One day last week I visited a horticultural park nearby to photograph flowers and butterflies. I’ve spent many hours volunteering in this park as part of my master gardener hours, but haven’t really experienced it the way a first-time visitor would. I know many of the nooks and crannies, and where all the nastiest weeds grow, but to wander around with my camera and a few spare hours was a treat. The gardens are pretty diverse and my interest is mostly in the wildest parts of the park where the hands of the horticultural staff or the master gardeners haven’t much reached yet. Blogger has fits if I try to load more than two or three photos per post, so I’ll share some of the nicer pics from the different gardens on an occasional basis.

I had to call and ask the staff about the shrub in the above photo. From far away it looked like a humungous butterfly bush, but I knew better. The shape of the flowers was similar to a butterfly bush also, but they were formed more like those of a lilac. I got my answer today – it’s a Chaste Tree (Vitex agnus-castus) – a non-native, but from what I’ve read seems to be popular in the south and in arid regions of the country. I’d be interested to hear more about it from anyone that is familiar with it. The flowers were covered with bees and small butterflies, I walked round and round a few times to get a look at all the insects that were feeding on it.

I’m awful with skippers, but my handy-dandy naturalist friend says this is probably a Peck’s Skipper.

He suggested these might be Delaware or European Skippers. I don’t have a clue!

I thought this might be a sootywing, but he says it’s a duskywing, either Wild Indigo or Horace’s.

Today would have been my dad’s 75th birthday – here he is on his 73rd. He fully planned to live to be at least 100 and told us so all the time. There were a lot of things, I guess, that he still wanted to do.

This is probably the only pic I have of my dad sitting in front of a birthday cake, and it’s a sad one for me to look at. He looks so frail and sick; I wish I couldn’t see his catheter for dialysis poking out of the collar of his shirt. We’re standing around him there in the darkness, watching him make his wish before blowing out the candles. I wonder what he wished for on his last birthday.

I’m still at the point where I can’t think of my dad without thinking of the burdens of sickness he faced during the last months of his life. I want to be done with this part of remembering. His life was not about being sick and dying – I want to be able to think of all the rest.

I hardly remember my dad ever being sick; until the hospital got a hold of him. We brought him in because his feet and lower legs were swollen and full of sores. The doctors kept talking about cancer and kidney failure and heart problems. All my dad wanted was for the doctors to fix his feet! He told them so and refused most of the tests they wanted.

He was doing pretty well when I first brought him home with me, even though the swelling in his feet and legs never much improved. Within a month he was sick and back in the hospital and on dialysis. Dialysis, at least, took away the swelling, but made him so weak. He refused any treatment for the cancer; always said he wanted to wait until he was stronger. Only, he never got stronger, just weaker and more frail. Then he got shingles, lost his appetite, stopped being himself.

My friend Debbie lost her father early this year. She used to see my dad on his dialysis days when she was at the hospital visiting her own dad. She often told me how good he looked and that she always saw him smiling and concerned with others. That was his way.

There are some happy memories from that time: the way my dog Buddy would greet my dad each morning, tail wagging, when I went in to wake him and my dad’s greeting to us, “There’s the sunshine”; driving from my brother’s to my house with my dad on Thursday nights and passing the horse farms and the one field planted with giant sunflowers; my dad calling the bus that brought him to dialysis the “scat-wagon” (SCAT stands for senior citizen activity transportation); the pretty flowered finger bowl my dad insisted on having his meds served in, otherwise he might not take them; packing a lunch bag on dialysis days with anything my dad might eat, even if it was on the *prohibited* list – sometimes I would add a little love note or a chocolate for him to find.

This is the type of remembering I ought to be doing – it makes me smile to think of these things. My friend Debbie, with the loss of her dad, is a few steps behind me. She is marking the milestones of the first year without her dad. It’s so very hard for her, I know. I am anxious to see her get to where she can remember her dad with a smile, rather than tears; but I am hardly there myself.

Just trying this on for size. What better way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon than trying out a new look?

Let me know if you think it’s awful.

From DivaKitty and the Fluffies and perfect on a mindless Friday night after a very looong week at work.

Put your iPod on shuffle and blog the first twenty songs in the shuffle.

1. Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself – Luka Bloom
2. Angel – Sara McLachlan
3. Nightingale – Norah Jones
4. The Long Day is Over – Norah Jones
5. Come Away With Me – Norah Jones
6. Forgiveness – Luka Bloom
7. Boondocks – Little Big Town
8. Bring It On Home – Little Big Town
9. Something More – Sugarland
10. Come a Little Closer – Dirks Bentley
11. Rainbow Warrior – Luka Bloom
12. Turn Me On – Norah Jones
13. Blackberry Time – Luka Bloom
14. Lot of Leavin’ Left to Do – Dirks Bentley
15. I’ve Got to See You Again – Norah Jones
16. Days Go By – Keith Urban
17. Home – Michael Buble
18. Your Body is a Wonderland – John Mayer
19. Must Be Doin’ Something Right – Billy Currington
20. Pay Me My Money Down – Bruce Springsteen

If anyone would like to play along – have a go at it! I find it really interesting to discover what kind of music people like listening to – always a surprise. My iPod is pretty new so there aren’t very many songs on it. The mix is fairly eclectic; quite a bit of Irish alternative and folk music, some country, some jazz, some pop. The last song I downloaded was Bruce’s “Pay Me My Money Down” – I love the feel of that song.

I only use my iPod at work when I want to tune out all the chatter around me. It helps me concentrate to not have to overhear everyone’s personal phone calls and extended whining sessions. There has been an awful lot of that crap lately and entirely too much foolishness. I’m having flashbacks to when I was teaching kindergarten. Not kidding! Makes me want t0 change careers and pick vegetables for a living.

