Sunday, July 01, 2007

June's over

How long has it been since another like it? We haven't watered anything but pot plants that are in the sun. The roses of Sharon are going crazy. We still have a few California poppies and Drummond phlox and quite a lot of delphinium. The pride of Barbados is coming into its own and the flowers are attracting the first hummingbirds we've seen since the first couple of sightings weeks ago. There are still gazanias in pots, although the violas finally gave up a few days ago. I noticed for the first time that nasturtiums tilt just like a tilt-top tea table of the eighteenth century when the sun is hot and bright; in other words, their leaves forsake the customary horizontal, lilypad position to turn at complete right angles, all but parallel to the stems, thereby exposing the least possible amount of leaf surface to the direct rays of the sun. Now we're seeing larger grasshoppers. Ponder Lee, our timeshare cat, pounces on the proliferating crickets; whether she ingests them we don't know. Both colors of milkweed are blossoming again after the first wave of seed pods. We found a giant tomato hornworm on one of the potted plants; they are strong and don't want to let go, but this one is now housed a tomato-less yard elsewhere in the neighborhood. We still have black-eyed Susans and quite a few firewheels. The cassia (or senna plant), despite being in the grasshopper zone, is blooming for the first time in a few years, and profusely. Ruellia is flowering now, and so are the wild sunflowers. We're very happy to see that more and more people are leaving these sunflowers unmolested. I'd like to see them become identified with Austin. They grow where nothing else does, even in cracks in parking lots, and withstand the worst heat of summer, always blooming, and their seeds provide food for a great many creatures.

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