This summer’s first gaillardias

Summer

I love gaillardias. More will follow and provide a large patch of vibrancy, as they have each year since we planted them. They outlast the sunflowers, and display their sunny brightness at the edge of our driveway.

Anticipating a sunflower

For the several years my husband has planted sunflower seeds in the spring, they have come up tall and strong by the onset of summer in all their Sunflower Yellow glory. Ours are now forming flowers in their still-green stage. Their stalks are straight, tall, strong, and prickly.

I was trying to recall who wrote a poem with a refrain, “And I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder,” and came up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in whose poetry I lost interest while I was still in high school. I Googled the quote anyway, and it seems lots of people have used it, and it wasn’t expressly clear whether Ferlinghetti was the first.

Whoever wrote this line, it enters my mind when I await the bloom of sunflowers, and other wondrous and beautiful bounties with which our Creator blesses us, for nothing we have done.

A sunflower begins its complex process of blooming: it will undergo   metamorphoses from verdant to gold, and prickles to petals.
“I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder.”

Another fitting line: “Death is the mother of beauty.” (from Wallace Stevens’s poem, Sunday Morning).

Effie’s favorite hangout when it’s 90° in the shade

“When it’s ninety degrees in Effieland, I move my capital to the turf under a blackberry vine where sunflowers are also growing, and eat grasses. I like wild oats.” –Effie

 

Later in the summer, the amaranth will be as tall as the sunflowers. Effie loves it.

Back to the River

Friday evening we fished at the pond, and took four trout. The pond is warming, and the trout will soon move to the cooler river by the end of June.

Bass favor warmer water than trout like, and some bass will come into the pond from the river once the trout are gone. Bass and trout will share the Snake and Grande Ronde Rivers when the trout resettle there for the summer.

Right now, the river is still too cold to urge the bass to much activity;  they’re still sluggish and disinterested in chasing fishing lures.

We took Pisca-Dory on the river today, enjoyed the little lagoons, the families of geese shepherding their goslings along the walkway and into the water, and seeing a couple of bass jump, but not close to our fishing lures.

We enjoyed a pleasant zero-catch day, even though the heat was too much for me. Offsetting the heat were pelicans on the water and in flight.

My husband Vic took all the photos and the video for this post.

The osprey is the best fisher on river or pond.

A tribe of geese enter the river from the lagoon.

Lots of fluffy goslings were part of another troupe.

Effieland’s first poppy heralds the beginning of summer

Effie gazes at the first Purple Oriental Poppy of the year, home grown in Effieland.

Good morning, Effieland (Quick, before it rains. . .)

I proffer a catnip leaf to Effie, and I notice we need a claw clip today.

The pink lupines are budding.

Effie’s lavender

Flax blooms throughout Effieland. Fortunately, it is not tasty.

The Effielander on patrol

Sunset and sleet

It was bizarre: first I heard the strange sound of sleet. Sleet happens, even in May. Our last sleetfall was in November. Joining the rare occasion of sleet was this darkly brilliant sunset. All quite strange, and all quite lovely.