Garden Of Unearthly Delights

This is the view from our kitchen window.

We didn’t do much of anything, except editing. There was all sorts of trash out there, including a big pile of the former roof. Someone had unwisely tried to grow stuff to eat next to the parking area, and also used it as a dump. We flattened that.

We’re two climate zones away from knowing what grows. Everything that came out of the ground was a surprise. The lupens are just hitting their stride. There’s a big white lilac bush past its flowering on the left. There’s a big clump of bleeding heart. There are big ferns everywhere. Huge thistle plants take over if you don’t keep after them. Lots of buttercups, daylilies, queen anne lace, and wild violets. Some sedum. There will be black-eyed susans later. There’s a rambling rose bush over behind St. Francis. There is some sort of tall free-seeding phlox-looking plants everywhere around here that fill in the interstices with blue and white flowers. There’s a bunch of other stuff I have no idea of.

Maine has trees, boy howdy. We’ve got tilia (linden, or basswood), blue spruce, a willow, birch, fir, pine, and magnificent Norway maples in our yard. The Norway maples are blood red, dark green, and light orange at the same time, which is impossible.

There’s a dead spruce that an enormous pileated woodpecker is disassembling. He’s as big as a toddler and as dumb as a blog writer, with much the same method — constantly bashing his head on spots that appear rotten looking for juicy grubs, destroying the whole thing in the process.