In my August vase

What's in your August vase? - Noelle the azplantlady asks for her monthly meme. The lavender is lolling over the path. No access. When we went walking today we passed a garden where they had hacked back a wheelbarrow full of lavender clippings. Packed in bags and off to the dump - how ungrateful and ungracious. Even if it goes to compost or mulch - what a waste!

Lavender and Marguerite

Winter August flowering into Spring

What flowers are in our garden in August? Still winter, but we have had rain and the winter snow grows as I watch. Sometimes in quiet horror. That handful of gravel is all you can still see of this path, which is next on the list for weeding and cutting back. For clearing, so the cats can still get thru. They make it quite obvious when they are not satisfied with their garden service.

Rain gardening

Gardening to deal with winter flash floods. June 2007, just after we moved in. Floods! We have heavy clay soil, and the swamp monster will get you! Can I have my foot back, please? (Catching up in September 2013)

July 2008. Floods, again. But now we have a buried drainage pipe to clear the driveway. We have gravel paved paths, and the flood waters recede quickly. 

August daisy chain walk

It is a month since you walked around my garden. Those white daisies which have just begun to open, are Dimorphotheca pluvialis (hear the rain?) Rain daisies. My mother, born in London, grew up in Cornwall, waits eagerly each year for her favourite wildflower on the slopes of Signal Hill, behind the city of Cape Town.

Today just one of my stars is not an Asteraceae. (We used to call them Compositae, with ray florets for the OTT, and Fibonacci spirals in the heart of the sunflower)

Weaving dreamcatchers

I am not a poetry person. Words, I love, and the last line of this poem is embroidered on my mind.

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

 by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Vlei lilies in Plum Creek

At the edge of the wheat-fields and along the road side verges, where the farmers spray weed-killer and the authorities send out teams with ride on mowers. One of the plants they fight, in the boggy hollows where the winter rain collects, is this vlei lily. Wurmbea stricta