I wake up, step out and think -- who needs words when you have flowers. Who needs breakfast when you have flowers. Who needs pickle ball when you have flowers. You get the point: growing flowers serves many purposes and doing so can feed your soul and calm your raging bull and also, at the end of the day, fill the pages of a blogpost.
It's fair that this should be the content now. My days aren't merely filled with flower care, but much of what is good in them resides in the flower fields.
[Other stuff? I have been tracking various people's Covid infections -- how delightful, right? And I have been ruminating about how difficult it is to be a funny person when you aren't genetically predisposed to be a funny person. A humorous gene, you'll tell me, does not exist. The talent to entice laughter is shaped socially. Go ahead and debate that if you wish, all I know is that there are some people -- admittedly not very many -- who can knock your socks off with their clever twist of a story that leads you to chortle right out loud and I am not one of them. But I can, on this July day, get you to smile! Not with words, but photos. Of flowers. Here we go!]
(By our back door, which, for us, is the only door...)
(From there, I take the secret path...)
(Along that path: an unusual lily, with two varieties joined as one...)
(And now for the lily field in front of the porch... Remember: each lily lasts only one day...)
(There are tiers of flowers: the lilies are at the top)
(Viewed from the side...)
(Okay, now let's follow the path toward the barn... hey, Uni, are you cleaning Happy's feather's? You are! You don't have to do this you know! In the background: a corner of the Big Bed)
(Wait, let's backtrack a little and show at least a tiny edge of the bed I hardly ever photograph: the one facing the road. This bit is all yellow and white...)
(And how about the field to the west of the porch? It's very shady these days and yet the monardas and lilies and cone flowers persevere...)
(Okay, back to the Big Bed...)
(This is where I put in the holly hock... waiting for it to blossom upwards... )
(A digression from a distant bed: out of the many experimental seeds I put in, there was this bean that grew to be taller than the branches of the crab apple...)
(Turn around and look across the Big Bed to the farmhouse...)
(Just one beautiful clump, out of many...)
(Finally, breakfast. Alone: Ed is out of town. A rare thing indeed.)
(If ever I'm going to butcher these hens, Bold Beatrice will be the first to go. She follows me everywhere if I stray toward the barn, the tomato field, the lavender patch. I trip over her all the time. She wants corn. Pesky and bold! But with a sweet side... Sigh...)
(One last one: the meadow in the new orchard. wild and beautiful...)
And there you have it! A day of nothing but flowers.
And love...
