A Well-Watered Garden

Summer evenings can be beautiful, magical, full of delight. One can understand why so many stories were written about fairies and other magical happenings at this time of day, in this season. These photos were taken during one of those hushed warm evenings, when the sun has just set. The truck was asleep on a bed of moonlit-drenched hydrangeas, transforming it into something other than a truck. Maybe a flying time machine at rest or a coach flown by moths and bats. Even in the dead of winter, I can watch this video to see the fireflies.

For a wedding gift to me, my husband bought me the Spring Bride Duet - a combination of Cosmopolitan Darwin Hybrid tulips and Stainless Daffodils. We planted them in the fall of 2014, and they have faithfully come up each year. I thought the daffodils and tulips were a good combination for us in case the deer ate the tulips, the daffodils would still be standing. Also, tulips can fade over time but daffodils multiply. So far, both have come up faithfully, and beautifully, each year, and the deer have left them alone. I would buy Darwin Hybrids again - they have really strong stems and huge flowers! The Cospmopolitans color changes over the time they are up. They come up a pale peach/pink, and then slowly shift to a brighter pinkish/red.

The Crocuses appeared a couple of weeks ago, sentinels of beauty and Spring. They are infused with heavenly light. They are Easter. They are delicate yet durable vessels which are visible to us as well as those in the next world, they carry us from winter into spring; gateways between the here and now, and times to come. Welcome Crocuses! The striped are the Pickwick variety:

Last spring I started most of my garden vegetables and flower annuals from seed. We purchased a grow table from Gardeners Supply , which overall worked really well to start the seeds. I knew going into it that some of the seed experiments would be successes and some failures. I used seeds from at least 3 different companies and I also found that seeds from certain companies were more successful than others - here's one of the successes. When we moved into our house in 2010, some beautiful purple flowers began blooming in August - they had a unique structure to them in that the blooms were nestled under the leaves. We really liked them, and my husband called them "Underflowers".  I researched and found that they were Balsam. Here's a previous blog post on those pretty purple ones. Balsam is a species of Impatiens, and they are a delightful, easy to grow annual. At first I didn't realize they were an annual, because the next couple of years they appeared as well...

We took a walk through the conservation land behind the house, and found that while we were taking a respite, others were very hard at work harvesting pollen from the Prairie Asters: Such a beautiful office to work in:

Here are some photos of last summer's (2014's) Hollyhocks. They are the same that were photographed in 2013 , but they bloomed even more profusely last summer. In the grip of winter, photos of flowers like these seem like miracles.