Phyllis and flowers

Phyllis, my mother, was the first flower gardener I knew as a child and I have vivid memories of some of her flowers that grew in our yard from those early days in the late 1950s. I returned home to Manassas in 1985 after years of study and fun in New York City to find she had let flower gardening slide and I dreamed of rebuilding a big flowering garden. With a lot of free time and the suburban luxury of the big yard in I began to discover gardening and Phyllis has supported our garden delights ever since. I was inspired also after I worked for a few years in a flower shop in NYC, called Pure Mädderlake, where I learned the names of lots of cut flowers and developed a taste for some really nice varieties. In Manassas I had a chance to try and grow them if I could find them and make it work in our climate and soil. Seems from this flower gardening I have developed an ever expanding interest in the environment and the natural world. 

This week I set out to take Phyllis to a native plants ground cover talk hosted by the Virginia Native Plants Society downtown Manassas. It was a great experience to be in a room with some many people interested in local native plants and the speaker Janet Davis from Hill House Farm and Nursery was inspired giving us lots to think about in the way a garden is constructed and grown. I recognized several plants during the slide show from experiences in gardening and walking the trails of the area. This plant we brought home seems to be the same one I was obsessed with photographing on my hike out at the Battlefield recently that was growing and blooming throughout the meadows and at the woods edge. 

I hope it grows for us in our home garden as well as it does out in the open untended fields of the battlefield park . 

The home garden was looking good, full of flowers and creatures. A few of them I had close encounters with and brought back images to share. 

While staking and tying up tall flowers in the front flower beds I nearly jumped out of my skin when I lifted a long bough of phlox to step into the garden and nearly stepped right on top of this great eastern box turtle. It's the first time we have seen one in the garden. 

This lovely sphinx moth that looked like a small humming bird or a really big bumble bee was all over the flowering butterfly bush and other deep throat flower trumpets sipping the nectar. It's Moth Week so I was excited to get home and discover I had some images of a very cool one who lives and flies in daylight hours. Its called a Snowberry Clearwing Hemaris diffinis fully described in the hot link. 

Sweet gum or Liquid amber tree by the old Koi pond still stands out in the back yard.

Virginia Creeper native vine 

 Our neighbor down Lomond Drive has six honey bee hives discreetly located behind a six foot tall fence and those bees are regular visitors now to the flowers and especially the purple flowering hyssop that smells like licorice candy when you crush the leaves. Makes me wonder if sipping that nectar impacts the flavor of his honey?

Last but not least the birds were always on my mind and in view when I looked for them in the trees around the house. These cardinals showed up twice and the catbird modeled in a low branch of the crepe myrtle trees for a nice portrait. 

I think I remember in grade school we were given little golden books to help identify various things like an adult I use books and now the internet to look up what I can. Though I never liked to read as a kid those picture books were endlessly interesting because of the great pictures and they helped me look more closely at the world around us where we played in the back yard and on trips to SW Virginia the woods the fields where we learned to respect the dangers and appreciate the other creatures in the world. It feels like I still have a lot to learn about the world around us.

Quilting and flowers

showing the zig zag edge over the side of sleigh bed

showing the zig zag edge on the blue pillows at the top of the bed

My English paper pieced rose star quilt is making good progress this week I finally got the last roses connected with the winged hexagon bits that go between and attached them all together to arrive at a finished size of about 86x84 inches. I went out to visit mom and see about getting it put with a backing and batting and getting it professionally basted together so I can hand quilt it more easily. I was not quoted a very good price for that work so I most likely will do it myself. As I have been working I decided to give it a decorative edge of points on the two sides that works out to be part of the design. You can see one edge is completed and the other side is soon to be done to match. Top and bottom or sides will be straight with maybe a border of a few inches added to give it more length for tucking and turning to keep dirty hands off the important parts. It was really difficult to choose but my conservative nature won in the shop when I was choosing the backing. I decided to back it with the same printed white muslin fabric that is between the colorful rose stars. I almost regret not being bolder and going with a red and white Jacobean line print I found but it was what my gut was telling me to do at the moment, use the white... it said. I took time to photograph some of the threads that were pulled out from a section as I removed the basting stitches used to hold the paper parts in place while assembling all the pieces. What a nest of thread it is and it's only about a third of the quilt that these came from to make this pile of threads which balled up is as big as both of my fists side by side.

pile of basting threads from the paper pieces of a third of the quilt after removing them and the paper. 

