My Macro World...........

Hydrangea

I really don't know the time when these turn white but I really don't remember them being in a green stage at first.  I transplanted one of these here in the front of the house 5 or more years ago and they have really spread out to be mature plants.  It is the traditional old fashioned white one that you see around a lot of the older houses planted along foundations.

I received a note from a high school graduate friend of mine yesterday.  She was asking me to consider letting her bring her garden club tour bus to see my gardens.  I was flattered but very embarrassed.  I plead innocent to the fact that I have shown off my gardens somewhat.  I also confess that I am a better macro photographer than I am a gardener. I have lots of nice plantings that look good together as I do understand good design.

 What I don't have is the ability to have a great lawn and to keep my gardens weeded.  The creeping Charlie owns my yard and I just don't have the time or money to deal with it right now.  Also my garden flowers are not all planted in groupings.  So I may have an iris blooming here and 10 yards I will have another.  My orchard area is planted with stray things that have no organization other than I have temporarily planted things to get them into the ground and I will move them elsewhere later.

I will not have the summer to get my yard and garden in shape and I am sliding into another job right after the last day of school.  I haven't planted my perennials for this year and I may not as I am too tired, lazy, busy to maintain them and keep them alive.  I will plant zinnia's as they are easy to maintain.

I might send her a slide show of all the photos of my flowers so she could do a presentation with them.  My macros seem to be cropped so you can't see the glaring weeds or creeping Charlie or bad gardening skills.  I also don't have a drop of mulch to make my place look better.

My red peony bushes are now taking their turn to be in bloom.  I have them planted in three different locations but one of them is being crowded out by an old fashion rose. It has only a couple of buds on it this year so I will move it after it blooms.

The smaller rose has many blooms on it this year.  The one on the right is one that is just opening and the one on the left is fading away to the dropping of its petals stage.  The brown from the freeze in April is visible on all of my roses.  When I clip them back after blooming the new ones will not show any damage.

My mock orange bush is an old one.  It has grown to be so large.  It was better looking when I first moved here 30 plus years ago.  I will probably start removing a third of the mature branches and see if I can get it to be a smaller bush.

I am a floating sub today, working in the special education room in the morning and then will be reassigned to another job in the afternoon.  I haven't had a tech day for quit a while as bad spring allergy colds are hitting the staff and students.  There are a lot of track meets and golf meets that take teachers away from the classroom also.

Thanks for stopping by my post today.

Because it it there.....

This row of iris all staked up so they can bloom on a vertical stem, create an unusual composition.  I will share it because I have it.  I am showing you way too many iris but endure it all as the iris are fading.  There will be no more iris posts in the near future.

The spiderwort is in partial bloom.  I didn't get it staked this year and it fortunately is standing on it's without any support.  I had a magenta colored on that has been destroyed by invading hosta plants.

 Pontentilla come in many colors but my white one seems to be a strong bloomer this year.  It doesn't like warm weather so it struggles in Iowa in August.

 It is a bug portrait again coming from my back yard.  This is the rose that I moved from southern Iowa to my south side of my house.   It is it's third year in the ground and I am pleased with the way it has rooted in and revived to a wonderful rose.  I bought it for my mom years ago and I haven't a clue as to the name of it.  I must have paid a lot of money for it as it is such a strong plant with shiny green leaves.  It has five blooms on it right now and will rebloom after I trim it back.

It is going to be warm today and that will be great.  I have many things on my list to do when I leave the school today.  I have found that I can't do it all so I will make a strong effort to get a lot of things done on one of the projects.

I am a floating special ed. teacher today, taking notes about World War 1 and writing poetry for a final project.  I don't know the next class that I will be attending as I will be sent in to replace the most critical spot. There are actually two people gone and there is only one of me.

Thanks for stopping by my post today.

Tuesday's Things.........

The dark buds really don't help one to know what color the iris will be. This probably ia more of a red-brown iris as the camera doesn't pick up red colors accurately.  This iris sat about three feet back from it's present location.  I moved it away from a forsythia bush and out into the sun.  This is the second year that it has bloomed but only two stalks of buds came up this year instead of the three that came up last year.  I may move the back portion to another location in my garden.

 

 I keep taking pictures of this wiegela as the rains have made it really bloom.

This small rose has many buds on it and they flowers are really nice.  It has many blooms and if I keep them cut back they will bloom most of the summer.

I took a shot of the new sprouts from the leaf starts.  I am not going to rush into replanting these as I want lots of roots on them before I move them.

The old traditional iris is starting to bloom.  My neighbor was given this also and it bloomed earlier than mine.  Her iris did not survive the rains and the winds and they looked like a hurricane had hit them. I am glad my waited to bloom later.

It is a bazinga day at school for me.  Each day some group of students sneak in and treat a teacher's room to a special hazing.   The Spanish teacher is gone the first two hours.  When I, the sub, entered the room I had to remove a criminal yellow tape from the door.  When I walked in,  every student desk had been flipped upside down but all neatly still in the right location.  He also has his desk covered with balloons.  Since I have only two classes today before he returns the kids are going to sit on the floor and also leave the balloons in place so he can see it all when he returns.  The students like sitting on the floor anyway even though a couple are sitting on the desk while it is upside down.

Bazinga is a friendly honor to the staff.  I am not sure that it is students but I suspect if it isn't, that a staff person had to have student help to accomplish this.  In order to teach sit-in's of the sixties last week, one of the staff social studies teachers had one, in the neighbor's classroom, unannounced.  It probably wasted five minutes of class time but these kids don't know what sit-ins look like unless they watch Occupy people today.

We awakened this morning to the sound of our furnish running again.  It was 50 degrees F. last night and won't warm up to 65 degrees today. Thank you for stopping by my post today.

Rain and Wind.......

The rain and wind is a love/hate relationship to our world.  I like that we have rain and I don't like drought.  I don't like so much rain that it wrecks the spring flowers.  But the wind has been menacing.  Most of my larger blooming irs are laying on the ground from too much water and high wind breaking them down.

The cemetery iris above is going to have a few more blooms so I should get a better photo.  They whole lot of the iris look like they have been through hurricane Lawrence.

The fernleaf peonies are all done but one branch must have slept in or something.  The last two small buds came out on Saturday.

These buds have opened and the were on the ground yesterday from the wind.  I will show you tomorrow what the color is of this iris.  Think red everybody, or maybe red-brown.

I do not know the name of this rose. The plant has many blooms on them and the actual flower is half the size of a normal rose.  I like the rose as I trim off the spent roses and it sets up new buds immediately.

Saturday proved to be an interesting day in Woodward, Iowa.  They put in a new track around the football field and it had been put to good use.  They had a Junior High State Track Meet at the new track.  It was said that over 100 different schools were sending students to the meet.  We live four blocks from the area and we had cars lined up and down our street.  The town was doubled in size just for one day.

I am an art teacher in the morning and a special education teacher in the afternoon. We are running out of Mondays before school will be out.  It has seemed like a short school, but not as short as my last weekend.

Hey, we watched the new PBS version of Sherlock Holmes done in our present time period.  It is done well.  We watched three episodes in a row and became a lot loony.  What I found interesting was the fact that Dr. Watson, wrote about all that they did on his BLOG.  So the whole world was keeping track of them in the modern world as they were solving cases.  Once in a while in the dialog Holmes would ask another person how he knew his information and the person would reply, "I read it on the blog."

Thanks for stopping by today.