A Possible Culprit, and Thom Gunn

This is Persicaria amplexicaulis, which we have growing in the "Ratthew zone" of our garden below the blackberries. Every time I pick blackberries I wade into this plant and reach through the leaves. Bailey, in her obsessive quest to conquer Ratthew in all his iterations, has been practically rolling around in it. (In fact she's done quite a bit of damage to it, but it's tough!)

Blogger Jennifer asked in a comment whether my itchy arms might not be due to irritation from a plant. I hadn't really thought about it before, so I did some Googling about this Persicaria, and lo and behold, what did I find? "Contact with all parts may irritate the skin," warns the Royal Horticultural Society. Who knew?!

I suppose this may in fact be the culprit when it comes to my itchy arms (and legs, to a lesser degree), not to mention Bailey's itchiness. I don't break the leaves or stems or come into contact with any visible sap, so I'm not 100 percent certain, but it seems likely. Maybe I just need to wear sleeves while picking berries. (I suppose if bugs were to blame that would help too.) I don't think I can realistically keep Bailey out of it, but hopefully her fur gives her some measure of protection.

Here's a less toxic denizen of our garden -- some zinnias, now in full flower and pretty much identical, which is purely by chance because the seeds were mixed.

This was one of my projects yesterday -- to refresh the plants on our front porch. I bought that beautiful Echinacea at Waitrose on Thursday, and the little blue balloon flower I bought yesterday at a florist. The annuals we had out there from the spring were looking sad, so this gives the front door a bit of a lift.

We had a lobelia in that gray pot for nine years (!) but it had been gradually dwindling, and it expired this summer. I think Warren missed it when he watered during our absence and it just got baked. I never liked it much anyway.

And of course I spent more bonding time with Bailey. This is her "pleeeeeeease keep rubbing my belly" face. We went for a walk to Kilburn Grange Park and up through Kilburn toward Cricklewood. She seems like a more dutiful walker than Olga, to such a degree that I worry she's not having much fun -- especially because I can't let her off lead to play with a ball or anything. Her new long lead did arrive yesterday so maybe today we'll experiment with that a bit.

Otherwise, I spent part of the day reading a biography of Thom Gunn, the poet, which I bought a couple of years ago. The subtitle is "A Cool Queer Life," and while Gunn was gay and quite edgy, the book is pretty sophisticated in its discussion of his poetry -- so much so that I'm afraid it's going over my head. I really don't know Gunn's poems, so I struggle when the author gets specific about certain works or wades into the philosophy behind his writing (Gunn was a big fan of Stendhal and Camus, neither of whom I've read or know much about). I'm more interested in his relationships and his life as a gay man in the '50s, and how he made that work in such a conservative era. Fortunately the book goes there too.

I also spent part of the day on the phone with my brother trying to sort out certain aspects of my stepmother's estate. I have to go back to the notary on Tuesday to sign more documents. Ugh!

Last night I made a martini and watched a movie called "M/M," a surreal gay German film that I've had on my list for ages, and ultimately found pretty tedious. I don't know whether the martini hurt or helped!

Drought and a Mystery Object

It's definitely summer again, because my arms are itching like crazy. This happens to me every year, and I have gone back and forth about the cause, vacillating between sun exposure and insects. I'm now back on the insect hypothesis. I seem to develop this problem when it's blackberry season and I'm reaching into the bushes to pick berries, so I think some kind of little no-see-um is biting me. Once again I suspect insidious flower bugs, aka minute pirate bugs, though I haven't seen any of the bugs themselves.

What's funny is, the area where I'm being bitten (I think) is also the area where Bailey killed Ratthew the other day:

She is now fixated on this part of the garden and is running into those bushes every few minutes to make sure there's not another Ratthew lurking there. And we've noticed that she is also itchy! I wonder if those pirate bugs are biting her?!

Even when she's lying on her bed, her eyes are locked on the Ratthew zone.

