Forwards, Backwards, Sideways

My garden is in an "in-between" phase. Sweet-peas are waning. My flashy, lipstick-colored Gladioli have had some early glory, and been burned by a quick heat wave. Their apricot and cream clothed cousins are just unfurling their ruffles. Dahlias are beginning to loosen their tight buds, but not enough yet for anyone but me to know their colors, which are cataloged in my plant memory-banks.
There are nasturtiums and geraniums and Persian, night-blooming jasmine but I didn't think I had enough cutting specimens to make a bouquet to take to a friend who had invited us to lunch on Sunday.

But wait! Behind the jasmine, out of sight, I  have a small and isolated herd of bi-color sweet-peas, pretending to be butterflies as they bob around in the breeze. That's a start.

Fuchsia, begonia and petunia are not for cutting but make a glowing oasis of color in the shade.

I scavenged around and came up with enough blooms to fill a vase, after all. From this angle it looks quite formal, with skyscraper gladioli for verticality and rotund hydrangea for foundation volume. When delivering flowers to an Artist, best have a design theory to present along with:)

Rosemary, snap-dragons, sweet-peas and jasmine fill in the gaps between the building blocks.

The back of the bouquet has a separate identity entirely, a wild-child cluster of chaos which is my favorite aspect.
I don't often cut flowers for myself. I enjoy my garden immensely and don't feel the need to bring it indoors. I do love having flowers to cut and take to friends. This bouquet traveled a hundred miles to its destination, seat-belted upright into the back seat in the vase.

A Little Color to Share

 A small vase to hold a collection of colors, textures, perfumes and corresponding memories.

Rosemary, spiky, aromatic, dressed in Provencale colors.

Velvet wallflowers in burnished orange, wafting scents that take me back to the garden of my Mother's Great Aunt Flossie.

 Brash petunias and perfumed stock, encroached upon by a bustle of sweet-pea starters and the evergreen leaves of jasmine. The stakes are there to support the Dahlias that are hidden to all but my inner eye, for now.

 Forget-me-nots blueing up in my overcrowded pots.

 Wall flower habitat. Unstructured, willful, messy. 

 Birds-eye view of sweet-pea plants that have reached a foot tall already, and had to be tied up to the trellis today. There is a seating area just the other side of this low wall, and a crab-apple tree behind, that flowers in an abundance of rich cotton candy pinks.

 The small green leaves down in front are Columbines. I see the flowers that are not there yet.

Orchids in a pot, by my front door. They come back every year, from this plant that I bought at the flea-market, on a jaunt with faraway friends. This year's abundance has let me use orchids as a cutting flower.

Worth Getting Up For!

Top of the morning, ten minutes up the hill from home, at what would have been 7am yesterday and is 8am today.

Using up a credit I had left on a gift certificate, I went on a trail ride with a friend, who needs to get her behind in shape for a 200 mile pilgrimage ride in Spain, come May.

Turning away from the vineyards, the vista of San Francisco Bay stretched below us.

Home for a much deserved cup of coffee. The garden is showing some color by my front door.

Cheerful nasturtiums, black-eyed Sues, freesias, primroses and geraniums wrap the corner out to the sidewalk.

Cymbidium Orchids tantalizingly close to flowering, need attaching to support canes.

Spring color palette continued right onto the lunch table.

Thank goodness for pressure cookers. Lamb Shank stew in 35 minutes, seasoned with fennel, brown mushrooms, rosemary, Worcester sauce, shallots and beer.

More green and orange stuff.

These strawberries looked too good to be true, but their sweetness surpassed the brown sugar and calvados.
I have another 500 mile road-trip planned for tomorrow, so I may take a nap. This time it's not dog-related. It's about a designer who needs some support in a meeting to explain to a client why she's a million dollars over budget and she hasn't finished closing in the walls yet. This promises to be fun!

Pregnant Mare Rescue, Breakfast with the Babies.

I don't know what I could have included in my morning to make it any better. Today was the fundraising breakfast for a local horse rescue group near Santa Cruz. The stars of the pancake breakfast are pictured below.

Hard to imagine that, without the intervention of : Pregnant Mare Rescue

this mare would not have been around to produce this elegant foal.

Baby needed a snack, before settling down for a rest.

Like all babies, this one tried to resist falling asleep until she couldn't hold her head up one more minute.

