Summer is my favorite season at Spruce Pine Cottage. It’s the green time, the lush, sultry time, the time when the rosinweed blooms and the garden is full of tomatoes. Box turtles come out in the rain. Nighttime is even better than daytime because there …
This summer Rob and I are growing a fun tomato called Granny Smith. It gets its name because it looks so much like a Granny Smith apple; it’s big and solid and stays green (well, chartreuse) even when ripe.
Each May a great transformation takes place in our borders and meadow garden when the purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) start to bloom. The beds turn rosy pink and buzz and flutter with bees and butterflies. And I wear myself out taking pictures and picking bouquets and bragging about my great purple coneflowers. (I’m always trying to get people to come over and see them.)
I’ve spent a fortune on native perennials. I’ve tried nearly every kind you can buy. But none is as reliable, in my experience, as the good old purple coneflower, which is drought tolerant, long-blooming, and self-seeding. This plant never lets me down.
Purple coneflower is adaptable, growing in sun to part shade. It prefers moist, well-drained soil but can also grow in poor, sandy soil and red clay. I don’t water my plants . . . or fertilize them or spray them with any sort of chemical. I don’t do anything except fish for compliments about them: “So I don’t know if you noticed my purple coneflowers . . .”
In North Florida, purple coneflowers grow anywhere from 2 to 5 feet tall. Even before they bloom, I find them quite attractive–straight and sturdy, with plenty of big, dark green, lance-shaped leaves. This year they started blooming in early May and are still going strong now in mid-June. The flowers, which consist of pink rays arranged around a coppery central cone, aren’t at all delicate or fragile and make good cut flowers as well as nice roomy landing pads for pollinators.
I don’t deadhead my plants. Like I said, I mostly just leave them alone. Gradually, the cones turn black and are visited in winter by hungry goldfinches looking for seeds. The black cones don’t look all that pretty, I’ll admit, but the goldfinches make up for it. They’re quite decorative perched on a stem on a cold winter day, with their canary-yellow bodies and zebra-striped wings.
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| My cute nephew, Jake, in flowerland |
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| These fellows are a little shabby for some reason. |
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| My sister Kris and Jake |
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| Sophie among the coneflowers |
On Saturday Rob and I touched up the paint on the breezeway and repainted the door that leads from the breezeway to the Little House. The breezeway gets lots of wear and tear because it’s open to the elements–and because it’s our cats’ very favorite …
On Sunday Rob and I made a batch of vegan zucchini bread with our first zucchini of 2013. It’s interesting the sense of duty we feel toward our homegrown vegetables. We never want to waste them, so the bulk of the weekend is often spent …
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| Buntin enjoying the day in her uptight Buntin way |
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| Petunias and caladiums on the front porch |
Rob was out of town on Sunday, so I got to have one of my little “Leslie days.” It was extremely pleasant.
I started it with a delicious breakfast of popcorn popped on the stove. There’s nothing better than eating popcorn at dawn. As I ate, I read a cookbook (The Book Lovers Cafe Cookbook) just like I would a novel, for the pleasure of the language and for the little stories the author included about each recipe. I dreamed of Plumber’s Pasta and Sweet Pea Guacamole.
There were cats underfoot, of course. I turned on the faucet so Carl could play in the sink, his latest hobby. He likes to play with the dripping water, but if the water falls on his head he gets mad and bats at the faucet. Each morning he climbs in the sink and “yells” at me until I turn on the water.
Next I started doing a little unnecessary rearranging of my knickknacks, which is my most favorite pastime. I arranged them one way, and then another. And meanwhile, close by, gigantic Leroy was sleeping in a tiny shoebox. He looked very content. In his mind, Leroy is, I think, a very small animal.
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| Staffordshire sheep. He has a sort of wry expression, doesn’t he? |
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| Leroy in his shoebox bed |
I had some buttered toast for lunch, and then I babied my houseplants. I trimmed them up and fertilized them and carefully dusted their leaves. I rearranged the plant stands several times and rubbed the wooden ones down with Feed-n-Wax.
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| Ferns in the sunroom |
And so the day went, the whole day. At night I sat out on the breezeway and read a biography of Beatrix Potter, with Foxy on my lap. Foxy is our sweetest cat, so soft and babyish. She likes to be held and gently brushed, and she likes lying in sunbeams. Anyway, we were sitting together in the lamplight on the breezeway, enjoying the warm air. We could hear the owls hooting and the armadillos bumbling around among the fallen magnolia leaves behind the Little House.
“Don’t worry, Foxy,” I said, because she always needs reassuring. We were safe from the night but not separated from it. Moonlight striped the meadow, and a frog sang in the rain gutter.
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| Foxy |
On Saturday Rob and I went to Dothan to visit Landmark Park, a 135-acre park with nature trails, a living history farm, a one-room schoolhouse, and many other historic buildings. The moment we turned into the entrance …
I have this dream that someday I’ll be able to take a week off of work and do nothing but drive around in the country, on the back roads, and explore. I’ll go to all the little towns near my house, like Whigham and Bainbridge, …
Today I thought I’d tell you a little story and then show you some pictures I took that have nothing at all to do with it.
The story is actually my mom’s story, and I’m going to to use her words to tell it just because she told it to me so well and I don’t want to mess it up. It started like this: She called me on the phone and said, “Do you have a minute? I’ve got to tell you about my bunny!”
I was immediately interested; Mom has a wild rabbit in her yard that she loves to watch, and I enjoy hearing about him.
“Have you ever seen rabbits fight?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I can’t say that I have.”
“Well, there were two in the yard today and they were fighting, I think. I was watching one, the one I usually see, I think, and it started rolling in this patch of sand under the swing. It rolled just like a cat would roll in the sand, except not quite on its back, mostly just on its side. And then another one hopped over and they started fighting over the sand. It was the most interesting thing! They never touched, not one time. They just jumped, over and over, straight up like springs, not going forward at all. They were almost taking turns, it seemed. They jumped real high in the air, too, so high I couldn’t believe it. The birdbath is what, maybe three feet tall, and they were jumping higher than that. Oh, it just went on and on. And that was how they decided who got to keep the sand. In the end, the second one hopped away and the first one just started rolling around again, just rolling in that sand, as happy as can be. Well, I was just fascinated. I was going to go to church at 8:30, but I stayed home and watched the rabbits.”
And now for my usual irrelevant pictures:
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| Owl statue by the pond |
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| Carl relaxing on the breezeway |
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| A little carrot harvest |
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| The front yard with oxeye sunflowers, Indian pinks, and purple coneflowers |
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| We picked our first peach yesterday, a Florida King. |
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| It looks like a pretty good year for blueberries. |
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| Doesn’t this cat look like it’s crying? |
