Stolen thunder

I was looking at the yard yesterday and thought I should take some pictures of some of the flowers. But Tom beat me to it, so I stole his photos and his text from his family blog:

Summer Garden

The early summer garden is coming in, and a combination of a cool, relatively wet spring and warm but moderate weather in the last two weeks has brought the gardens around the front of the house into full bloom.


The early summer daisies are doing well, with long-lasting blooms. I put the daisies in two summers ago, and they are finally taking hold. I'm of the "put them in and see what works" school of gardening, and I try to use native species.


A week or so ago, the bleeding hearts made a spectacular display. I brought one of the plants from Chicago, an older variety that my mother, and perhaps her mother before her, cultivated at the farm, and bought two more modern varieties from a local nursery in Bear Valley. The differences between the two strains are typical of developments in flowers over the last thirty-odd years. The newer variety is larger, but somehow coarser and less beautiful.


The iris have also come into their own, both along the walk to the front door and alongside the driveway. The differences between older varieties and modern varieties show up clearly in the iris beds. The small, delicate iris on the left are an old variety, given to my great-grandfather by Al Ringling, and the larger, and to me less interesting, iris on the right are more modern varieties from Betty Staron's garden.

I favor early summer gardens, before the green foliage has become dark and dusty looking, and the plants looking stressed from the heat. Early summer gardens epitomize the hope of youth, and every year I am caught up, once again, in the promise of things to come.

I suppose I should know better at my age, but I don't.

Al Ringling, BTW, is one of the circus Ringling Brothers, who lived in Baraboo. Tom's great-grandfather sold them horses or something, I think.

Anyway, with less time at the railroad, Tom is putting in lots of work on the grounds at the house, and it is looking very good.