A Tour of the End-of-Summer Garden

I had a very time loading the pix in this post. I don't get how sometimes I can upload those pictures like a pro, and a minute later, I keep getting "Safari is not responding." How does Safari decide when it will and won't respond? Wouldn't it be cool if we could all that - when the demands at work or home got so great that we could just send a message that we are not responding, and the person who needs something from us would then just kind of shrug and say ok, I'll try again later....

Anyway, I toured my gardens this weekend and the results are posted above.

The top picture is from next-door neighbor Harry's garden. Harry is a sweet retired pediatrician who taught himself how to garden and he grows the most beautiful dahlias, and they last longer than any other flowers in the neighborhood.

The 2nd picture is the only living flower that remains in the flower garden. I had forgotten that I planted these mums, but they are the surviving living flowers that are left. It's nice to know that not everything died.

The 3rd picture is the garden with the dying jack-o-lanterns, aka "Laurel's Garden." My sister Laurel took a garden that was full of 5 feet tall weeds and cleaned it all out as a birthday present a few years ago. A great present. Unfortunately, this garden is all stones, and they go way down deep. So we have learned which plants can survive anything, and those plants include the jack-o-lanterns that you see (quite beautiful in their blooming days) and mint. One planted sprig of mint yielded many huge mint plants.

The remaining pictures are what's left of the veggie garden, which Hubby cleaned out. What remains is what I call "Bing's Kitchen." Bing is our beautiful blonde outdoor cat (the brother of 2 indoor cats). Bing's kitchen consists of a catnip plant and some kind of mint plant that he finds to be even more enticing than the catnip. Lately, when we let Bing out, he heads over to his kitchen and munches on the plants, which for some reason I find amusing. There is one other outdoor cat in our neighborhood - a chunky, all black tailless specimen. Well I found him lying in Bing's Kitchen, right next to the catnip plant. I don't know if he was enjoying the scenery or if he was just plain stoned.

It's funny how the end of summer is such a melancholy time. No other season ending has that feeling. Fall just kind of turns into winter, and no one is sorry to see winter or spring end.

I have no idea why this just popped into my head, but years ago when we were at the cottage, my son was just kind of daydreaming and I asked what he was doing. "Glazing into my birdness" is what he replied. He has always kind of marched to a different drummer, but it was kind of a catchy phrase. So when we're out there on cloud 9 sometimes and someone asks what we're doing, we'll often reply "glazing into my birdness."