Yesterday, Alice, Gil and I went to Bricktown and had lunch and then walked around and took pictures . . . we’re all three camera nuts. There are two artificial waterfalls and this is one of them.

Farther along on our walk we came upon several of the statues that have been erected. They are so lifelike. It’s a wagon train as it comes to the river’s edge.

Last year when Alice and I were at Bricktown they had not completed this mosaic at the west end yet.

Then we made our exit of brick town through the sidewalk fountains. I caught a shot of Alice as she’s scurrying through the splashing water. Then it was off to the Myriad Gardens.

This is my favorite spot at the Myriad Gardens. It’s sometimes hard to remember that you’re smack dab in the middle of downtown Oklahoma City. All in all we had a wonderful afternoon.  

Yes, I know they’re a day late, but here are a couple pics of how the yard is covered in spider webs . . . or should I say stray strands of spider’s webbing.

These cosmos seeds also show how much of my yard was covered in cob webs. . . especially if you click on the picture and look at a slightly larger version.  

Here are just a few of the shots I took in my garden yesterday. As you can see there were butterflies and beas everywhere. They are really out in force right now. Another thing we have an abundance of right now is spider webs. You should see my back yard. Everything has tiny little spider webs on them . . . flowers, the fence, the trees, the bird bath, the lawn furniture. They’re everywhere. If I can remember, I’ll get a picture of them today and blog them tomorrow.

Another industrious bee gathering nectar from a perfect Gaillardia.

In an earlier blog Gil_L commented about how the Oklahoma State Capital dome is painted using the colors of the Gaillardia . . . one of our State flowers. You can see what she means in the above picture of the inside of the dome.

And here is one Gaillardia that apparently forgot to put on her make-up.

Our garden club took on the four small flower beds at the entrance to Superbia, a retirement village where my mother lives. It’s one of our “projects”. We got a lot done today, but we’re not completely finished with them yet. But even at that they look 200% better than they did. We have a wonderful bunch of ladies in our garden club. We all work together and get along so well . . . not like a lot of ladies groups I can think of.

This is the largest area that we worked on today. It was just a patch of dry dirt with a few weeds before we started. We’ve planted little patches of monkey grass and spread mulch to help hold in the moisture. Then in a couple weeks we’ll have some boulders scattered around in there too.  Then later this fall we’ll plant some grape hyacinth and crocus bulbs.  It was a difficult area because it gets mostly shade and we didn’t want to plant a lot of ground cover that would compete with the trees for precious moisture. We also had to be careful not to damage the root systems of the three large trees by digging lots of holes for planting shrubs. We’re pleased with the results.  

 
The Gillardia is Oklahoma’s state flower . . . well at least ONE of them. I forget how the story goes now, but somehow we have TWO state flowers. I love this one.  

 
And Alice tells me that Gillardia are prone to have frequent “deformed” blooms. The bee doesn’t care if it’s deformed or not . . . the nectar is the same.

 
And Alice seemed surprised the other day when she was down at my yard that I still had a Jolene Nacole lily blooming. Today it presented me with two blooms at once.

 
I think she said this was a Gloriosa Daisy. What ever it is, I like their bright shiney faces.

I sprayed my front yard with bug killer this evening. There were tiny, minute little white flying specks and they were devouring my purple Homestead Verbena. I hope they just ate the foliage and didn’t actually KILL the plants. We’ll see next spring if the verbena survived. If they don’t come back, then that’s pretty expensive bug food.

Well the large order of lilies (48 of them) came yesterday and I soaked them overnight and had intended to start planting them at 7:00 this morning. However, when my alarm went off at 6:30 I hit the snooze and went back to sleep for another half hour. By the time I got dressed and ate my breakfast (you MUST eat breakfast . . . it’s the most important meal of the day) it was somewhere between 7:15 and 7:30. Then I had to go through them all and divide them up into buckets according to what part of the yard they were to be planted in . . . that took another half hour.  Finally I got started in earnest and after I planted about 8 of them it started to rain.  I went back out shortly after it quit raining and started planting again.  I must be fairly slow at this because I only got 23 of them planted today . . . taking time out for lunch, a short nap and supper.  Surely I can finish tomorrow.  I may never order another lily again.

Alice and I both use this sedum as a bordering ground cover. We’ve called it Kitty Sedum for years because Alice got it from her husband’s cousin’s wife (not sure what that would be called), but I saw it at the TLC nursery the other day and now we know what its actual name is . . . Spirit Sedum.  Just like most all sedums it is easy to plant. Just pluck off a two inch sprout and make a tiny hole in the ground (I use a large screw driver) and stick the broken-off end into the hole and close up the hole with a little pressure from your finger. VOILA, you have another start of Spirit “Kitty” Sedum.

And this is a collage of all the flowers that were blooming in my yard just yesterday. All these pictures were taken yesterday morning. Just three years ago, who would have ever thought that I’D be farmer Duffy.

I love the morning light . . . especially the way the blinds slice the sunlight. This is my breakfast table at 7AM this morning as I was eating my breakfast.  

As soon as I finished breakfast I went outside to check on the yard to see what blooms were waiting for me and the shadows of the picket fence on the wet grass caught my eye. You can see my footsteps in the dew covered grass where I had just checked the rose bush on the far fence.

Last Friday, Alice, Gillian and I went to the zoo . . . not to see the animals, but to see all the photos in the zoo photo contest. I think this was my favorite one. I’ve played with it to make it look more like a water color, even though it was not from a photo I took.  Tigers are such beautiful creatures, I just couldn’t resist.