"Flowers in a city are like lipstick on a woman–it just makes you look better to have a little color."
– Lady Bird Johnson
11/17/16:
This morning I wandered around the yard, studying patterns of shadow and light from the newly risen sun. I decided to photograph a few flowers with interesting petal shapes: the bottlebrush (Callistemon), Cape honeysuckle (Tecomaria capensis), and sweet pea bush (Polygala). Then I went back inside, where a sunbeam was just beginning to spill across the kitchen, so I took the red-flowering cactus down from its hook near the skylight and zoomed in on the blooms. I have just learned that this variety is Thanksgiving Cactus (Schlumbergera truncata), not Christmas cactus, as I'd been calling it for 10 years.
The maranta that hangs near the cactus was looking lovely as well, although light was too dim to get a sharp, non-grainy photo. Once I got to a computer and downloaded my images, I found that I'd saved a picture of this same plant from June. The amount of growth in a few months is impressive! I have not yet gotten around to trimming the maranta and planting the cuttings as mentioned in my last post, but will probably have lots of indoor-time this weekend to do so, since rain is predicted.
Clicking on the small images below will bring up a larger version.
Thanksgiving cactus.
Orange honeysuckle.
Maranta: June & November.
Sometimes I start writing a new blog post immediately after finishing the previous one. I then plan what to photograph in the coming week, or I select images I've already got but haven't featured here yet. But there's times something noteworthy happens in the garden, so I re-work any writing I'd started in order to include new ideas.
On other occasions, I don't have any subjects in mind until I sit down to blog on the day I intend to post (usually Thursday or Friday). Or perhaps I'll have had the vague intention of writing about snails, tomatoes or whatever, but didn't manage to get images to go along with the text. I abandon that idea or save it for another day––which is what happened this morning.
Anyway, I'm happy that I've stuck to my plan of posting roughly once a week, for a year and a half now. I've proved to myself that I can overcome procrastination, find new stuff to talk about all the time, and remain motivated to pursue this passion project of writing and gardening.