On the way to the event, there was a roadside floral rainbow with a box to put money in, (honor system) to buy a bouquet. I came away with a huge bunch of sweet-peas. I love their perfume.

a bit of everything

I have a lot of plants in pots to brighten areas where there is more concrete than I can bear. These three, in front of our garage, overlap shamelessly and make me guess where to aim the hose for watering purposes.
The nasturtiums re-seeded themselves from last year. The black petunias were an inspiration for Halloween 2009 and I love their pansy-velvet richness. Yellow columbine are a bit wishy-washy compared to other color combinations in other spots but, of course, the one I like least grows the best. The pink flowers are ivy geraniums, grown from a friend's cutting and since shared with others. There are some frilly purple and white iris in the middle and strong pointed leaves promising the next batch of powder and darker blues.
What is hidden in the middle of one pot is a slender stalk that is the first sign of dahlias to come. We'll have to wait and see what color they turn out to be.

Iris-Hint to Grand Couturiers

Dear Grand Couturiers, 

I have yet to see a red-carpet ensemble as beautiful as this.

Flower Power!

Sunday was Hot as Hell! I like my share of sunshine, but waking up at 6:30 am to ingest an Alka Seltzer (we overdid the din-dins and drinky-poos Saturday night), it was already 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Discretion being surely the better part of valor in this case, I gave up on my 9am riding lesson and went back to bed for an hour. We subsequently spent a lazy day, mostly indoors, as it was too hot to even enjoy the pool.

The result of all that added calorific sunshine to the neighborhood's already well fed and watered plants has been a "bloom-boom" and waves of aggressive perfumery that would make a Triffid feel embarrassed at it's own paltry attempt at post-apocalyptic World domination, in comparison.

Yesterday, although ten degrees cooler than the triple digits of the day before, it was still nice and toasty as I set out in the morning with my old furry dog to complete our morning rounds of the 'Hood.

First off, my next-door neighbor has jasmine as ground cover. Wham! Into a solid wall of fragrance. Surviving that caramel-sweet encounter we moved slowly on, passing nuclear powered English Roses and almost succumbing to the nauseating droning fragrance of Mexican Orange; the "B" list of citrus smells. We hadn't yet made it to the end of the block and it was obvious that there was some kind of teeth-baring face-off going on, to decide who would be Alpha Aroma plant for the day.

Continuing bravely into the olfactory essences; unmitigated by the slightest wisp of air movement; we rounded the bend into a staccato hail of Gardenia gunshots, the source recognizable by the telltale creamy-white muzzle flashes in the dark green foliage. Ducking for cover we made it into a place of temporary respite; a garden planted with drought tolerant native plants on one side and, on the other, the fried-to-a-crisp remains of what just yesterday was a spectacular display of bearded iris.

Into the home stretch now, although mauled by undiluted honeysuckle and pursued by Peonies; which I usually liken to the magic drops placed on the eyelids to enhance the experience of a Midsummer Night's Dream; but on this day was so strong as to be a shockingly noisome Bitch-slap of scent. One last effort to get past the high-pitched exhuberance of Sweet-Peas and thankfully back into the house, whence to recover from the woozy and pscychadelic effects brought on without ever having smoked a thing. Whew!

If you go down to the woods today.....

Friends are the best birthday gift!

Crazy and generous, loopy and familiar, odd and forgiving, daft enough to drive in from near and far to picnic in the damp cold woods in March, for my birthday.

Only, it wasn't cold, how could it be with all that warmth and love?

Sharing My Sunshine

I live in California for a reason; I have paid my dues in colder climes and choose now to live in a place where it doesn't hurt to breathe outdoors in Winter. For those of you who are somewhere chilly, let me share a little of my sunshine with you today.

My morning started with a slow stroll around the block with my trusty canine. Diva has reached a mature age where slow and stop are her two speeds. She was never an athlete; although, in the past, a skate-board or UPS truck could provoke a moment or two when she more resembled a guided missile than a dog.

Where yesterday I noticed one small dark-pink blossom on a young tree there are now a flurry of them. White almond-blossoms and the fat, waxy buds of tulip trees are shouting "Look at me, I was first!" I have a couple of yellow crocus in the pots around my patio and the stiffly erect promise of daffodils protruding the soil.

I spent a hour with my book out on our deck; exposing pale, hairy legs, which luckily no one can see as our garden is not overlooked.

My French Artist and I decided that it would be a good day to eat lunch outside in the sun. I cooked artichokes that we ate with a home-made mayonnaise; the yellow color like sunshine in a bowl. The ingredients include lemon-juice from lemons I picked this morning in my garden and olive-oil which we import for ourselves from a family-member's olive orchard in the South of France. Egg-yolk, mustard, salt and pepper and voila!

We had fresh bread and cold roast lamb with some Provençale rosé wine, in moderation. The shiny fat blue of blueberries kept us smiling all the way to the end.