We bought this mullien late last fall or winter. Its twin flower stocks have reached over five feet tall. The other mulliens we have grown over the years have been pink or red. This yellow one is spectacular, its color nearly unique in the gardens. We hope to harvest its seeds later this summer and replant it along the top of the terraces for another show next spring.
Our friend Richard Knight had accumulated a great selection of books, and his widow, Judith, recently gave us several from their library.
I looked through one on flowers and was happy it confirmed the flower I had been calling a California primrose is indeed an evening primrose that thrives in Northern California.
Over the last few weeks, I took several photographs of it in bloom with canterbury bells, delphiniums and love-in-the-mist.
15 months or so after I started them from seed, the canterbury bells are blooming. The ones in the garden between the garage doors have received the most sun, so they are the largest - about three feet tall by three feet wide - and are more fully in bloom. I especially like the flowers viewed in close up.
The night before, he wouldn't eat dinner when I brought it out to him and his sisters. He didn't look like he was feeling well, so I brought him inside and slept downstairs with him.
In the middle of the night, he started having labored breathing.
Before we could take him to the vet, he came into the garage, panted into my face, lay down between me and Toe sleeping on a cushion, and died.
Phil and I looked online, and it appears he had some sort of lung or heart problem.
I'd noticed a week before he died that he was losing weight, but he didn't mind when I poked and pawed at his body, so I didn't think he'd eaten poison - I once saw a rat running around our backyard, screaming, before it dropped dead. According to the literature online, Tic didn't seem to have a hairball problem, either, as he wasn't dry heaving.
We're going to miss him. He was only about fourteen months old.
These photographs are of him at happier times. One is of him when he was still a feral kitten, doing his best impersonation of Bigfoot caught on camera striding through the woods. Another is of him and Toe during one of the first times they came to me to eat. Another is of him trying to take a nap when Tac lay practically on top of him and decided it was time to take a bath. Another is of him rolling around one winter day when his winter coat was very full. And the last is of him a few weeks before he died. I thought he was posing for the camera. A moment later, he leapt at a hummingbird flitting around the lemon tree.
I took the below video only a few days after I'd discovered him and his sisters living with their mom, Bert, in a neighbor's yard. He is the kitten who collapses while playing with his feet, runs away, then struts back into frame like he's the king of the world.
I can never decide which flowers are my favorites. It seems it is usually whatever I am looking at, but I have recently decided once and for all sweet peas are my favorite.
Here you can see I succeeded in growing the sweet peas up the side of the house and nearly into the windows of the front room.
It has been an especially rainy, cool and sunny spring, and I think this is exactly what the flowers needed to thrive.
The cabbage poppies are about five feet tall, their flowers a little smaller than your hands cupped together to catch water.
At about fourteen inches tall, it doesn't seem to have grown much in the year or so that we've owned it, but now there are many more flowers than the two or three that typically bloomed at any one time.
The flowers last only a few days and are somewhat larger than teacups.
I fed the cats this evening after the rain stopped.
Tac sat on the feral villa (cat house) and lazily kept an eye on me photographing the gardens. You can see she has lost most of her winter coat.
Toe took one look at the clicking camera pointed at her and fled into a neighbor's yard. Tic doesn't mind the camera, but wouldn't sit still long enough for a photograph: he was busy trying to capture a hummingbird, a recent interest for which he has an alarming aptitude.
When we moved into this house four years ago, we found a tree severely hacked to the ground. Neither of us could guess what it was for the first couple of years.
Then, as it steadily grew taller, Phil became convinced it was a rhododendron, though it never bloomed.
This winter, it finally grew taller than the fence it sits against and now receives sunlight for most of the day. Almost over night, it went into bloom.
