June 7, 2013 -- butterfly weed

I'm looking forward to playing with these tomorrow, but here's where this handful of butterfly weed flowers  landed tonight. What with all the rain, I've got butterfly weed plants that look like large azaleas (in size), but some of the stems were so long they were lying on the ground, so I cut them. These are a few that broke off as I was transferring them from one bucket to another. Notice how lush everything looks in the background--thanks to tropical storm Andrea.

If you look really carefully into the background out the window, you'll see a tall elderberry blooming. I didn't know it was there until I saw it out the window a few minutes ago--which will tell you something about how tall and out-of-control my weeds are!

June 6, 2013 -- couldn't resist

I couldn't resist posting something prettier than anything I could create on the windowsill this afternoon--the unadulterated view out the window. I'm particularly sensitive to the beauty of this tree, because one of its friends (a tree of about the same age) is now dying, due to a lightning strike, nearby

June 5, 2013 -- commemorative branch

I groaned--seriously groaned--when I inadvertently snapped this sweet bay magnolia twig off today. I was pulling bindweed out of a border, and one vine was twisted around the top of a happy, young sweet bay magnolia. I pulled too hard, and the soft new growth in the top of the tree snapped off. I was sick. The tree was doing so well, and I shouldn't have been so heedless as to pull too hard on the bindweed! The tree won't die, but it has lost its leader and will never be the tree it would have been if I hadn't snapped it off. Groan.

In the vase with the sweet bay twig is a stem of borage (leftover from snapdragon lineup of a few days ago) and, alas, some of the bindweed still clinging to the twig.

June 4, 2013 -- ribs of leafy greens

I indulged myself for lunch today and fried up some leafy greens with garlic. (That's not all I ate, but it was the healthy part!) As I stripped the ribs from some Swiss chard (I think it was Swiss chard; this leafy green in  a seed mix had a white central rib), I saw how beautiful the ribs were, gathered them in my hand sort of like feathers, then dropped them into this black pin holder. Might add a flower tomorrow; might not!

June 3, 2013 -- snapdragon line-up

I picked these short-stemmed snaps just to keep the plants blooming (and to relieve them of the stress of supporting these almost-spent blooms). But what looked weary in the garden now looks snappy (!) on the windowsill. And these colors are SO gorgeous.

 These are a variety of Butterfly Snapdragon called 'Chantilly' from Renee's Garden Seeds.

May 31, 2013 -- moss on bottle of veggie flowers

This isn't much of a photo, but there are actually a couple of interesting things going on here. One is the moss tied to the neck of the bottle. Saw something similar in a magazine recently and stole the idea. The other is the mat the bottle is sitting on. It's a coaster I bought in the Longwood Gardens gift shop--tiny rounds of wood glued to fabric backing. I bought the coaster with the intention of making something similar myself, but I don't know that I ever will. Suddenly, it looks too hard! The flowers in the vase are sweet little white ones blooming on a plant in the vegetable garden. At first I thought they were radish flowers, but they're not. I honestly can't identify them, which seems to happen to me more and more as 1) I sow packets of seed that include mixes of various edible greens, and 2) my memory gets less and less reliable.

 There's also one stem of Nigella (love-in-a-mist) in this bottle.

P.S. Relative to yesterday's post: the calendulas in the wine glasses are not from Select Seeds. Today I happened upon the seed packet I'd saved to remind me which calendulas I was growing. They're 'Flashback' calendulas from Renee's Garden--the prettiest ones I've ever grown.

May 30, 2013 -- calendulas in wine glasses

The calendulas blooming in the garden this year are prettier than any I've ever grown before. Must look up the variety (from Select Seeds, I think), but their unusual lushness is probably due to unusually wet, cool spring. Picked a bunch of them today and dropped them into these wine glasses with some Chinese temple bell seed pods (the linear green things) and some nice, fat Heuchera (coral bell) leaves.