ago:
I LOVE the little inset details--love, love, love.
I bought seventeen--yes, seventeen--of these small (maybe 5x6") encyclopedias at the thrift store last week. They were published in the early 1930's, and they are in perfect condition. It was one of those things where you're loading them into your cart and thinking, "What is wrong with you and what on earth are you going to do with these?" but I couldn't help myself. They were dirt cheap and just so cool. I love the design on the spines.
They don't have many illustrations, but the ones that are included are quite nice:
It's not a complete set, but that's okay. I think I have a fear that in another 20 years books will be a total anachronism, and I feel this need to grab all the oldies I can find and take good care of them. These books are already an anachronism--do encyclopedias even exist any more?And speaking of anachronisms, here's the globe I found at another estate sale five or six weeks ago:
I was so excited to find it, because I didn't have a black one yet, and the price was very fair. The colors are so nice, and I believe it's about 55-60 years old, because Israel is a country, but Korea hasn't been divided yet. I love dating globes, it satisfies the utter dork in me.
And with this purchase, I am officially out of room for globes, except maybe a few more of those little globe banks, which are getting rare as hen's teeth, but way more expensive. Time to buy a bigger house, right?
We are still without our second car, which is getting the automobile equivalent of triple bypass surgery right now--a gamble on an eleven-year-old car, but we agreed that neither of us had the energy for a new car search right now. Nor do we have any burning desire to make car payments again. It seems like a law of our lives: within six months of when we get one car paid off, the other breaks down or gets in an accident and has to be replaced. But we're going for the surgical option this time, with fingers crossed that we can get another two or three years out of this car if we do the work on it now. But I am ready to have my car back and start running useless errands again!
I finally got my car cleaned out, and it gave me an idea...you know how people nowadays are taking "staycations" where they stay home and do fun things instead of taking expensive vacations. My idea is called "New Old Car," because I couldn't think of a clever name like "staycation."
You just take your old dirty car, scrub it up, polish the windows, spring for some new floor mats, and maybe run it through a car wash and voila! All the benefits of a new car without the costs.
It works best if you really let the car get filthy before you clean it up, so the contrast is even better. Like to the point where you feel like you should be wearing rubber gloves to touch the gearshift. Where the dead leaves, bits of gravel, and nameless crud on the floor are at least 1/4" thick. Where you can't push your seat back because of all the empty plastic water bottles crushed underneath it.
My experience was also greatly improved by removing the cloth covers from the leather seats (we covered the seats a couple of summers ago so our thighs wouldn't pan fry when we sat down)--I had planned to take the covers off and wash them, but they disintegrated as I pulled them off, so now I'm sliding across luxurious leather again, which feels ever so new and nice. (I'll have to put new covers on in a couple of months because of the pan-fried thighs issue.)
If the car is paid off, the satisfaction is even sweeter--a new car with no car payments!
It's all about the small pleasures, isn't it?
A couple other small pleasures:
My phlox is phlourishing: (I had to say it, I had to!)
Note the careful cropping of weeds from the viewfinder. The weeds are BAD. I'm at my wits' end with this garden, I have no idea what to do with it this year. I need some classes, or an intervention, or something. Maybe if I go out and weed, some kind of inspiration will come to me. It's the arranging that I just can't figure out--how to make a ton of disparate elements all flow together. Should I hire somebody to draw me up a plan? Maybe it would be worth the money...
That's all I've got today. Just busy with the regular boring stuff: laundry, groceries, looking at weeds. I've gotta get out there and start yanking and digging and moving stuff around, I've just got to. Somebody give me a push!
We're having a lovely, warm (70 degrees-ish) day here today, with spring in the air. The daffodil and narcissus bulbs I planted in November are sending up little shoots, and violas are popping up here and there.
And I found a lovely lily-of-the-valley plant at Trader Joe's today! Three little plants in a jadite-type of container. It's real glass.
They smell fantastic. I put them on my desk so I can pick them up and smell them whenever I want. What is it about those early spring flowers that makes them so cute? There's nothing cuter than a lily-of-the-valley bell, unless maybe it's the sweet little face of a viola.
Love 'em.