Following my junior year in college I spent the summer in Spain. It occurs to me that the 15 years between that summer and now has passed in a flash! Where does the time go?

I remember being excited to go, but so very scared. I was a Spanish major and my college sponsored the trip in conjunction with the University of Madrid. I had classes four days a week in the mornings and the afternoons and weekends free for travel and sightseeing. Looking through the photo album I made, it seems that I saw very little of the country, outsiide of the areas surrounding Madrid where I lived. This photo taken outside the Plaza de Toros de las Ventas bullring in Madrid is my favorite; I think because it reminds me of my Uncle “Doc” who grew up in Barcelona. Either one of those men could be him. A copy of the poster advertising that Sunday’s corrida hangs on my sunporch. Bullfighting is controversial, even in Spain, but I’m glad to have had the experience of seeing a few. I only wish we hadn’t bought the cheap seats – the Spanish sun is incredibly strong even late in the day.

We visited an inordinate number of churches, most of them much more ornate than this one in Segovia, a spectacular old town set high on a rocky cliff and surrounded by two rivers. We saw the castle-like Alcazar and the Aqueduct built by the Romans during the 1st century. My most vivid memory from this town is buying a beautiful handmade lace tablecloth for my sister-in-law from a gypsy who tried to steal my camera after I had paid her.

We spent a lot of nights in bars, but we were college students and that’s what one does is Spain. The custom is to have a late supper around 10 pm when the sun finally sets and head out for the evening sometime after midnight. This made being in class at 8 am pretty difficult, but I found that by staying up all night I wouldn’t oversleep and miss class. I’d go to class and then spend the afternoon sleeping by the pool. I often missed the big meal of the day around 2 pm, so was always hungry. Sundays were my favorite day because the cafeteria at the school was closed and we went to a chain restaurant that served spaghetti (my favorite!) Hungry, but I had a great tan that summer. The pic at left shows us drinking milk and orange juice 😉 shortly before I returned home to NJ. I’m almost as dark as my Spanish friends, but the red-haired girl clearly didn’t spend enough time by the pool!

My favorite city was Salamanca, where we spent a weekend and treated ourselves to an expensive hotel with air-conditioning and room service. Quite a treat after dormitory living! Salamanca is a breathtakingly beautiful city, where the quality of light is somehow magical, especially at dusk in the Plaza Mayor; built of a warm golden sandstone. We spent most of our time there, eating and people-watching. Very late in the night I took this photo of people dancing in the middle of the square.

I would love to return someday and see the south of Spain, and the northern regions, and Barcelona. There is so much that I didn’t see and a lot of what I saw I couldn’t really appreciate because of my youth. Years of summer jobs and my dad’s generous nature made the trip possible. I’m still amazed that he let me go. Some day I’ll post more about that.

Cicadas are noisy now that the heat of summer is upon us. Hal Borland compares their shrills to “the twanging of a taut and ragged nerve at the peak of a galling summer day, a quiver so painful that you wince a quarter of a mile away”. I don’t mind their noise so much; as kids we always called them *heat bugs* because their calling coincides with the hottest parts of the day.

I was sitting out on the screened patio this evening having coffee when this one flew into the Rose of Sharon hedge nearby. These are big bugs and so very clumsy in their flying! I’ll admit to being a bit afraid of them; as I was taking pics of it I kept repeating over and over, “please don’t fly at me… please don’t fly at me” – of course I spooked it (and it, me) and it took off out of the hedge and I went in the opposite direction.

A few years ago we inadvertently attracted Cicada- Killer Wasps when we replaced our concrete driveway with pavers. The loose dirt was attractive to these digging wasps and I often watched them as they dragged a cicada into their nest burrows in the loose dirt beside the driveway.

Later I wandered into the garden to pick a few grape tomatoes and some basil and found the shed skin of a cicada nymph on the underside of a tomato leaf. I can remember one summer during my childhood when the willow tree in our backyard was covered with the shed skins of thousands of cicada nymphs. My older brothers terrorized me for all of that summer, tossing the crinkly skins at me and putting them in my hair. Propbably explains why I’m scared of them even now.

Take a cold shower

Drink plenty of fluids

Find a shady spot for a nap

Take a dip as often as necessary

This herb is something of a mystery. I purchased it a few years ago at a local native plant nursery because I had read that it was a good plant to attract pollinators. It was labeled only as *mountain mint* and I’ve not been able to figure out today what variety I have. It looks like it might be short-toothed mountain mint, but I’m not very sure of that.

It’s a nondescript plant and doesn’t *do* much more than you see in these pics – no big showy flowers here. Just these tiny white ones that seem mostly to attract equally tiny flying insects that I can’t identify. It’s growing among the swamp milkweed, joe pye weed, and bee balm so it tends to disappear among its more showy neighbors. I like the cool green color of the foliage.

I found quite a few references to the medicinal properties of this plant and one reference stated that it was believed by Native Americans to have strong medicine capable of *reviving the dead*.

I’m not in the mood to fight with Blooger tonight to get it to post more than one pic, so I’m sharing this weird mosaic/hockneyed photo collage I made on Flickr. I’ve always wanted a lace-cap hydrangea and fell in love when I saw this one; a macrophylla/serrata cross. The larger outer flowers have serrated edges which is what attracted me to it – they start out a pretty lime-green and mature to a soft cream color. It should be gorgeous as it gets larger.

I’m using it to replace the Winterthur Viburnum that I planted last fall that died. I’ve given up on trying to grow them – the one surviving is struggling; it has hardly put out any leaves this year, but I’m trying to baby it to keep it going. Hopefully I’ll be more successful with this shrub – it’s planted in moist shade which it should like. We’ll see.