Flopping

Another rainy weekend. Riley and I have been out in the garden doing the usual.

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One advantage of a rainy, rainy summer is that all these lovely tall Flowers that usually don’t mingle with their shorter brethren are flopping down for late summer close ups. These bigger plants are so leggy after a season of so much rain and their blossoms are so heavy with actual raindrops that all the plants that aren’t staked are flopped over. That would be practically everything in the garden. Everything is flopping. That would be because nothing is staked. Despite all my best intentions and all those great green metal stakes I could buy, there just hasn’t been any staking going on. Zippo! Ergo, very little is vertical out there.

Here the formerly five foot tall Bee Balm visits with the two foot tall Autumn Joy Sedum. The Sedum is just beginning to think about blooming. The Bee Balm is just beginning to think about finishing its blossoming. They look like they were meant to nudge elbows but they weren’t. Notice all those lovely leaning stalks!

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More flopping on the Sedum. I would if I could. It looks very inviting. Here a five foot tall Phlox takes advantage of the offered resting place.
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Did you notice in that photo of Riley that the lawn is looking rather long? Sort of like the beginning of a hay field? Yup, that’s another thing that is looking leggy.

Jim experienced a miracle this last week. The lawnmower died. When he took it in to be serviced, the lawnmower guy reported so many other sick lawnmowers in the queue that Jim was assured it would be a good two weeks or more before a revived lawnmower would be returned into his hands.

This delay gave Jim a new lease on life. Up until the lawnmower collapse, any essay he wrote about HIS summer vacation would have been about mowing the lawn.

Our endless rain has meant that the lawn has needed to be mowed at least every five days ALL SUMMER LONG. Usually after these five days it was a tough mow of thick lush growth.

All this wet summer long, whenever Jim would get a distant and distracted look on his face, I would asking him what he was thinking about and he would tell me he was thinking about his next assault on the lawn. Often he would overshare with long descriptions of his next mowing strategy.

Even during a dry summer this lawn is a tough mow. As you might imagine, with all the odd shaped garden beds and zillions of shrubs, trees, and gewgaws I have planted, it is no easy thing to mow our lawn. It takes Jim at least three and a half hours and he can’t do any of it on a riding lawnmower. Its all fiddly bits circling trees and such.

Were Jim to film a horror film, he would probably include a scene with him mowing under the Larch tree. But for now, he’s been given a reprieve. He is enjoying a sleepy Sunday afternoon without the smell of gasoline in his nostrils or the roar of a small gas engine in his ears, an afternoon where the only noise is that of rain drops falling on flopping Flowers.

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