Bees make merry every morning now in the bread seed poppies, ensuring that a good supply of that wonderful baking ingredient will be harvested.
Thank you bees for your part in bringing poppy seed pancakes and muffins to the brunch table next winter.
Having become momentarily distracted by the wildfires burning around me, here is the post sharing some of the ways the Garden of Earthly Delights celebrated the full Flower Moon.
A whole galaxy of Shasta daisies glows front and back from a spring division of the mother plant.
They make great cut flowers and are the backbone of any bouquet when I need one.
Or an offering for the kitchen gods. While we have said deities’ attention: please could the (in)famous desert fire ants be persuaded to find another place to play. Walking barefoot in my kitchen isn’t fun at the moment. My feet are covered in welts from fire ant bites. They think it is their territory. I dispute this, but come rainy season I know they will magically go away again. At least they keep their activity on ground level, are not falling from trees down inside clothing like in Hawaii.
This magnificence of ornamental allium is flowering on shorter stems than I expected. I think the heat is proving problematic for these Allium Ostara hybrids.
The Chilopsis (Desert Willow) out front is covered in blossoms. They don’t last long in the hot dry winds, but briefly have a light fragrance and can be used for tea.
I’m considering whether to prune this to a single trunk and branches for a classic tree shape, as most gardeners in the neighborhood do, or leave it to take its natural shrubby, many limbed form.
Similarly the Desert Bird of Paradise, also out front, and also blooming marvelous at the moment, could be pruned to tree shape. I thought I liked them shrubby and natural, but after visiting a neighbor’s garden where they had done an artful pruning over a span of twenty years, I am not so sure any more. There’s an elegance and grace can be achieved through pruning: it’s sculpting in partnership with a growing thing. I have a few months to think about this because I probably would only take out the pruning saw in dormancy.
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