My garden is fragrant and full of new life. I am crazy-happy with all of the beautiful colors and of course, torn by the usual dilemma: Do I leave the flowers on their bushes to bloom and grow and fade naturally? (And therefore let my neighbors enjoy the beauty that is Marta's Garden in the spring?) Or do I trim off some of the ...
Garden
Cheaper than prozac
I've been a little down lately. My roses are not yet in bloom. *sigh* And the sweet peas and gladiolus have not yet broken through the still unseasonably cold (this is California and it's already March!) ground. What's a depressed flower-lover like me to do? Inspired partly by the gorgeous Gerbera Daisies that I used as a ...
Is it me?
You know how much I'm loving my white picket fence and so I was thinking how much fun it would be to plant a wall of sunflowers along the fence. Can you picture it? A little sunflower army lined up to greet us each day. (Okay, well, I was sort of fantasizing about that, but that's not important right now.) So we planted the ...
Give it a rest.
I was standing at my kitchen sink thinking of the myriad of tasks still unfinished on my to-do list. These included a bunch of planting and pruning tasks in my garden, not to mention the mess I have going on in my office/studio/classroom right now. The voice of my Noisy Internal Perfectionist (let's just call her My N.I.P.) was ...
They only come out at night…
Onthe 23rd Day of the Month of September in an early year of a decade not too long before our own, the human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence, and this terrifying enemy surfaced as such enemies often do in the seemingly most innocent and unlikely of places... Mission Viejo, California. =D I have something to ...
The White Picket Fence – Part Deux
If you've ever done any kind of home improvements, you know that it's like knocking down the first in a long line of dominoes. It's the same wedding-invitation-logic that says if you invite so and so, you must invite the next person and so on and so on. In this case it started with the picket fence. (which I absolutely LOVE, but ...
How does my garden grow?
In 1970, when our home was built, the "country-look" was in. Rugged, exposed beams were the hip thing.Fast forward to when we actually bought this house in 2001. I struggled with those once-hip exposed beams. Truthfully, I hated looking at those things sticking out of our roof line. I wondered if there was a way to cover them so ...
Can you hum a few bars?
This was taken at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens. Don't we look pretty in pink? ;-) This is in the Japanese garden and I was seriously floored by how amazingly beautiful these cherry blossoms were. I just couldn't understand why they would plant such a tranquil garden near such noisy power lines. But wait . . . I quickly ...
You’re all invited to my Pity Party!
We took the red-eye home from Honolulu. It seemed like a good scheduling decision at the time. I hadn't planned on catching a cold in Hawaii, but that's exactly what I did. So I got home and I was over-tired from not being able to sleep on the flight and all feverish and achy and fussy. Oh so fussy.And in a foul, foul mood. Yes, I know ...
Keep the faith
Look at that beautiful vine growing in the corner of the patio there.(pay no attention to my daughter and her hula-hoop, even though she is REALLY good at it, but that's not important right now)I swear. I have these four big, fat pots sitting in each corner of my patio and in them are these amazingly gorgeous flowering vines.No, this isn't like my ...
