In the Garden.

I was slogging through the wet and overgrown front yard, pulling up weeds and attempting to plant a few things.  I had just won a battle with some large woody weed that had decided to entwine itself with one of the re-blooming yellow irises and was wet and covered with mud when Dave, the UPS man arrived with a package for G (my birthday present — although now I have to wait a few weeks to see what it is).

Dave commented that it had rained 21 of the last 30 days and I added that I had just emptied the rain gauge again and had recorded 13.25 inches of rain since May 17.  A round of mumbling about the weeds overtaking everything ensued.  

In the middle of this photo is a shot of a lovely New Guinea impatien that has naturalized itself in my front yard.  I popped it in a few years ago, 5 or 6 I believe, when this little patch by the front door was mostly bare.  

You can see that it isn't bare anymore, but this impatien has come back every year.  It will bloom a little later in the summer, when it is a bit warmer and sunnier.

The front of my garden remains a little warmer than most of my yard.  I am properly on the colder end of zone 6, much of the county is zone 5 except for a narrow swath along the Hudson River, which happily includes my yard. A small section of the front yard is protected by the house from the North and West, and also from the harshest of winds coming up from the south west in the wintertime, and I have grown a few plants that are really hardy only to zone 7 here.  Unfortunately this area is also deeply shaded so I don't get many flowers, but there is still a wealth of color and texture from the many shade loving plants that are making it their home — much better than the clay and moss I found when I moved here.