Dave departed yesterday morning for the USA, and texted me later that he arrived just fine. He thoughtfully scheduled a grocery delivery for me yesterday afternoon that I somehow missed. I'm not sure what happened, because I was home -- I was in the garden but I still should have heard the doorbell (and Bailey definitely would have heard it). I wonder if the guy came early when I was running errands.

Our water shortage is becoming increasingly dire. The other day, when France and Spain were burning, I said to Dave, "It's only a matter of time before we get similar fires here." And sure enough, a 200-acre fire sprang up on the Suffolk coast. The Environment Agency says we are in an "exceptionally serious" drought and Wales apparently had its driest July since record-keeping began, 200 years ago. Southern England has had one percent of its expected July rainfall.

Even scarier is that this may be the new normal. We've had an officially declared summer drought in three of the past five years. I've been watching an apocalyptic BBC show called "The Rapture" which takes place during a heatwave, and it's all shot in a sort of yellow-orange tone with the foliage looking dried out, and frankly it's all hitting a little close to home for me!

We are respecting the hosepipe ban -- though I did use the hose to wash the dog yesterday. Is dog-washing allowed? I have no idea. I could do it in the bathtub but why let that water go down the drain when it could benefit the garden?

A certain neighbor is running her sprinkler as usual and her lawn is as fresh as a green carpet.

Speaking of the garden, I keep finding these things when I dig, and I've never known what they are. 

I knew it wasn't very old, though, because it has a recycling symbol on it.

I took these pictures and searched Google, and turns out it's a plastic lawn-mower blade for a brand of mower called a Flymo. I think this was the plastic mower that came with the flat, and that I got rid of (with the landlord's permission) several years ago. We never used it. The blade seems so small, doesn't it? The cutting radius must have been incredibly narrow, unless there were multiple spinning blades.

Coming from Florida, I find the idea of a plastic lawn mower hilarious. A Flymo would positively explode mowing a lawn there. But I guess here in England, with our wimpy northern grass, it can do the trick under certain circumstances.

I'll stick with our metal one. And as I said, I've found several of these plastic blades lying around out there, so even on our lawn they're apparently not super-durable.

RIP Ratthew

We finally have a successful sunflower! And this is not the biggest one, which is yet to come. I grew four of them from seed, and one -- the weakest and skinniest -- bit the dust while we were in Italy. The other three are powering along, two in the garden and one in a planter at the side of the house.

I always feel like I've had success once a plant blooms and I've posted its picture to my blog.

The Bailster and I took a couple of walks yesterday, once around the neighborhood in the morning and to the cemetery in the afternoon. I'm trying to make this our routine.

She's a little harder to photograph than Olga because I have to keep ahold of her leash. But she is gradually learning her name, and I've ordered a long (10-meter) training lead from Amazon which hopefully will let her roam a bit more widely while still giving me control (and making sure she returns to me). I also ordered a label for the lead that says "No Dogs -- I Like People," which should warn away any canine owners who want to put their dogs nose-to-nose with Bailey.

We had some excitement yesterday in the garden when she killed a rat right in front of me. Dave was inside with a visiting nurse, learning how to self-administer his new Crohn's injections, and I was sitting on the garden bench reading. Bailey wandered into some bushes and suddenly I saw her pounce, and next thing I knew she had Ratthew in her mouth. I will spare you the picture. That dog is earning her keep! We buried Ratthew.

Speaking of garden benches, this was yesterday's project. Our new bench, meant to replace the deteriorating one that has become a source of wasp building materials, arrived and Dave and I put it together. (Bailey was very helpful too.) This one is made entirely of metal, so hopefully it will hold up in the weather better than the wooden one did, although it lasted ten years so I can hardly complain.

Here's the new bench in situ. It's comfortable! I set the wooden one in the far back corner of the garden for now, so the wasps can continue to chew on it, but I'll have it taken away later in the autumn.

