It’s important sometimes to go someplace else when unpleasant things are happening. Yesterday I was in the dentist’s chair and while my dentist leaned on my lower lip and reached fists and sharp things into my mouth parts, I did my darnedest to go back to work. (How lucky am I that one of my happy places is where I work?) I thought of the bees and swirled around the arbor in the Display Garden and tried really hard to remember, minute by minute, how we spent the morning.

The first thing I saw yesterday morning was this very large bucket truck being carefully driven into a too tight place for a morning of tricky treetop trimming.

The Deadheads shouted to eachother over the sound of the chipper and snipped and tugged the sweetpeas off the Cutting Garden fence. We might have been able to get another year out of the netting if only Mary Scissorhands (in the picture wearing red gloves) had been more careful! (You’re a gracious scapegoat, Mary!) There are a few summer vines getting going with room to grow now and the Clematis ‘Roguchi’ is still blooming away.

And do happy places usually have slugs? This one is ginormous by dry summer in RI standards but pretty tiny compared to its west coast banana cousins!

It’s raining today and that makes me happy (without having to go anyplace else) and I’ll bet GusGus is pleased too.

I’m a day late for the Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day party! If you feel like a little web crawling, click on the link above to see what’s blooming (as of yesterday) all over the country and even out into the wide world. It’s amazing to see the summer progress at different speeds!

I went out into the garden this morning with a multi-blooms post in mind and was arrested by the Cutting Garden (not really – it wasn’t a cop issuing speed-walking tickets. — But can you imagine?! — What if the garden pulled you over and said “Ma’am, do you know you just passed that rose without smelling it? I’ll give you a written warning this time. Do that again though and I won’t be so generous …”). Anyway, here’s some of what I stopped for in the Cutting Garden this morning. Hover your pointerfinger over a picture to see the name and click-on for a slightly larger image.

Here are a few choices from the Idea Beds:

In the Rose Garden: How many beetles does it take to eat a bud?

Down by the water garden I spotted these bloomers and also noticed how our rainless days are affecting the pond. I hope someone did a rain dance at Blithewold’s annual Hoe Down last night! The Hoe Down is more of a horseticultural event (there were pony rides) than horticultural or else I probably would have been there. Did anyone who’s reading this go and was it tons of family fun? Let us know!

I could have sworn I heard my first cicada yesterday. It was that kind of blazing hot day you’d expect to hear a chorus of them. So maybe I heard it through wishful thinking (auditory halucination) because I haven’t heard it again! There are a few things that herald full summer for me and that’s a major one. (The first swim in the ocean is another; first minor league baseball game… anyone else care to add to the list?)

How about a picnic on the lawn? Blithewold’s second Soiree was held in the North Garden and this time almost everyone brought supper! What a good idea – and some of it looked really tasty! Everyone sampled California wines and cheeses while listening to the smooth crooning of Jeffery Thomas, a local musician who serenaded us from the porch. His singing was so melifluous and his song choices so sweet that it seemed to me that love was in the air. For the couple of couples who looked inclined to dance (but were too shy) and the Japanese beetles picnicing and cavorting on the climbing hydrangea, the evening was definitely romantic! Since I was unaccompanied, instead of strolling arm in arm and sharing bites of cheese-n-cracker with a cutie, I wandered in search of soiree-ers with garden questions. And I found some FAQs! First question: “What kind of mulch is that – it’s so delicate and attractive!” Answer: Buckwheat hull mulch. Although it’s a bit pricey (around $12/3 cubic feet), we love it in that garden and the Rose Garden because it’s elegant, organic, mold resistant, and adds an excellent fluff to the soil as it gets mixed in over the season. Next question: “The edges are beautiful – how do you keep them looking so crisp?” Answer: Fred Perry, Groundsman extraordinaire, cuts the edge every spring with a sharpened spade and trims it weekly after mowing using a string trimmer held vertically. There were appreciative comments all over the place – everyone raved about the food, the music and the garden – it just doesn’t get better than that!

