Something’s happening behind the house:
The crew is here to frame for the pour. They are behind schedule. The plan is for inspection and conference Tuesday morning with the pour Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday. However it is doubtful that the forms will all be in place today and the crew is supposed to finish up tomorrow (Saturday) a day which is also supposed to be filled with heavy rains due to the travelling plans of Ernesto. My apologies to Florida, but I wish he had stayed further south.
Meanwhile the powers that be (men in boots driving trucks, and my own darling husband) have decided that the only place for the dumpster is next to the spa and the "Iris bed" that I built last summer, with the door to the dumpster opening out over my flower bed. G has decided, wisely, to lay some boards over the flower bed so that we will all be tromping over the boards, flattening my flowers but not tamping down the soil as well. I think the whole shebang will just miss my irises, which are starting send up flower stalks for the second bloom and I think I have the boards laid out in a way that only knocks down the glads and cleomes and the annuals in front but those are short-lived at this point anyway. I think it is well enough laid out that even big clumsy men who don’t think about flowers will miss the iris buds.
The mixture of lillies, cleome, and gladioulus at the back of the bed has been quite successful. The first lilies were devestated by the deer when they started to come up so they were replaced with white lilies. This was fortuitous because the white cleome with the white lilies have been really beautiful and the pale purple gladioli have been just the perfect accent.
cleome
gladioulus.
Unfortunately I did not get photos of the lilies in bloom. Next year.
Luckily for this weekend’s construction the chrysanthemums I planted on the west end of the bed did not come back up this year, well only 1 out of 5 and it is still terribly small. It fits under the lumberwalkway I just set up. I don’t know why I can’t grow chrysanthemums. The sedum in the same position on the other end of the bed have grown fabulously. They are over three feet tall, thick and lush, after only one year’s growth. Here they are just beginning to bloom:
I will put some more sedum in the bed on the west end, after all the trampling has ceased. l worry that by matching plantings on the two ends, one side will do better than the other and it will look even worse. Well, can’t be worse than non-existent chrysanthemums.
But now, I must go help haul lumber and other detritus so that we can get as much accomplished as possible before the rains.