Now I am home getting ready to finish up the last of the zig zag edge on the other side of the Rose Star quilt. It has been a long haul from Jan. 15th when I began making rose stars in the challenge. It was a small block quilt group on Flickr.com set up with a simple tutorial by Clare who goes by the Nome De Plume Selfsewn. She is the blogger who started the group for us to share photos in the "Rose-Star block party" on Flickr. I am very happy that I kept going making rose stars beyond the challenge number of six making 54 which is just large enough to fit our queen sized sleigh bed top. It's going to be fun finishing it off over the remaining months of this year. At least I hope it won't take much longer than a year to complete the quilt even with quilting by hand. It could be that I need two years to finish but I hope not. 

quilt with zig zag at top and bottom on the bed 

quilt top with straight top and bottom.

The next thing we did was stop at the Merrifield Garden Center in Gainesville to see what we could find. I was hoping to find a dark purple 'Nicky' summer phlox but they didn't have a single one. Some others that were pretty but not that dark and rich in color. Mom got excited about some of the day-lilies that were still in bloom this late in the summer. She went out and picked one called Vanilla Fluff which is a big 6 inch doubled flower that smells of vanilla and the one she selected had three flowers open. So we brought it home and I planted it strait away. Another flowering plant in the green house caught her eye from half way across the nursery and we went to see it. Crossandra's orange flowers were pretty spectacular so she said she would like one of these to go home too. We packed it up and went back to Manassas. I sketched it at her recommendation this morning before I came home to DC.

Vanilla Fluff big day lily blooms

Vanilla Fluff daylilies

crossandra in the rose pot Manassas 

sketch of crossandra 

Rain in July

Mom always said if it rains on her Birthday, July 15th, we will have a lot of rain in the following weeks So far it looks like this year her prediction is coming true. This week has been extra wet and thankfully a good deal cooler. However that may change back to hot in the days ahead. This time of year I watch the rain and storm reports carefully to see if I need to rearrange things in the garden. Usually to avoid wind damage to potted plants I have to weight them or even turn them on their sides during windy
thunderstorms.  I rarely get a total rainfall measurement from the news and sometimes I just wonder how much did rain did fall right here in my garden. I had this rain gauge from Casey Trees open house sitting in the studio for about a year and I thought why don't I just stick it in the ground and see what happens. Well the first night it was stormy weather, it was a whopper of a thunder storm with one and seven tenths inches accumulation I discovered the next morning. Wow how exciting to know the number of inches was a lot so I took a picture for proof below.

Naturally with this new gauge in the garden I wanted more data, so I dumped it out and repositioned it for the next 24 hour count. This morning it is still sprinkling by noon the gauge check was an additional six tenths of an inch. Plenty of rain for the garden and the trees in the neighborhood which require 1.5 inches if they are recently planted. Or as the gardener you have to see they get 25 gallons per week to survive and thrive.  

Lately I have been a little off with my daily sketching routine. Not feeling inspired with the heat and just being alone for a few weeks didn't seem to make it any easier nor more difficult I just didn't feel like drawing in addition to all the other stuff that seems to need to be done. Finally on Friday morning, after that big rain and no duty to do watering in the garden, I went out and did a sketch from the flowers right in the garden for a change.
Maybe I needed a break from my routine to get back to a more direct expression of the flowers in the garden. Earlier this year I felt stuck inside with all the cool flower arrangements Keith has been making for his 365 days of Ikebana. That and the extra hot weather made sitting in the garden seem too difficult and uncomfortable.

While I was sitting there drawing I realized that the House Wrens had indeed hatched another clutch of babies over the last couple weeks. It seemed to me that they were fooling around the bird house not sitting on the eggs once they were laid but after listening carefully I heard the baby begging noises coming from the house again for the second time this summer. I tried to get a photograph of what I was watching. The adults coming and going delivering bugs to the babies. Here is a series of images showing some of what I saw.