Here was my other garden project for the day. Several months ago I planted a teasel in a big plastic pot, and I recently noticed that Nicole the Nicotiana apparently also dropped a seed in there, so then we had two plants competing for space in the single container. Yesterday I put them both in the ground, where hopefully they can coexist with room for their roots to spread. (In the process I found two more toadflax brocade moth caterpillars, which I was careful not to harm.) This is about the worst weather I could imagine for planting a plant -- the ground is as hard as a paving stone -- but I used lots of water so that helped a bit.

Our afternoon walk in the cemetery was warm, and when I turned on a spigot to give Bailey some water, she promptly rolled around in the puddle just like Olga used to do. I guess this is a staffy thing -- luxuriating in mud! Needless to say, bathing was required when we got home. Only a dog can manage to get muddy in a drought.

Paperwork and Baileywork

I found this little crab spider nestled in one of the blossoms on our "Poodle Skirt" dahlia. Can you see it in there, waiting for an unsuspecting bee or fly to come along? I wonder how it manages to find blossoms -- are these spiders just out there, migrating from flower to flower?

Yesterday was a day for getting things done. My mental inbox has been full of a bunch of stuff that I had to get cleared out.

First of all, I had to mail my ballot for the Democratic primary election in Florida. The election is August 18 and I just realized the other day that I never received an overseas ballot as requested. So I sent a message to the Supervisor of Elections in the county where I vote, and they e-mailed me a ballot. I filled it out, printed and mailed it yesterday. Done!

I don't care much about the Democratic primary but I want to stay active on the voter rolls and also get a sense of how this will work for the general election in November.

Second, I had to file the insurance claim for my camera. Dave had to sign, scan and copy some documents, which he did yesterday morning, and I pulled everything together and filed the claim electronically yesterday afternoon. I don't think I need to send paper copies as well but I'll double-check on that. I hope everything I sent will be sufficient; we shall see.

So that's two big items off my plate. In addition I caught up on some e-mails and blog-reading.

And of course I took care of this beast. She lay in the garden with me after an eventful neighborhood walk. She really does not like other dogs. She ran into Olga's black lab and spaniel pals from the nearby housing estate and I thought she was going to take their heads off. I see what the rescue place means about her needing to stay on a lead. She is a very different dog from Olga, and who knows what dark things may have damaged her psychologically in the past.

Fortunately she is very sweet to both of us, and to the other people she meets. It's only dogs she can't stand. She is happy to lie on our laps, submit her belly for rubbing and sleep with us in bed.

In the afternoon we took her to Fortune Green and the cemetery, where we walked the forested paths and she could watch the squirrels (above). She looks tiny in that photo but she's really not that small; about 22 kilos, roughly the same size as Olga. It's just a matter of perspective, I guess.

Afterwards we went to Sweet Corner, the corner cafe, and had a coffee in the air-conditioning while she lay by our feet.

And remember that alligator chew toy that we bought for Olga years ago? Olga never knew what to do with it; she much preferred her Kongs. But Bailey loves eviscerating a soft chew toy. We gave her the alligator and she made short work of it, first methodically gnawing a small hole in the tough outer covering and then pulling out all the stuffing and the squeaker. After that, she beheaded it.

Here's some of the action, in case you'd like to see the carnage first-hand.

She still has a lot of puppy in her. Fortunately she doesn't chew anything she shouldn't. (So far!) I hope I can redirect some of this chewing energy to the Kongs, because they are very sturdy and will hold up, unlike the soft toys. Remember how Olga used to gnaw Kongs apart as a young dog? We've been through all this before!

Her world is about to be shaken again, because Dave leaves tomorrow for a ten-day trip to the USA to see his parents and attend Drum Corps events in Indiana. She's very bonded to Dave so I hope this doesn't unsettle her too much. Fortunately the rest of her new routine should remain more or less the same.

Bailey

Meet the newest member of our household -- Bailey.