Alas, the clouds are moving in, the rain is coming, and the forecasters' dartboards are calling for snow this weekend. I'm not too bugged about it, because I love the cold weather and wish it would last longer, but most everyone else is bumming. But it will be 95 degrees and humid all too soon--I'm going to enjoy winter for as long as it wants to stick around!
Sunflowers are such a great late summer flower. This one came up all on its own, from a seed dropped by a bird or squirrel making his getaway from the birdfeeders we had out front this year.
I interrupted a couple having an intimate moment...how embarassing!
I swear the one on top was giving me the evil eye. Deserved, I guess.
Not quite as sexy, but the blooms on my garlic chives are also looking lovely right now, especially when they blow gently in the breeze.
And that's it for the garden, everything else is brown and sad and done blooming. It looks like the mums are getting ready to explode soon, though.
We're doing some fall redecorating--moved our living room around over Labor Day weekend, which is so much more of a process than it sounds. All the home entertainment stuff has to be set up and wires run in new places and holes drilled so wires can run under the house and through the walls...my poor hubby. General Eisenhower had less trouble preparing for D-Day than Todd does setting up his home theater.
But the room looks better. It's long and narrow (like 10-12 feet wide) with a fireplace at one end, a doorway at the other, and windows on the one long wall. It's been hard to figure out a way to set it up so the couch can face the TV (necessary for Todd's optimal surround speaker placement.) The TV competes with the fireplace and the room has never had a focal point.
After visiting his boss's new house a few weeks ago, Todd suggested putting the TV on the wall above the fireplace and turning the couch to face it. I wasn't sure the couch would fit well placed across the room (have I mentioned this is a narrow room?) but it did, and now things are falling into place. The focal points are combined, and the bonus is that we'll be able to face the fireplace and enjoy our winter fires, instead of sitting off to the side and letting the heat wash past us.
I'd share some pictures, but there is literally stuff sitting everywhere--all the wall pictures I'm not sure where to put now, odds and ends, and stereo equipment and wires all over the place...so I'll wait! We've also decided to pare down all our components--get rid of the separate receiver and the 300-CD changer and the two separate DVD players, and Todd found a great system on Craigslist with small speakers and a DVD/CD/receiver in one. So we'll just have that plus the satellite box and one DVD/VHS player left so I can watch my piles and piles of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on VHS. So, three components instead of five, I guess.All the neighborhood kids started back to school yesterday, and we've had a few cool nights here and there so one might start to hope that fall is on the way. Not today though--it's 93 degrees. Ick! I want to go buy some sweaters and move to Maine!
I haven't had a chance to look for red stuff today, but here's a picture I've been meaning to share:
This is a gerbera daisy from my garden--I went around and took some garden pictures last week when I was trying out my camera.
Can you spot the little guy hanging out in the daisy? I didn't see him until I uploaded the picture.
Isn't he cute? I love having bees and butterflies and birds in the garden, but that's the first grasshopper I've spotted.
I also found a nice blog today with all sorts of crafty, creative ideas for little and big kids: the Crafty Crow. Now that summer's here, maybe some of you are in need of ways to keep the kids occupied. I suggest chores...lots and lots of chores...but when your house and yard are finally spotless, you can reward them with a craft! Hee hee.
Heh heh. Well, I haven't really been that lazy, but it's most assuredly summer mode around here.
I've been scrapping a ton, too much to post here, but you can check my gallery at Two Peas if you have any interest (scroll down a little to see pictures.) You or someone you know may be featured on a layout, you never can tell...
Look how pretty my bee balm and coneflowers and tiger lilies are getting. My blue birdbath is buried somewhere in that mess, and you can see our next-door dog Socks' hinder at the top, too.
Is this a butterfly or a moth?
And soon, oh so soon, we'll have tomatoes. I've already harvested two peppers. Very exciting stuff going on here!
We are in the middle of a gorgeous weather system right now--cool breezes, warm sun, moderate temps, low humidity...in other words, heaven.
If you need me, I'll be on the front porch having a glass of sun tea.
I was gazing at a bouquet of roses I clipped and set on the coffee table yesterday, and it got me to thinking about my wedding bouquet. Or more specifically, about my florist, Rosalie Kurtz, who did such a wonderful job for our wedding, and gently steered me in the direction of affordable flowers, which is a rare trait among florists, I believe!
