Wildflowers. Porches. And stuff.

[mrissa]

I really like the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. A lot. It is green and sometimes shady, and the bits that aren't shady have prairie things, which I like, and there are benches in good places for benches, and if you bring a pameladean, things will have a certain order to them, where the flowers and the dragonflies are comprehensible. At least the non-yellow ones are. (pameladean is apparently a Green Lantern. You heard it here first, folks.) I will want to go back and see that again with different wildflowers in bloom.

The porch guys are -- be still my heart -- fixing the porch. They came yesterday when they were supposed to and did the stuff that could be done yesterday, and then they came back today and are doing more stuff. It's really astonishing what a load off my mind all this is. I thought I had put it out of my head for the winter, but I hadn't. I think it was the lack of snow. Snow makes everything more tolerable, I think. Anyway, I have some faith that the painters and the driveway people will show up roughly on time and perform the work approximately as specified, and this is a great comfort.

It turns out that I have once again chosen a book that will not write itself. Go figure.

Comments

Eloise Butler

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

Louie and I are also quite fond of Eloise Butler (the place, not the person it's named after). Last year, we didn't go over there to walk and to commune with nature anywhere near often enough, and I can't remember why; but if we keep having very hot weather on the weekends this year, we may have the same unfortunate pattern redevelop. We also sometimes walk around the Rose Garden near Lake Harriet.

Nate B.

Re: Eloise Butler

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'd been to the Rose Garden several times before (and will go back -- I like it there) but never the Wildflower Garden. It was plenty hot today, but pameladean had put bottles of water in the freezer, so that was refreshing, and on the whole I would say it was definitely worth it.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It turns out that I have once again chosen a book that will not write itself. Go figure.

Dang. How can this happen? So often? (Me neither...)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm half way through Bridge of Dreams and I love it so far, nobody could tell it didn't write itself!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Aww. You-all are good to me. (I have to tell you, that book not only didn't write itself, it didn't write itself twice. Get me drunk sometime, and we'll swap stories about editors...)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We just need to be cleverer next time, is what.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I don't know where you get your books, but where I get mine, they don't come seasoned.

We just need to find the literary equivalent of Byerly's.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I should have known that all the answers would involve Byerly's somehow.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That sounds absolutely terrific. And go porch!

The wildflowers I am growing on the balcony are completely anonymous. They came in two packets marked "Wildflowers" and "Wildflowers for the Shade". I planted both of them much too close together in a herb planter, with some lobelia in case nothing else happened. They're now between 1mm and 3 inches high, and they're green, and they're different shapes, and that's really all I know about them. Even when/if they have flowers I probably won't recognise them unless they're in my Idiot Immigrant's Guide to the Simplest and Most Recognisable Wildflowers of Eastern North America. I have wanted to do this ever since we came here, and have just got around to it this year. I remain very excited about the project and may even hobble out and have a look at them this morning to see if they need watering, and today is not a day on which I am moving about very much.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

with some lobelia in case nothing else happened

That's Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, I am taking it?

Also,

They're now between 1mm and 3 inches high

I am loving these cross-cultural metrics, and kind of hoping this is a Canada thing, what with the French/English split'n'all...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Take a picture and make pameladean do the identifying for you! Unless they're yellow when they come out. Then ask someone else, arkuat or my mother perhaps.

[pameladean]

I can identify primroses, honest!

But then, Jo probably can too.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, as you saw yesterday, I can't. "Poppyish thinger" is not really a positive identification, much less a positive identification of something that is in no way a poppy.

[pameladean]

Well, it was kind of buried in the grass.

The tall plants with shiny yellow flowers that I said were in the buttercup family were, in fact, tall buttercup.

I'm not sure about the other one, but it could have been a tickseed (which is a kind of coreopsis). I forgot to look at the leaves. Broadly speaking, that plant is a DYC, or Damned Yellow Composite, so called by botanists because there are so many of them.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hee. Poor botanists.