Solidly Summer

It was pretty late last night as I put away the garden fork and picked up the hand tools, trying to find them all with the light fading fast. There was a flash, and another, and another as the fireflies lit their lamps. I was tempted to try to catch a few and see whether my camera could focus on them, but decided that such treatment of these small sweet visitors would serve no purpose but to ‘feed the blog’. So they flitted unmolested and I watched them and was happy to live where they live.

We called them lighting bugs when I was a kid, and they were around every summer in Illinois. When we moved to our first Austin house, for five years I saw no fireflies. Was it the rocky terrain? Drier weather? Whatever the reason, May has brought us fireflies in the three springs we've lived at this house, and their appearance also confirms that we have crossed the line from Spring to Summer.

The butterfly plants that were mere buds in the last post have opened and the garden is alive with bees and butterflies. Buddleja “Black Knight” has exploded in dark, blue violet wands, with the Achillea Moonshine adding golden landing pads for insects.

The Verbena bonariensis is able to pull passing butterflies right out of the air – do any of you grow this plant? Philo took this photo of a swallowtail seeming to caress the flower.
This verbena was an annual in the north, but once you got it going, it almost always reseeded, even after below zero winters. Here it acts like a short-lived perennial, tall and bony in nature, useful for the edges of the border, where it acts as what Allen Lacy used to call a ‘scrim’ plant – a see-through curtain, softening the view and adding to the drama. The seeds tend to sprout at the edges of the bed, so as old plants die and new ones grow to blooming size, the curtain moves to work its effect on different scenes of the garden’s stage.

With no satin pillow for the first tomato, I looked around for something special enough.

This rosewood platter was made by my daughter in wood shop a few years ago. At that time, the philosophy of the middle schools was that every person should know how to do basic things – so all the students, both boys and girls, learned how to do some cooking and some sewing. Everyone took shop, everyone had some personal finance instruction and all students got basic consumer education. This little platter wasn’t a regular project – my daughter loved woodshop so much that the teacher allowed let her make this as an extra treat, and let her choose from a cache of small pieces of unusual wood. I loved it from the minute she brought it home, and could think of nothing finer as a salver for the Juliets. They tasted just fine! And the Early Girl might be ready tomorrow.

The Salvia guaranitica seen in the last post has opened more flowers, and on the opposite end of the bed, the Salvia guaranitica cultivar called ‘Black and Blue’ is now open, too, ready for bees and hummingbirds. The flowers are very similar, but this one has dark stems and the calyx is very close to black
Some of you in cooler climates are planning to grow Salvia guaranitica as an annual - I wish you lots of luck and hope you get to see these Salvias yourselves. Down here they grow so well they take over whole beds, needing to be pulled up like weeds before they smother their neighbors.

There’s another flower looming over us – the Pecan trees are in flower, too. The female flowers grow on spikes that emerge from the ends of some branches, but the male flowers hang down like this, in long trailing bunches, wafting pollen in the wind like cheerleaders shaking their pompons.

Soon the long strands will turn yellowish-brown and drop off by the hundreds, covering the area under the trees and inducing allergy headaches in the gardener who is trying to clean them up.

Congratulations and many thanks to Pam from Digging, who wrote a very cool story about the Austin Garden Bloggers. Some photos were taken the day we had our Ground Robin and they appeared in the paper, along with Pam’s article which was printed in the Austin American Statesman last Saturday.

We promised not to say anything before the article came out in print, but now we can proclaim it – you’re wonderful!