The adult birds make a lot of warning noise, like a clicking sound. When I am out in the garden they click and scold me especially when I get close to the bird house full of babies. You can see these pictures clearly show the house wren is keeping an eye on me as it comes and goes.
Today it was too drizzly in the garden to sit out there to do my sketch so I decided to cut a flower and bring it into the studio to draw. These hosta flowers smell sweet like a gardenia and they are large and showy so it is a delight to have them by my desk this afternoon as I am writing this blog post.

It's very satisfying to have sketches each day piling up. I don't know what they are for but they at least make the day feel like it means something. I really enjoy having a way to share my sketches as soon as I can get them loaded on the Internet. It feels very good to hear that people see and like my photos and sketches.

This week has been full of tragedy with the cowardly murder of 12 and wounding of 50+ men, women and children in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater. I think of how scared all those attached to such a horrible experience will be for the rest of their lives. It's a sad thing when people have so little love and respect for their neighbors lives. Meanness is all around us but so too is love. I dream of a world where guns and murder are no longer needed and everyone lives in peace. We have to have hope that impossible things can happen or they really will not. Speaking of impossible I used to think that surviving AIDS was impossible but I had hope that I could live longer if I got involved in the search for a cure... twenty five years later I find I was right to get involved. This week begins the International AIDS conference in Washington DC. I plan to attend some of the marches and free educational and cultural events at this years conference.  I went to the conference in 1992 Amsterdam Netherlands. It was right after my partner had died of AIDS and they didn't even know which infection killed him so I was amazed to see so many people coming together to find an effective treatment from all over the world. It helped me get my hope back and keep strong as my own illness progressed. Now I hear that 30,000 from around the world will be coming to this years conference right here in my home town. I hope to be inspired yet again that a cure is coming but only if we keep pushing those who are in power to look for it will it come true. That much I know from experience. Act Up, Fight Back, Fight AIDS is what we used to chant at all the ACTUP marches and demonstrations. That was effective at getting the media to pay attention to the less than 200,000 people infected with the virus. Now it's millions infected and that call has faded but the need to find a cure is as important as it ever was. Will they hear the calls for a cure? Watch TV this coming week to see what they report and monitor the papers to see if they really are telling the stories of real people in need of help or just reporting sensational news to sell advertising...

summer's bounty

Tree down with power poles and wires across the street from my apartment June 30th

Day lily sketch July 12th

Summer is really here in Washington DC. We had a storm at the end of June that set records for our area. Power was taken out by downed trees and power lines by a rain storm called a Derecho that began in Chicago and swept by WDC like a hurricane with 80-90 mile per hour winds and heavy rains and lightening strikes. More than half of all homes in the city lost power and many more in the suburbs north and south. Thousands many went without it for a week, my place was powerless for four days and the temperatures went soaring. In the garden in spite of the heat setting records with 12 days above 95ºF and a consecutive run of 4 days with temperature over 100ºF. I measured 114º on our back porch in the shade one afternoon as the outside temperature only rose to 105º. I escaped the heat and the lack of power by taking our frozen foods and driving out to Manassas for a few nights. I took a walk round the neighborhood and took a few pictures before I left to get an idea of how bad the storm was before I left.

Still the flowers grow and they bloom even in this amazing hot air. It's a bit of work to get out each day and take my walk and water those many patches of plants and trees in our gardens front and back yard. Some grand flowers bloom this time of year in our gardens. Many daylilies are reaching peak and then the Asian lilies bloom most favorite of all the Casa Blanca white tall lily which has numerous blooms.  The storm blew some of them into slanting postures but they are still pretty and with the heat outside I felt it was wise to bring a few in the house and give some to friends and neighbors to enjoy.

The one tree that I have and was most excited about blooming began this week with it's first flower in it's new home on the curb side. It survived the winds and storm and hot days to look pretty happy in it's new spot. I am looking forward to more and more flowers as the month progresses. My red crape myrtle thrives.

red crape myrtle is the same read as the stop sign at the corner across the street!

I worry about the changes in the weather but there isn't much any one person can do other than try to vote for changes to policy makers in the coming elections and live a greener life with all the choices we make.