Rain was forecast for that evening but never materialized. Good for the Soiree; bad for the gardens! The Petasites (poorly sited) look like I feel after blazing days spent watering! It has stayed hot (90′s) but at least whatever system came through that night blew in a breeze and blew out the muggyness.

Here are a couple of choice bloom pics before I leave for the weekend (it’s Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day this Sunday but I might not make it in for a post – this and another on Monday might have to suffice!) Please let me know if you get tired of seeing Lotus pictures because it’s so cool I can’t seem to stop!: The second bloom opened this morning and check out the fruit from the last one! Someone told me that it’s edible – anyone have a recipe? (Not that I would harvest any of these beauties… I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of a photo op!)

The Balloon flowers opened this week – they are such a beautiful deep french blue (cobalt with a little rose madder thrown in maybe – are any of you painters who mix colors as you walk the garden?)

And click on the picture below to blow it up – the flower is wee (a little purple on a snakey green stem). I love Stachytarpheta (porterweed) for its weirdness. It’s in the verbena family, doncha know.

It was blissfully peasoupy this morning – a sauna bath still but a welcome relief to the scorching asphyxia of the last couple of days. I love the sounds of fog – amplified birds, dripping tree percussion and fogbound ship’s blasts and foghorn echoes. The siren songs lured me on a long early ramble past dewy smokey smoke bush and a diamond encrusted spiderweb, down to the shoreline. The buildings and grounds committee met Monday night and among other necessary projects shelved for lack of funds, the salt water pumphouse and dock restoration was discussed. The salt water pumphouse was used to send baywater to bathtubs in the house equipped with a third faucet — can you imagine?!! Of course, these days the bay is slightly less pristine than it was a century ago and bathing in it holds less actual appeal… Nonetheless a rescue is necessary because the historic water’s edge building is being undermined and is in danger of falling to the beach in a heap. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen before the funds to fix it are procured! (Anyone interested in donating money to the capital campaign please click here. Another project needing fundage is a new roof for the mansion to the tune of a cool mil. Those amazing 3rd floor archives need protection from the elements!)

As I write this it’s vacillating between stinking hot blazing sun and windy fog. The North Garden Soiree (sold out!) is tonight and we’ve been madly dashing around making sure every bloom is looking-alive and crossing our fingers that the thunderstorm in the forecast holds off (at least until much later tonight – we need the rain!). I’ll update you on the event’s sure success tomorrow or the next day! Anyone else out there feeling conflicted about wanting a big rain?

What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Who do you turn to for advice? Your mom? Your best friend? Your life-coach? What if you don’t know what to do in your garden? Who do you turn to then? Over at the Garden Rant blog I found a post and a link to this NY Times article about garden-coaches. Evidently you can pay someone (big bucks) to come to your garden and tell you where your weeds are and cheer you on to “just do it” when you want to rip out those ugly shrubberies but are scared that it’s the wrong decision and you’re worried you’ll regret it forever. Personally, while it’s tempting to try to make some mad money as a coach, I think giving advice is what friends and public gardens are for! Part of Blithewold’s mission is to “teach and inspire” and we fully expect visitors (for the price of admission or an annual membership) to steal ideas from our Idea Beds (and all the other gardens) and use the property as a a living identification key and how-to book and to ask us questions. Just this morning a Blithewold member came to the greenhouse wondering how to prune his roses to keep them in bloom. (“Are they repeat bloomers?”, I asked. “ummm… errr…”, he said. But if they are, now he knows what to do!) There are gardeners and groundsmen on the property every week-day, and Sunday afternoons (starting this past Sunday with superstar Gil Moore) there are Garden Docents available in the gardens to answer questions and shoot the garden breeze with visitors. Use us!

All that said, getting a good garden coach to come to your own garden might be just the thing to kick start a passion and sometimes it’s just necessary to hire professionals. This past spring, we asked a water garden guru from Nelumbo Water Gardens in Wickford, RI to fix our cement pond and this weekend the lotus we got from them started to bloom — according to Gil, it was the talk of the day!