As you know we applied several days ago to adopt her from a local dog charity called All Dogs Matter. We got Olga from the same organization back in 2012, so it was only natural for us to return to them. The process unfolded smoothly -- because they know we've been dog owners in the past -- and yesterday the woman who runs the group told us we could come and get Bailey at their kennels in Waltham Abbey in far northeast London.

We were initially thinking we might go Wednesday, because Dave had Zoom meetings yesterday and today for school. But I volunteered to go on my own, because I wanted her here as soon as possible -- so that's what we did. (I also picked up Olga on my own, so there was precedent for this!)

I met Bailey at the shelter and walked her around the grounds, and played with her a bit. Here's what we know: She's about a year and a half old, she's had at least one litter of puppies and she's only recently coming out of heat. She was apparently abandoned after producing those puppies. She has a microchip but it's blank -- there's no owner information registered -- and the chip itself is Romanian. We don't know whether this means Bailey came from Romania, or whether someone imported Romanian chips and implanted them here.

There's been some confusion over her name. The shelter office named her Bailey and put her on their web site with that name. But apparently the carers at the kennel called her Tali, as in Natalia, because of her Romanian connection. Dave and I had already agreed that Bailey seems a good name so I think we're going to keep it. The dog doesn't seem to know either name, so I'm not sure it matters to her.

After meeting her, I called the same taxi service that I took from the tube station to the shelter, and a nice guy named Graham who is a fellow Staffy enthusiast himself drove me from Waltham Abbey all the way back to West Hampstead, at what seemed to me a bargain rate. The odyssey took all afternoon but I finally got Bailey home around 4 p.m.

Dave, meanwhile, was out buying some supplies, including food, treats and poop bags. He gave Bailey a stuffed hot dog with a tuggy rope inside, and she promptly eviscerated it (as you'll see in the video below). I got out Olga's old Kongs and her old bed, and we still have some of her other belongings, so we're good to go with dog equipment.

Bailey is about the same weight as Olga, but her legs are shorter and she's a bit stockier.

I told Dave a better name for her might be Sherman or Pershing. He didn't get the tank reference, but she really is shaped like a tank. Or, as Dave said, a torpedo.

So now, it's getting-to-know-you time in the PapenReed household! Bailey has already showed a fondness for Dave's chair, which was also one of Olga's favorite retreats.

I'm both excited to have Bailey with us and sad, deeply sad, that she's not Olga. I know that's unfair and I think the feeling will go away with time, but it is what it is. Bailey seems more hyper-vigilant and laser-focused, with a bit of ADHD, but I think some of that will subside as she relaxes. 

The rescue people made a big deal about Bailey's nervousness around other dogs. They said she has a strong "prey instinct" and always chases squirrels and cats (which, again, is something we're used to). Yesterday evening, as we watched TV in the living room, she kept leaping at houseflies.

Apparently she doesn't tolerate yappy dogs very well and the rescuers recommended I keep her on a lead while walking. She's still very young, so I'm hopeful that as she grows up and calms down, and gets more comfortable in our household, she'll be a little less triggered by other dogs and we can eventually let her off-lead. I got such joy from watching Olga romp through the woods on Hampstead Heath that I can't imagine not doing the same with Bailey. Just not right away.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking I'll order one of those long leads from Amazon so she will be attached to me but with some freedom to run.

She's got a lot of puppy energy but she seems well housebroken and she's shown no destructive tendencies, aside from thoroughly killing her toys. Here's what she looks like as I'm typing this post:

Garden Life With Caterpillar

We had a very, very light spattering of rain yesterday, which was a nice surprise. It's the first rain we've had in all of July but it wasn't enough to matter. It lasted about four seconds, just enough time to leave drops on the windows and remind us what rain looks like, and then vanished.

According to our local NW3 weather web site, this is the driest month on record:

But that doesn't mean things aren't growing in the garden. The inulas (above) are blooming...

...as are the red-hot pokers, or Kniphofia. This is the one that I dug up last year because it was being shaded out by surrounding plants. I put it in a pot and moved it to a sunnier space, and now we're seeing a tiny developing flower. It hasn't bloomed in years, so I'm glad that work paid off.

