First off, here are some roses I cut from my garden. It's the end of June and every Sunday I throw out last week's boquet and go out to cut a new one, representative of what is currently showing off in the garden. This week's boquet had southern-yellow St. Patrick roses, white double Mt. Hood roses, some gaudy pink sprays of anonymous climbing roses and an extremely fruitily-fragranced red rose of uncertain ancestry. Oh, and a couple of sprigs of lavender thrown in for good measure.

Here is my gladiolus and lily garden. Every year I grow an embarassment of oriental lilies and various colors of gladiolus. Yesterday the first two or three lily pods popped open. In another couple of weeks this will be a total riot of color and fragrance. As the stalks grow heavy with blossoms, they begin to lean over the sidewalk and get in the way. As you can see, some of the glads fall over entirely. The last couple of years I've used wooden stakes and rope to fence back the flowers but as this is definitely going to be an annual occurrence, I've decided that I should invest in something more attractive to keep the plants up. Still looking for just the right thing.

July 1, 2003. Here is one of the oriental lilies that popped open on the last day in June. That's kind of early for orientals, but the location of my lily garden is against a southward-facing wall, which is extremely warm. I thought that this was one of the "Broadway" lilies, but that type isn't supposed to have those speckles. So I dunno. At any rate, it smells fantastic!

July 1, 2003. Here are my dwarf callas - no blossoms yet. They're more of a mid- to late-summer flowering plant. The foliage is attractive, however. I especially like the speckled stuff to the left. I believe that all the calla plants pictured produce flowers in various shades of purple. I have a giant calla out in front of the house that makes early, huge white flowers that are so big as to be kind of creepy. They look kind of carnivorous, to me.

This isn't a plant, but it's so attractive I just had to add it. This is the arbor swing that is tucked away back in a corner of the yard. The flagstone patio it sits on is overgrown with blue star creeper and the arbor itself is being consumed by morning glory. The backdrop of the arbor is a section of our old, weathered cedar fence. When we tore down the old, rotting fence and put up a new one, Scot and I felt that the swing no longer had the same ambience so we rescued a section of the old fence and just nailed it up in front of the new one. Viola! Instant ambiance!

This is a closeup of a piece of black bamboo or Phyllostachys nigra. I came across a five gallon pot of it at our local nursery priced at a whopping $75. Three days later it was bought up. Rest assured, I did not spend $75 on my black bamboo. In fact, I didn't pay a dime! Here's the story: Max and I took the truck to do some errands. While out and about, I went to a drive-through burger joint and got a burger for myself and one for Max, who was in the back. I ate my burger on the way to the next errand while the poor dog sat in back and slobbered all over himself, watching me eat. After a frustrated yelp escaped the dog, I took pity on him and pulled onto the shoulder of the deserted back road to give him his burger before he died of want. As he inhaled his snack, I happened to turn and notice that there was bamboo growing by the side of the road. Black bamboo! Astounded, I took note of it. Two or three months later I remembered it and went and dug it up and brought it home. Oddly, it appears as though it was grown in a container and dumped off the side of the road to fend for itself. There were a number of dead canes and only a few, very young, live canes. All in all, it appears as though someone had it in a container where it outgrew the poor quality soil it was given and appeard to die. The tightly-knotted root ball weighed about fifty pounds when I dug it up. What little soil it had in its clutches was non-native clay (the surrounding soil was sandy and peaty). Someone probably just heaved it off the side of the road rather than pay money to toss it into a landfill. Given its freedom, the bamboo came back from the dead and is recovering nicely. Neat!

Here's the French lavender that's growing like crazy by the bar-b-que pit. In the background on the left you can see the arbor swing.

July 1, 2003. Above, are our roses. You'll have to take my word for it - they're under the weeds somewhere in there. In the center of the photo you'll see a huge mass bearing many small pink blossoms. I have no idea what kind of rose these are, but they try to climb everything in sight and I'm sick of them. We are gradually reclaiming our landscaping from the weeks through the judicious application of weed barrier fabric and bark mulch. As soon as we get to the roses, those little pink monsters are coming out of the ground and going to a new home. Then we'll put something more civilized in their place. To the left of the pink things are three rose bushes: bright coral "Candelabra", yellow-gold "St. Patrick" and a mystery red rose with an intoxicatingly strong fragrance. To the right of the pink things are three more rose bushes: yellow-orange-pink "Tropical Sunset" (with no blossoms open just now, but lots of buds), ivory white "Mt. Hood" (also with no blossoms... and no foliage, either!!), and dark dark red "Taboo", whose blossoms are hidden up in one of the birch trees.