My bouquet was pretty standard: cream roses, white and pink daisies, pink carnations, baby's breath, ivy. We had pink and burgundy tulips with the daisies and ivy in the altar arrangement, and brass bowls of daisies with candles in the middle in the windows. Our colors were burdundy, mauve and cream, very early-nineties.
Looking at wedding bouquets online, I see so many gorgeous things that would have been wonderful for our wedding, esp. this peony which is exactly the right color. If we'd gotten married in June, instead of May, we could have raided all the family gardens for a plethora of peonies. Wouldn't that have smelled wonderful!
My aunt Molly has fond memories of the lily-of-the-valley she and her sister picked from Grandma's garden for her early May wedding. My mom had daisies, which I think were mandatory for late-sixties' weddings.
It's fun to think about what you would do over if you got married all over again, but my standard bouquet certainly served the purpose. What flowers and colors did you have in your wedding bouquet? Write a post and share!
In other news...Todd took before-and-after pictures of the house last weekend, and it just makes me laugh, because after all his hard work, is a difference even apparent?
The front of the house was quite dirty, and all the white trim had mildew spots on it that developed over the winter, so he scrubbed and washed all the whole front of the house. Then he painted the garage door and shutters. I had thought the paint chip I picked was a very dark blue...turned out it exactly matched the unfaded back side of the shutters, which was only three or four shades lighter than the shutters. So my hoped-for dramatic difference didn't really materialize.
However, when we look at it, we see the difference--it's all sparkly clean, and not so faded and sad-looking. Todd did a great job!
Another tiny bouquet from the garden, arranged in a mini teacup I've had since I was a child. I'm addicted to tiny bouquets! And now that I have a few more things blooming besides the Johnny jump-ups, I can make slightly more complex, but still tiny, bouquets. This has summer snapdragon, pansies, tiny petunias, pinks, and some lemon verbena and vinca way in the back.
I know where the addiction comes from, too--my aunt Molly and my mother. My aunt Molly has always had a gorgeous cutting garden, and would often bring lovely bouquets to summer birthdays and celebrations. And my mother, who is also a terrific gardener, loves all things tiny. Every time I ooh and aah over a tiny flower or bouquet, I can hear her in my head oohing and aahing right along with me.
While I was out snipping, I took a picture of my stone turtle, who is slowly but surely being obscured by a blanket of gorgeous thyme:
And I'm giddy with excitement about this development (hint, look at the bottom left):
Yes, it's my lavender, getting ready to bloom! It didn't bloom at all last summer, so I've been waiting eagerly to see if it would bloom this summer. I planted another variety, with silvery leaves, that doesn't seem ready to put out blooms yet, but at least this one will! Can't wait!
I came downstairs and pulled up the living room blinds this morning, and who should be looking right at me from one of my hanging baskets?
Can you see Mama (or Papa?) Mourning Dove?
There were two birds in the pot, but by the time I got the camera, only one had its head up.
I had to water my pots, though, and although they sat and watched me water the other two, when I started to tip the pitcher toward their pot, they took off, twittering in a very irritated fashion. I don't know if they had started to lay eggs or not, but they may not come back now that I've interfered.
I feel bad, but bird nests in my hanging pots really skeeve me out. I don't want baby birds anywhere that close to me or my front porch. Baby birds are the creepiest things I can think of. That's why I'll be making Todd check the pot for a nest tonight--if there are baby birds in there, I don't want to see!
Speaking of creepy--yesterday we took a drive out into the country west of Suffolk to search out some antique stores one of Todd's co-workers told him were out there. It was not a fruitful trip! Toward the end of the day, Todd dubbed these places "shacks of crap," which is both succinct and accurate. I never thought of myself as an especially fastidious person, but the shops along the way were some of the filthiest, scariest shacks I've ever seen.
Picture a cheap outbuilding erected in, oh, 1929, with several extra rooms tacked on over the years but otherwise left completely untouched. Now fill that shack wall-to-wall with every sort of old crap you can think of, and let it just moulder in the dirt and damp. Now, attach price tags more fitting with the upscaliest of upscale boutiques. Hire yourself a couple old guys in seed caps to run it, and you, too, can do business in rural Virginia. You can sell boiled peanuts if you need to actually keep a money-making item on hand.
