The Early Bird Gets the Dickens

Remember how I said the garden was beginning to feel a little claustrophobic? Here's a good example -- the path leading up from the patio. That gigantic dusty miller -- which grew from a tiny little plant I bought back in 2022 -- is encroaching from the right, and we have a rambling rose and the crocosmia "Lucifer" leaning in from the left. You can still see the stepping stones I made during the pandemic from some of the pottery shards I'd collected on my walks, but just barely! We can sidle through here without too much trouble but I do feel a bit like Dr. Livingstone in need of a machete.

I did a bit more gardening yesterday, trimming and neatening and repotting a fern that lives in the back atop our celebrity plant pedestal. The older fronds on our tree fern were in a sort of in-between zone between life and death -- substantial portions were alive and green but some bits and pieces were brown. So I painstakingly trimmed away all the brown parts, thinking it would be good to save what's still photosynthesizing and benefitting the plant. And then a few hours later Dave marched past holding the entire fronds, having cut them off himself and thus negating all my work.

Oh well.

The Brugmansia seems happy, with five flowers (two of them hidden in this picture).

Here's what I found early yesterday morning on my way to buy a carton of milk. Someone discarded a trash bag full of old books, which had clearly been sitting out overnight as the top volumes were a bit damp. I took about half of them (above). I've never read "The Woman in White" or anything by Elizabeth Gaskell, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Harris Barham or Len Deighton. I might try all of those. I have read "Great Expectations" and I'm not sure why I took it except that I hated to see it thrown out. "Straight to the Mark" is a Victorian novel supposedly meant to teach morality to young people. It could be incredibly tedious -- it was published by a company devoted to religious tracts -- but it has a beautiful cover so I took it anyway.

I left behind some practical nonfiction ("How it Was Made") and religious books, as well as Robert Browning's poetry and half of "Tom Jones" and "The Count of Monte Cristo," which were published in two volumes but both had one missing. The funny thing is, by the time I went to the store and came back with my milk, all the rest of the books were gone too. Someone must have come along behind me and scavenged the rest.

Here's a peculiar set of images I found while scanning slides. Back in 1991, someone took pictures on a beach of a distant person doing what looks like yoga poses. (Or maybe just acrobatic ones.) They're mysterious pictures, aren't they? Did the photographer know that person? Were they aware in advance that the person was going to bend over backwards? Why are they so far away? So many questions. I love the colorless sort of moonscape, though -- it adds to the surreal quality.