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Wide Shots - April 2020
It's April and time for one of my quarterly wide shots posts. After seeing what a great job another blogger, Cathy of Rambling in the Garden, did in conducting a full-blown video tour of her garden I...
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In a Vase on Monday: Fruit Sherbet
We had beautiful weather this past weekend and I spent a lot of my time in the garden, at intervals even managing to forget the circumstances currently facing everyone everywhere to one degree or...
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Wednesday Vignettes: Bird battles & other struggles
We've had a lot of birds of all kinds soaring around, through and over the garden during the last few weeks. I saw an oriole in the strawberry tree (Arbutus 'Marina') outside my office window Monday...
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Visiting my Lath House!
The title of this post is a play on the "Coronavirus Tourism" posters designed by Jennifer Baer and shown on her website, This is Colossal, which Denise of A Growing Obsession introduced me to last...
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In a Vase on Monday: Going overboard (again)
Our Easter holiday was eerily quiet. I shared greetings with some friends by email and others by text and enjoyed watching the birds splash in our fountain - the white-crowned sparrows take their...
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Bloom Day - April 2020
Spring is in full force here and at this time of year it seems impossible to cover everything that's in bloom. I decided to focus on the blue flowers and give shorter shrift to those in other colors....
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A small cause for celebration
Unable to trawl through nurseries and garden centers as I commonly do this time of year due to our shelter-at-home status, I've been suffering from plant shopping withdrawal. My local garden center...
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In a Vase on Monday: Scent
The spring floral lollapalozza in my garden continues. I have three vases to share again this week. The only thing that links them thematically is scent. Taken as a group, their fragrance is almost...
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Wednesday Vignette: Under Sunny Skies
After a couple of weeks of good rain here, the skies have cleared and it's sunny again. We're expecting steadily warming temperatures. Under those sunny skies, things are better in some places than...
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Project Updates: What's done and what isn't
On April 1st, I published a post on the garden-related projects my husband and I were focused on during the current stay-at-home order. Within a week, I relocated the Yucca 'Bright Star' I'd...
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In a Vase on Monday: Something a little different
Last week, we fast-forwarded into summer without any kind of transition. On Friday, our temperature peaked at 95F (35C). All the tender new foliage and recent spring blooms struggled, and some...
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Let's visit the back slope!
In the spirit of the "Coronavirus Tourism"posters created by Jennifer Baer, I'm providing another virtual tour of my garden, this time focused on my often-neglected and very steep back slope. (You can...
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Getting back to business
My local garden center has been closed to in-store traffic since the latter part of March when businesses began to shut down in response in California's order to stay at home for all but "essential"...
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In a Vase on Monday: Decisions, decisions
I thought I had all my choices made before I stepped into the garden on Sunday to select blooms for "In a Vase on Monday," the popular meme hosted by Cathy at Rambling in the Garden. But, facing...
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What season is it???
The current pandemic and the stay-at-home order that followed it have upended my usual activities and thrown my schedule into total disarray. Like many people I know, I find myself struggling to...
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Foliage in context
As we move reluctantly into summer here, I thought a look at some of the foliage that provides the backbone of my garden was in order. The difficulty taking photos under the glare of the sun with our...
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In a Vase on Monday: Taking advantage of new arrivals
I was feeling grumpy when I stepped into my garden on Sunday and briefly considered skipping flower arrangements this week. That didn't last. I got rolling on one and soon had flowers to fill three...
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Clean up, front garden
Last week I discovered that one of the large Auranticarpa rhombifolium shrubs growing in a bed facing the street was dead and that the shrub next to it appeared to be failing as well.  They were...
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Bloom Day - May 2020
In mid-May, it would almost be easier to list the plants that aren't flowering than to identify those that are. And this is despite the fact that, since mid-April, we've been hit by two heatwaves here...
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In a Vase on Monday: A mix of spring and summer blooms
There are still a LOT of flowers suitable for cutting here, as anyone who read Friday's Bloom Day post could tell, but yesterday I went looking for something a little different to include in this...
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