I wish I was exaggerating, but sadly, I'm not. The last place we stopped actually replaced the Jefferson Ave. flea market at the top of my list as the nastiest place I've ever set foot in.
And speaking of the Jeff Ave. flea market, guess where our first stop was on our way out of town? Todd stops by here every Sunday morning in search of old tools and cheap DVDs, but I'd never returned after my first trip last fall.
I actually found something interesting this time, though.
This tole tray is enormous--I'm actually not sure what I'm going to do with it--but it was five bucks! I saw five or six tole trays later in our "shack of crap" tour that were selling for $50-80.
I also got a 1941 Webster's children's dictionary that has some great illustration plates...I'll try to scan and share some later this week.I'm feeling frustrated because after days of babying my right shoulder, I yanked my left shoulder blade out of whack this morning trying to unzip the side pocket in my yoga pants, of all the dumb things. So my afternoon task of sanding, priming and painting my table is going undone after a couple abortive tries. It's extremely frustrating. So I need to tackle a few things on my to-do list that don't require arm movement. Hmmm...
If there's anything more fun than picking flowers and making tiny bouquets, I don't know what it could be. I have a bunch of tiny bottles, blue, green and clear, gleaned from various yard sales, and I line them up on my kitchen window sill and put a blossom or two in each.
This bouquet gets the special spot by my computer, though (at which I spend far more time than at the kitchen sink) because it has my very first rose of the year, plus a sprig of summer snapdragon, which is a perennial I planted today, plus a purple flower that I planted last year and have no memory of what it's called. The purple really clashes against the peachy-pink of the rose, though--I love it.
And the rose smells wonderful, which adds to my enjoyment as I sit at my computer desk.
I never hear people talk about the mysteries of buying a home and trying to figure out the plants that come with it. Our home's first owner was a guy who planted a few shrubs and odds and ends of flowers, the second brief owners did their utmost to decimate every shrub out front, and then I came along...trying to replenish the previous owners' destruction, and also to figure out the odds and ends the first owner left behind.
The rose, for instance--I'm sure it's some sort of hybrid tea, but I have no idea what. Next to it in the bed is a miniature rose that has had every pretty red sprig of new growth chomped off by the bunnies. Again, I have no clue what it is. Mysterious bulbs were unearthed when we put in the front boxwoods--calla lilies that refused to sprout again in the spots we moved them to. A tree is rising in the side beds that looks like nothing I've ever seen before, and there are several other mysterious stumps that are putting out sprouts after being chopped down two summers ago. And I found a bulb down by the creek happily sprouting white flowers of a type I've never seen before. How did it get there in the woods?
These little mysteries are what keeps life on the ridge interesting.
My friend Cheryl gave me this little pitcher last week, and it's the perfect size and color to hold the tallest of my johnny-jump-ups, plus a couple straggler pansies and some lemon balm. Thanks again, Cheryl, I love it!
I went to my favorite nursery today and salivated over the herbs. I wasn't in the mood to buy and plant yet, just to look. I've been perusing my herb books and found a few that I'd like to grow, but I'm not sure how far afield I'm going to have to go to find them.
I love thymes, I have several different varieties growing out front, and they're starting to sneak through the rock wall very picturesquely, which is what I was hoping for. I found another variety today that I HAVE to get...it had the happiest green and yellow leaves and a fabulous lemon smell. But it wasn't lemon thyme...I can't remember the name. It was darling.
They also had a gorgeous purple basil and a Greek columnar basil; I think I'm going to get both of those. I planted a plain old basil last year, and it loved the hot, hot sun out front.
Also a bronze fennel that was SO pretty. I've never grown fennel before, and I think this one would make a wonderful contrast to all the green herbs and perennials.
I just wandered along, brushing and stroking and smelling...so much fun. The mints smelled like heaven, and I think I'm going to do some peppermint and something else to contrast with it in one of my flower boxes out back on the deck. They're built into the benches in the seating area, so you have to fill them with something or they're just boxes of dirt, which is hardly an accent. I tried to grow flowers in them last year, and the sun was just so iffy. I wonder if white impatiens and dark green peppermint would do well in the same box. It could look wonderful...theoretically, anyway.
The weather remains cloudy and unsettled-feeling, and my face remains swollen and tender. I'm usually not one to cry for the sun, but I'm missing it!
