A Passion for Fragrance

Warm sweet clove fragrance of My Mary Azalea begs one to linger longer than usual to take in the beauty of her soft yellow flowers edged with just a whisper of burnt orange.  She's at her finest moment, the love of the gardens, and she demurely knows it.  No one person resists her.  This sultry temptress incognito, so subtly intoxicating, filling our senses with the faint passion of a longing for something more, like that of a caterpillar that has begun its journey to find that special place to fall into a deep sleep not really knowing why.

Sweet-shrub Athens begins to open her buds...one, two, ten, twenty, fifty, and two hundred.  Whiffs of freshly cut honeydew melon come and go day one, hang around day two, tantalize day three, cross over the line day four, overwhelm day five, and become quite vulgar by day six, morphing into an assault of a thousand rotting honeydews blasting one in the face. She's by the front door.  Catalog promised the scintillating aroma of luscious juicy red strawberries. They lied.  She's too hefty to relocate; she'd need a good blasting to kingdom come to remove her and all those tenacious baby suckers she keeps replenishing. She's at the first of many of her finest moments to come this season and next, so we comfort or agitate ourselves in knowing she's the finest of front door people repellents this side of heaven :(

Robed in a zillion tiny petals and hundreds of bees, China Girl Holly's fragrance remains evanescent; fluctuating with the gentle breezes or hiding in the soft stillness.  Up close...in her face is the only way to appreciate those delicate flowers and their evasive perfume.  There's no comparison, as the storms this morning stripped her of her petaled beauty, and all that can be said is that her scent reminds us of her, and let it remain your mystery for yet another year.

A Study in Lacey

Orphans in Rags and Other Wild Things

When plan A starts ripping apart at the seams, and the needle has run short of thread in a futile effort to bind it all back together, plan B starts looking mighty reasonable no matter how haywire it really is.  You're dropped off at work on a morning that should be as it appears - sunny and peaceful, but in your head it's morphed into cloudy and troubled cause your mode of transportation is in for repairs and you wonder just how long it's really gonna be before you'll be able to escape THE JOB that afternoon.

Time to think of "what ifs" has vaporized as the phone calls and walk ins are surrounding you like a swirling sea of quicksand sucking your sanity into the vortex of total chaos.  Since "patsy's" stamped in indelible ink on your forehead  and your wispy bangs are doing such a pitiful job of camouflage, it's just a matter of a very short time before the scenario of bad becomes worse...then it happens.

You've just been given a box of rags, and your curiosity instantly dies a short flaming death.  You know something's breathing in there, and what should have been another's problem is now yours.  You're told this is what's left of a possum verses four speeding tires, and you sigh.  Husband's called, then Walden's Puddle Wildlife Rehab, and you're wondering how to set up an appointment when the car could be ready anytime from an hour, or two or three from now.

A time is picked for the hour long drive after husband's hour long drive to pick you and your orphans up.  Husband calls, then Walden's Puddle's appointment is reneged and reassigned a later time after a lengthy discussion. Long story short...the four orphaned babies are now with another group of orphans, cuddled warmly together.  Speeding towards home you stop for a huge bottle of cool pepsi to pacify your defeated soul, cause you passed up a planned afternoon of weed pulling ecstasy in the gardens and the rains are moving in.  Ain't life grand?

Wild Things this April Afternoon

Andee's Day

A Handful of Sweet Nothings in the Midst of Weeds

dark grey sky

light grey sky

just below the horizon

the sun climbs

up into auburn clouds

as a peach drenched dawn

glows over the gardens

with the rainbows

in each of 

a thousand times ten

dewdrops touched by

the golden light

leaving sparkles

lingering on the landscape

disappearing slowly

in the growing warmth

of an April day

'Silverstream'

Amidst the all day spring showers that have already flooded some of the low dipping city roadways and byways, the younger tulip flowers are folded up tight against the dim lit sky as thunder rumbles across the heavens; but the oldies, way past their prime, are just letting it all hang out.  I'm caught in the middle of a five way love affair with those little beauties, and despite a sole dedication to promoting their survival in my gardens, those dastardly little beasties keep bailing out on me year after year...those ungrateful little twerps!  All of them that is, except the species tulips that seem to cling onto dear life with a passion despite the abundance of years they have been present in my gardens.

Silverstream,  was the prize choice to be stuffed into the ground early last winter, not for its low key beauty so much as for its promise of a whiff of fragrance to titillate the nose.  This tulip of many hues, like Josephs coat, seems to have a schizoid personality when it comes to color preferences.  It does not hit me squarely between the eyes as a WOW!!! tulip.  It's more like a dysfunctional extension of our family that in my gardens has forgotten how to emit even the slightest little poof of a scent...nada, zilch, niente, niks, zero, kapoot!     

Walking through the gardens today

I returned with

...weeds, that is.

When does this become fun, like you promised?

What the Hell?

Payback will be so sweet, BABYdoll!

Wild flowers sounds legit.  Weed flowers sounds, well...rather weedy and seedy, so why not talk about these obnoxious offenders whose mug shots are plastered on those Wanted More Dead than Alive posters all over my front and back yard.  Poor misunderstood cleaver plant, loving dubbed the velcro weed, with barbs lining its weak puny stems so it can climb up any unsuspecting neighbor, using its good buddy as a crutch to reach towards the sunlight.  Pull it and roll into a ball and it stays a weedy sphere of green as it sticks lovingly to itself.

Short, tall, it adapts to the current situation with ease and can love your wild flowers to death, literally, as it smothers them in deep shade.  Flowering way too early it will run you ragged trying to eradicate that sticky mass of mess before all those hundreds of teeny tiny white flowers becomes hundreds of teeny tiny sticky burrs.

Spring vetch is its accomplice, appearing on the horizon at the same time, with its cute little purple sweet pea like flowers and those multi-leaved delicate stems that curl around anything and everything on its way to covering every book and cranny of its existence in peapoddy green.  If those lovely purple flowers have matured into those petite little pods that have blacken and curl open, you can kiss your sorry arse goodbye...you're too late...you've missed the most important date of your gardening life; and next year you'll be meeting all its brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews for a jolly good weed festing nightmare.

The Boss, making sure mommy and daddy keep their noses to the grind stone until his playground is weedless and ready for this puppy to abuse and misuse.  Sometimes a human's life is the cat's paw when they're had by a dog who just knows he owns the whole works.