Spring again

Grape leaves and blossoms are unfurling, as are social pressures to make the meadow more suburban-looking

Meant to put this here

Many cicadas earlier this year

Some more dramatically lit than others

Layered looks

I think there was text here once, and then a cat ran across the keyboard. Not sure that this was a missed opportunity for insights, or, for that matter, my big chance to become Freakazoid…

X, X, everywhere an X

Well, we aren’t the good people of Sniddler’s Gulch, but “X” is a pretty big [and loud] thing here right now…

Because

And

Not to mention

There’s always one that’s wonky

This might be the iris known as “Thornbird”. It hadn’t bloomed for a few years, and then it started up again last season after a tree in a neighbor’s yard was removed and more light got over to this patch in my front border.

I think it was orignally bred to highlighte that ridiculous sticky-out beard, but the side effect is that the standards don’t always form properly (or ‘at all’), and sometimes new but angles result in this silliness:

About that brief, briefly

Well, no. When you all choose to “save time” by “not bothering” the subject matter experts to get approval of the final storyboards and script, neither the writer nor the videographer will be surprised when one set of stakeholders suddenly reacts badly to the rough cut video…

This is not how any of this works….

And things….too fierce to mention

I couldn’t remember what I put in here, but I think it was in 2017.

The cat is in the way….

A short observation over here: Obsidious

What stays, what grows, what comes back

What I refer to now as ‘the meadow garden’ was originally a lawn, chemically-maintained several times a year by the previous owner. I know this mostly from the mailers that I kept getting from the services that were hoping to continue those treatments, and from the amount of undisturbed soil several inches down when I started digging out garden beds.

From neighbors, I learned that two owners or so previous to me, the yard had been overgrown with volunteer cedars, yews, and ivy, which had to be removed before one of the sales went through. I don’t know why that was — maybe someone’s child got eaten by a tree?

Anyway, there was a LOT of lawn and I had no interest in having such a thing.

But where was I going to begin? I’d had a fairly shady garden….no, that doesn’t sound right. “I had a garden that had many mature trees and not much sun.” There we go.

And now there was this expanse of hammering light that needed something other than a chemically-enhanced monoculture. [One might note that chemically-enhanced monocultures are fraught with other problems].

Thus, the following plants were ordered:

• Anchusa Dropmore
• Achillea
• Agastache [two types]
• Asters [two types]
• Sea holly
• Arabis
• Mums
• Monarda
• Phlox
• Leptodermis
• Russian Sage
• Teucrium hyrcanicum

Of these, more than a decade later, the Asters, Monarda, and Phlox have weathered the many changes in placement, light, and soil quality. Soil was amended. Roses were in the wrong place, and now the right ones. Seasonal springs were tamed with multiple willows that created a shady area for hosta, persicaria, ferns, and hellebores.

Seedlings became full trees, with birds nesting and singing. A blank canvas of grass has been carved away, year by year, into multispecies islands with green pathways between them.

So while the world is a dumpster fire, the lilies bloom.

Behold the flowers of the field