This is a closeup of some of the very bright pink blossoms we get from that mass of climbing roses. They're okay in small amounts, but there's literally hundreds and hundreds of blossoms on these plants by the middle of July. Too gaudy for my tastes.

Here's a closeup of a "Candelabra" blossom. This is a Grandiflora rose. The plant is described as having "large bright coral flowers on healthy dark green foliage. 4" wide flowers with 25 petals, plant reaching four to five feet tall."

Here's a closeup of the nameless rose with the extraordinary fragrance. I wish that there was some sort of scratch-n-sniff HTML I could insert in the code for this web site because this rose is just incredible.

July 1, 2003. Here are my tomato starts that have not yet been put into containers or the ground. I am growing two kinds of tomato: Yellow Pear and Isis Candy. Both are little cherry tomato types. As you can see, I have LOTS of tomato plants. That's the problem I have with starting things from seeds. I end up with way too many plants. Maybe I can find people who want tomato plants. I don't really know how to go about that, though. I don't really know anybody with a yard that likes tomatoes.

July 1, 2003. Here is the tomato plant that is currently largest and healthiest. It is a Yellow Pear tomato and I started it indoors way back in April. It was touch and go there for a while in May as I tried to harden it off for outdoor planting, but it made it. I'm not very good at hardening off my indoor-sprouted seedlings. Too impatient, I guess. I often kill them. This plant is now about two feet tall, growing in a large terra-cotta pot.

July 1, 2003. My sugar snap peas. They're going INSANE. They are significantly taller than I am and that's after I cut the tops off several times in order to keep the peas out of the tree. We've had one large harvest already. Looks like a second is on its way. If only the cucumbers would do as well. We'll see.

July 1, 2003. Here is a boring photo of one of my happy, healthy Isis Candy tomato plants. This is one of three that I have transplanted directly into the ground in amongst the landscaping. Those yellowy shrubs in the background are called "Emerald 'N' Gold" or Euonymus fortunei. I'm ambivalent about them but Scot seems to like them quite a bit. Anyhow, back to the tomato: it is about a foot and a half tall and very vigorous. Should get a good crop from them this year.

July 1, 2003. This is our five-kinds-of-pears tree. It has branches from Red Bartlett, Highland, Rescue, Anjou and Conference pear trees grafted onto one trunk, resulting in five kinds of pears from one tree. Neat! So far, it hasn't gotten big or well-established enough to bring fruit to term. Last year, we almost had some pears but the blankity-blank-blanking squirrels got to them first. This year, we may get some fruit! The Red Bartlett and Highland branches have several small pears that seem like they may be brought to term this year.

July 1, 2003. Here is a closeup of one of the 2.5" long fruits on the Red Bartlett branch of our pear tree. Exciting!

July 1, 2003. This is my first-year asparagus. I planted it early this spring. You aren't supposed to pick your asparagus the first year you plant it. This allows the plants to become well-established. It has been very difficult allowing the tender, succulent asparagus spears to lengthen and mature into feathery inedible asparagus plants. I want to snack them up! Every time I look at them, I say to myself, "Next year... just wait... you can wait one year..."

July 1, 2003. This is my root vegetable planting bed. It is full of parsnips and Little Finger carrots. The parsnips won't be ready till fall, but look how tall their foliage is! I should have planted them on the other side of the bed so they didn't block sun for the Little Finger carrots. Oh well. Now I know for next time. The asparagus is at the far end of the bed.

July 1, 2003. Here we have a very large plant called a "Butterfly Bush". This particular type can get twenty feet tall. We hack ours back severely every spring but, as you can see, it still manages to get extremely tall. In this photo you can see that it is taller than the shed (that is the dormer in the background on the right) and is eating the ornamental cherry tree to the left of it. The landscapers apparantly didn't take into account the mature height and diameter of the plants before they put them in. We have several plants that were small and tame when the landscapers planted them but are now crowding out others. Sigh.

Even though the plant is a bit of a pain in the neck, I feel that these flowers make it all worthwhile. These are the flowers that the butterfly bush produces in abundance every summer. The fragrance is heavenly; kind of a honey-lilac sort of smell. It's fantastic! Unfortunately, the bees agree. Scot hates bees and kind of despises this plant. This cone-shaped cluster of tiny blossoms is nearly a foot long! Snip one of these suckers off and you have an instant boquet.

Here is a close-up of approximately 3" of the 12"-long cone of blossoms pictured above. This should give you some idea of scale. Again, I wish I could pipe the fragrance of these flowers through the internet so you could enjoy it as well.