The African daisy is still producing blossoms. It's having a banner year.

And these, believe it or not, are chrysanthemums. Remember the ones I bought for the front porch last autumn? When the flowers faded I simply kept them, and they died back to almost nothing, but then they came out again this summer and they're covered with buds. I've always treated chrysanthemums like annuals but it's nice to know they'll bounce back if overwintered.

On the indoor plant front, remember the yucca I pruned back in May? It has finally, finally sprouted from the cut-off stalk. So next year, after these little sprouts have grown a bit, I'll cut the other stalk down and we'll have a rejuvenated (and much smaller and more manageable) yucca plant.



Here's the whole garden. As you can see, our grass is not happy. I mowed the "No-Mow May" area in the center rear of the garden, because the grass had gone to seed and I don't think there were any bugs doing anything meaningful in there. The insect world is already beginning to decline as we move toward autumn.

Dave discovered this fellow on some toadflax in a pot. It's the caterpillar for the toadflax brocade moth. (This is where I wish I had my macro lens -- the camera phone photo doesn't do it justice!) Anyway, I'd just pulled up some toadflax so I went rushing to the yard waste bin to make sure I didn't inadvertently throw away any caterpillars, and I didn't see any. Close call for this guy, who fortunately is on a plant I left behind.

A Sunny Heath Day

Yesterday was mostly quite joyful, if a little sweaty. I spent the morning trimming the shrubbery around our patio. The bushes need to be knocked back every month or two in summer or they'll swallow the patio like the Yucatan jungle swallows Mayan ruins.

Then I went for a walk on Hampstead Heath, taking my new AirPods so I could catch up on my podcast episodes along the way. The fireweed is mostly spent by this time of the year (above).

And the pond on Sandy Heath is once again paved with green duckweed.

I walked a route that I often walked with Olga, and although I missed her as I always do when I walk on the Heath, this time I could also look forward to having another dog to bring with me. Dave and I have applied for one through the animal rescue organization where we got Olga all those years ago -- we'll see if we get her. We're waiting to hear back.

One of the best things about walking like this is just letting my mind wander. My dad used to call it "cycling his mind," and he'd do it sitting at the breakfast bar in his house, often with the television on. I prefer to cycle my mind while on my feet.

I walked all the way up to the northern part of Hampstead Heath Extension, and then back through Golders Hill Park, where I stopped for a quick coffee. The park was bustling, especially the line for ice cream.

This has been a banner year for Jersey tiger moths. I've seen several of them, including three just yesterday. One was in our house, and another was lying on a path on the Heath with damaged wings. I lifted it up onto some ivy but sadly, although its body appeared fine, it will probably die. I wonder what happened to it? Bird? Dog?

I captured the one in our house and set it free outside.

The pigeons are roosting in this willow in the middle of the pond at Golders Hill Park. I guess it's an ideal spot for birds, surrounded by a moat and thus safe from predators. I like the way that bird at top left was zooming in for a landing just as I snapped the picture.

I came home and put on some music while Dave made pasta and meatballs in the kitchen. He used a bag of pasta he brought back from Amalfi, a brand recommended by our guide as authentic. It tasted pretty much like most pasta, we thought, but that doesn't mean it wasn't good.

Anyway, while he was cooking, some songs by Bobbie Gentry came across my iTunes, and I wondered what had ever become of her. Turns out she's now 83 years old and retired, and good for her. Most people know her from "Ode to Billie Joe," her gothic song about mysterious events on the Tallahatchie Bridge, which made her a star in the late '60s and was even turned into a movie starring Robby Benson. But she actually wrote a lot of excellent songs.

While sipping my martini in the golden light of evening, I was struck by the beauty of this song (once past the weird violin opening). Give it a listen. Maybe it will strike you too. And if so, you can follow it up with this one and this one.