Summer's Early Garden

Thought for certain we'd get rain today to wash away a week of 30-degree temperatures. We aren't interested in watering our lawn, which is looking pretty dim, yellow instead of bright green. Once you start watering, the lawn expects it. It has to make do with what summertime weather allots it; anything else is a waste. We can see watering the garden beds, the garden pots, but certainly not the lawn. We had a whole two minutes' worth of lackadaisical rain just as we were emerging from the ravine, this morning.

And this afternoon, while Irving was putting up the steel posts and overhead beams of a gazebo that he had bought for our deck, and I was down below in the back garden weeding, trimming, watering the pots, the sky got dark, thunder boomed overhead, and we got all anticipatory. And then. Nothing. The rain must have gone somewhere, but not here. There were a few more events of dark sky, threatening clouds and thunder, but it was all show and no-show.

On the positive side, all the bits and pieces of the gazebo have been put together, and it's standing nicely on the deck, not to be screwed into place until the top has been assembled and put on, and that'll wait for tomorrow some time. Since the new deck was tinted and weather-proofed, rain tends to pool on the floor boards, rather than be absorbed. The result of which, without a full sun day following a heavy rain, the pooled rain sits there. Unintended consequences.

Another one of which is that although the tinting is a light shade of brown, it might just as well be charcoal grey, since the effect of the sun full on the deckboards is to cook them to a degree most uncomfortable on bare feet. And if it's too hot for our bare feet, then it's most certainly too uncomfortably hot for the pads of our little dogs' feet. Just as, now that the driveway too has had its annual 'painting' the slick black surface gets extremely hot in the sun, no longer an inviting surface for little Riley to lay on soaking up the sun.

Lots going on in the gardens. Rose mallow is beginning to take the place of the blue and the white Canterbury bells. The poppies are finished, but mountain bluet is now in bloom. And while the irises have completed their bloom for this summer, the lilies are swiftly taking their place. Clematis vines are finally putting out their flower buds and a few have begun to open, large blue and also purple flowers, quite lovely. The tree peonies have finished, their huge luscious blooms spent, but the other peonies are in full bloom and fragrance; red, white, pink and hot pink.

As for the roses, oh the roses, they're rampantly blooming, so many blooms on each of the climbers they're uncountable. And gorgeous. The pink, the red, and particularly yellow roses give us great pleasure in the generosity of their abundance. Finally, I've cut back the bleeding hearts, those huge, overgrown bushes with their pendant pink-on-pink blooms. And cut back the spent-flowering stalks of the bergenia. Everything in the garden is lush and texturally pleasing, fragrant and beautiful.

Winter's fond dream of summer's form and colour become reality.