And the color of the day is . . . .!

Aw, you peeked!

A royal color! A velvety color. Endless variations, from almost pink to almost blue. Soft or strong, I love purple!


Here is my alium, honestly, regally purple. The queen in my garden. Well, actually, I am, but we won't tell her, because then she wouldn't bother putting in her presence next year, so we shall let the pretense continue, shall we?



Lush lupine. I cannot decide whether I love it more for its stalks of color, or its charming leaves, little spokes of delight.

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The wallflower - so delicate-looking, but so hardy, so strong! The lowly maid of flowers. Works diligently all summer long, under difficult conditions, not asking for much, but making things beautiful.







Lovely lilac, so delicate in color, so heady in scent. It does NOT get better than this! I don't understand that glue-sniffing I read about, but lilac-sniffing -- now we are talking! I could stand here all day and hyperventilate trying to take in all this perfume, and never get enough!


Okay, okay. I'll bet you have figured me out. I am going to come clean. I don't think it is DECEPTION as much as it is just FOCUSING ON THE BEAUTY. Yes, that's it. I am taking close-ups of all these georgeous, colorful blooms because they are beautiful and we want to look at BEAUTY!, not at the weeds, the bare dirt patches,the paint peeling off the pickets, the pavers that have yet to be sunk into the ground and have TALL grass growing like crazy all around them because they are too high to mow OVER and my weedwacker has run out of that acrylic string-stuff. And then there's the FUNGUS I am not purposefully hiding; the mushrooms that keep popping up, growing taller than my basil, almost, because of the dreadful, unrelentingly damp eternal spring we are experiencing. I said damp, okay? I am not kidding. The high we hope to get to tomorrow here in the Puget Sound is a whole, whopping 67 degrees! And that is why I am still taking photographs of lilac and lupine and aliums - because we are stuck in spring mode here in the Pacific Northwest, and while good portions of the country probably have tomato plants as high as their hips and with fruit on them, here I have 4 drowning little tomato starts that are about 1 inch taller than when I put them in the ground 6 weeks ago!!!

Enough of the rain rant. Sorry. As I was saying, I feel like focusing on the beauty rather than the raw, naked truth about the weedy, naked, disrepair of my garden. So, close-ups are all you are going to get right now, okay? Then maybe one day, when I am strong enough, you will get the WHOLE picture. Kinda like a garden version of what Martha did a few weeks ago here, baring herself in all her natural glory:
She's a brave one, she is. She tells it and shows it like it is. Me, with my tunnel vision, I am just going to have to focus on the BEAUTY!