Weeks of content

Well, Illinois does have beautiful days, and we've been having them. Mild, warm, bright, and not in the nineties, not even high in the eighties. I've been worried a bit that asthma might kick in but whatever is in the air is not toxic to me; the screens are not all in place but there's enough breeze. The chairs spotted around outside are wonderfully comfortable, and I only just discovered the whole series of Tim Simpson books by John Malcolm, so I'm steadily going through them.

He uses one phrase that I don't quite have the right handle on. "Starting large muscular hares" probably means that some word that sounds like quarry is the name of a big rabbit. A corrie?

The oriental hellebore is large and muscular itself; I'm wondering whether a ring of protective hostas has to be moved away to give the hellebore more expansion room. The foetid hellebore I thought I'd lost left a lot of infants that Bill located and even moved for me, last October, and they're growing lustily.

As it's the first June I've been here for awhile, I'm able to try to clear away and strengthen the various groups of lilies that had been encroached so much by lily of the valley and even simple grass, and of course by the old-fashioned stomatous daylily.

The peonies are beautiful; my neighbor's roses have begun blooming; the iris is about done.

The lance coreopsis grew so well last year but never bloomed; I find now that it's a really nice yellow daisy with a yellow center, and nice oval petals well set around. And the first of the horned poppy bloomed with it, a truly lovely yellow poppy with coral shading near the center. Only day-long, even only morning-long, just lovely. They're good to have just for their gray leaves and nice habit. These are descendants, the oldest original horned poppies I think are done, so I can hope to have my garden strip with poppies on the one end and coreopsis on the other for a longish time. That was one side of the annual bed, once. Does leave me without much of an annual bed, again.

Where the vegetable garden used to be, the dahlias and canna will, I hope, come up. With more gladiola there too. I can still dig it all up in the fall. Geraniums did turn out to keep perfectly well over the winter -- they started to leaf out, while they were lying in the basement in a box lid. I've added more of them, so that when I look out the kitchen window to the south, I have them to brighten the morning. Years and years ago, I used to pick up this kind of geranium (which I guess are no longer called geraniums?) for decorative containers which I actually watered; that was when I needed to keep the front porch clean for little kids, and I had a lot of water time. Boy, that was a long time ago. I never knew then that I could have kept them; well, they wouldn't have found any room in the basement, we used the workbenches for so many things then.