Flora & Fauna Friday

So much happening in the garden in May, and not all of it good. The buttercup is doing well! Yay. (Eye roll.) And a rabbit breached the fence. Grr.

I have found two dead babies in the driveway (the neighbor’s cat doing its job perhaps), but more of the tribe ate three-quarters of the pea sprouts, the strawberry plants, and two of four of the new tomato plants. They hadn’t found the lettuce yet, which is now netted. And I Liquid Fenced the heck out of the whole garden Wednesday night. I replanted peas after reading the snipped ones are unlikely to recover. When it stops raining, I’ll try to figure out where it got in. But as the exterminator told me of lady beetles in the house, “They get in any damn way they can.” Still, this is only the second year I’ve had a problem, and this year is way worse. And peas and tomatoes (along with lettuce) are all that have consistently grown well in this garden.

My mother’s azaleas (except for the one by the house that gets no water) and rhododendrons are showy, even not yet at prime bloom!

Once again, something is killing the coleus in the box by the front door. I caught three mice, after last year thinking something was eating the roots (and saw two run out when I watered in the new plants), but still they die. When I found two of the traps halfway up the driveway this week, I put them back in the shed. Mice are not the problem. I don’t know what is, they have done well in the past.

I love seeing these out the bathroom window in the garden I made where my mother said nothing would grow. I’m also spraying the hosta sprouts liberally to keep the deer from eating them, as they did last year.

Just to get in a little fauna, this huge gaggle got me looking to the sky as they honked overhead, streaming by on the way to somewhere else.

And there is this: the Laburnum tree—or Golden Chain or Golden Shower—a member of the pea family. The beautiful and highly toxic tree is relatively rare, as it’s finicky about growing conditions: not too hot, not too cold—the Goldilocks of the plant world. It also doesn’t necessarily bloom every year, especially if it’s not babied (and I clearly do not baby anything). Their brief show exhausts them and they have to recover. This is only the second summer I’ve seen it blooming beside my driveway—the first was three springs ago, the month following my mother’s death. Like azaleas, they are dull plants, except for the short wowzer bloom time.

Happy spring!