garden porn

It's June. Looks more like the middle of May out there, but hey, I'll take what I can get.


Front garden today.

And some closeups. I have names for some things, but not others, even if I thought I saved all the labels [sigh].


First time this iris has bloomed for me (it was planted a year ago last August). It's called Armageddon, which seems to me like a slander upon a beautiful plant [wry g].


This one was planted about six years ago, not long after I moved into this condo. I don't have a name for it anymore.


This one was planted summer before last, and it's the first time it's bloomed for me, too, but it doesn't match any of my labels, although I do have a label for a yellow plicata called Radiant Apogee. This is obviously not a plicata, though.

Those are the only three of my seven front-bed iris that are blooming this year. Drat our cold, wet, extremely late spring. But they're certainly better than nothing, and I do have one iris in bud out back, too. The same plants in my back garden always bloom about a week behind their counterparts in my front garden. My front garden gets a lot more reflected heat than my back garden does.


Dianthus Tiny Rubies, which I planted at least five years ago. Those pink flowers don't look like rubies to me, but they're pretty, and the foliage is lovely, gray, and needly for most of the year.


The Bleeding Heart That Ate New York is still going strong, although it's getting a bit floppy. I don't know the name of the hosta variety in front of it. I think I picked it up at a farmers' market four or five years ago, and then promptly divided it before I ever put it in the ground. The white flowering groundcover is sweet woodruff. That bed is completely bare in the winter except for a couple of hellebores that are currently hidden under the bleeding heart, and some snowdrops and a couple of hardy cyclamen.


I don't know the variety of the coral bells. Ice something, I think. Or the name of those hostas, either. All three plants started as one one-gallon pot about six years ago.


Back garden, complete with howling cat (see my last post [sigh]).

And some closeups there:


Blue columbine that was in the front garden when I moved in. I moved it back here, but there's still a blue columbine out front, so apparently I didn't take the whole thing. That's not a complaint [g]. They're both in full bloom right now, along with a yellow one and a white one out back. And I've got columbine seedlings all over the place, which is one of the nicest "weeds" I've ever had.


Clematis Nelly Moser. She's about three years old, and has survived being chopped clear back to the ground when she was a baby. She's on the lefthand side of the back garden photo.


Unknown purple clematis (which is much darker in real life). I brought this one with me in a large tub from my last place of residence, which makes it about ten years old, and it's been chopped back to the ground twice in its lifetime.

I find it very difficult to kill clematis, for which I am grateful [g].

It's supposed to get close to 80 today. This is the second day this year we've gotten to 70 degrees. I have all the windows open. It's glorious.

Morgan redux

1) I shut him up in the laundry room -- the room farthest from my bedroom, and the only room downstairs with a door (it's part laundry room, part powder room) -- last night as an act of desperation. I could still hear him, but the noise was muffled (neither of the neighbors with whom I share walls has complained yet, thank goodness). It sounded rather like someone was bowling, and yelling every time he got a strike [wry g]. His litter box is there to begin with, and I put his food and water and an old rocking chair cushion with an afghan in there, too. And a small lamp since the room has no windows. I'm not sure why I thought that was such a terrible thing to do to him -- it's significantly better than when he and his brother used to be banished to the garage every night in my other condo when they were much younger. And it's also significantly better than being put outside every night the way lots of people used to do with their cats. I did manage to sleep last night, although that may have been more the result of sleep deprivation than anything else. I also had to mop the laundry room this morning because he strewed litter into his water dish and then knocked it over. His water dish is clear at the other end of the room and around the corner (the room is L-shaped) from the litter box now, not that it was that close before. Hopefully that will help.

2) I am going to make an appointment with the vet this week and see if she's got any ideas.

He sleeps much of the day. When the guys were younger, I used to send them outside for most of the day, and they'd come back tired and sleep all night. I know most people nowadays think that's being a bad cat person, but it worked for us. It doesn't work that way anymore, alas, because he's way too old to be putting out on his own, although he does sit on the patio with me in good weather. I need a good way to tire him out, I think [wry g]. Except he doesn't seem to have enough energy anymore to get tired out enough to do any good.

Oh, well. Thanks for listening, so to speak.

just out of curiosity

Is there such a thing as a person who doesn't have a smartphone (or iPad or other portable Internet-connected device) who uses Twitter in a functional manner?