August 31, 2013 -- green tomato

This is a beautiful green tomato I knocked of the vine by accident. It deserved display (and I love the leaves and stem that came off with it) so I put it on this upside-down bowl on the windowsill.

July 30, 2013 -- seriously altered coneflowers

I'm really struggling with new camera. Want to go back to old one, even though its lens is scratched and I have to open it with a fingernail! This is photo taken with new, un-understood camera. The flowers are coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea cultivars).  I have lots of these flowers because I bought some coneflower plants at a fire sale at a local big-box store. Before I planted the plants, I cut off most of the flowering stems. Hence, these flowers. The photo is overexposed because I had to alter it in the computer.

July 28, 2013 -- celosia

This is celosia I harvested from the vegetable garden today. I actually pulled out a wheelbarrow-load of very tall, happy, blooming celosia plants, but they were shading out my veggies, so they had to go. I snipped these short stems from the discarded plants in the wheelbarrow.

I spent part of today trying to learn how to use a new camera, with limited success. Can't quite figure out how to focus it, and on the the automatic setting, the colors seem to cool. Oh, how I hate reading an owner's manual!

July 27, 2013 -- roses and gourds

These are the same red Meidiland roses from a couple of days ago, now combined in one vase. And at their base are three decorative gourds I picked today. If I'd waited longer, they'd probably have gotten a little bigger, but I couldn't resist!

July 24, 2013 -- roses & copperheads

You'd think, as I did, that going outside to pick roses for a windowsill arrangement would be a nice, relaxing activity. Not so today. On the way to the roses I encountered a dead copperhead in the street (run over by a car). That wouldn't have been all that unsettling, except that my husband killed a copperhead in the garden a couple of weeks ago, AND while out picking the roses a neighbor drove by and told me another neighbor who walks his dog down our street had encountered 5 copperheads his summer. Chilling. So I came inside with my roses less relaxed than when I walked out. Still, here's the arrangement--little red Meidiland roses combined with some wild sumac foliage.

July 23, 2013 -- salsify

I actually did this "arrangement" while on vacation and forgot to post it.  I found these wonderful salsify seed structures on a roadside, picked a few, and displayed them on the windshield of the car. They look like gigantic dandelions but they're actually wild salsify.

Here they are on the car "windowsill."

Here they are growing wild.

July 20, 2013 -- black-eyed Susans, etc.

With these black-eyed Susans are some hydrangea foliage and some springs of a grass called 'Frosted Explosion.' I like the way the black-eyed Susans are facing all sorts of different directions and all their heads are at different heights. That makes the arrangement look more natural to me.