I just returned a few days ago from almost three weeks out of town. It feels like we travel somewhere in early or mid-July more years than not. I love travel, but it’s a somewhat difficult time to be away from my garden. Usually the cherries are still finishing up and the raspberries are at peak production at this time of year. Several years we’ve been gone, I’ve told the neighbors to stop by and pick as many as they want while we’re away, only to come home to hundreds of berries left overripe and ruined on the canes. Can you imagine not accepting free raspberries?
July is also typically pretty hot and dry in our region, but in areas where the sprinklers are working, the plants can get so exuberant that they start overgrowing the sprinklers and blocking the water to other plants. If this happens or if there’s another issue with the sprinklers and we’re not home to notice it, I can come home to parched and lifeless plants in shockingly little time. (Ask me how I know 🥲)
Anyway, I spent about an hour this morning in the garden dealing with the vacation’s worth of overgrowth that was starting to block some of the sprinkler heads. This is a chore that usually must be attended to several times a summer, and lately I’ve gotten smart and started doing it in swimwear. (I’m partial to Land’s End’s 6″ high waisted bike swim shorts, for modesty and sun protection reasons, and stole borrowed one of my husband’s sun protection shirts to go on top.) After all, the best way to see where the water is being blocked is to let the sprinklers run while you’re trimming back the over-enthusiastic plants. There’s simply no way to remain dry doing it this way, and you’re lucky if the spray doesn’t hit you right in the face a few times. One of the neighbors was also out working in his much sparser and more sedate garden, and I’m sure he thought I was crazy as I squelched back and forth, drenched and dripping, with armloads of greenery for the compost or the brush pile.
Afterwards, my son made a bouquet with some of the cuttings that is almost as exuberant as the garden itself.
Meanwhile, I wandered back outside after changing into dry clothes to enjoy the beautiful breeze for awhile before it gets hot. The larger section of flower garden I shared photos of in this post is comparatively quiet right now, since the bergamot (Monarda didyma) and penstemons (various, but mostly Penstemon strictus) are finished or nearly finished and the Black-Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) haven’t quite started. There’s some scattered California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) and Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) in bloom, and quite a lot of creeping thyme of various cultivars around the edges and filling in gaps under the taller plants. Looking more closely at that, I was delighted to notice it crawling with honeybees. I usually see a lot more bumblebees in my garden, which isn’t a bad thing since the bumblebees are native and the honeybees are not, but after the various crises that have afflicted the American honeybee population in the last few decades, including the winter of 2024-2025’s disastrous die-off, it always feels good to find a bunch of them hanging around the garden. Here’s one of the 10 or 12 I found on a single patch of creeping thyme:
In the smaller section of the flower garden, there’s a bunch more coneflowers, and some blazing star (Liatris spicata) that looks spectacular right now, so I went back out this evening when the light was better to get some photos. The Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) and a dark pink hyssop I don’t seem to have recorded the name of are also blooming. All four of these flowers – both Agastache, the Liatris, and the Echinacea – are attracting a lot of attention from bumblebees and honeybees alike right now, and I saw a hummingbird hanging around the Agastache earlier as well.
It was a lovely morning and a lovely evening, and reminded me how good it is to be home after our trip. As the Russians say: “В гостях хорошо, а дома лучше!” This means “being a guest is good, but being at home is better”, or in English terms: there’s no place like home!
