SPM was here when I got home from work. I came along the sidewalk slowly, looking for bindweed, as I do every summer afternoon, bounced Shadowfax up the two steps to the walk, and spotted RDC inside. I am glad I didn't blow him a kiss or flash him--well, the latter was unlikely anyway--because through the screen I didn't recognize the additional height that made the figure SPM, not RDC. He said hi and I realized my mistake, and then he remarked on the garden. He hadn't seen it for 2.5 weeks and in that time it really has taken off.
It is lovely, as a matter of fact and thank you for noticing. Some spaces need to be filled in and the nepeta needs more cutting but yeah. It's lovely.
RDC remarked that after the house falls over into a swamp we can live in the garden. Our cheery conversation with SPM concerned how to fix whatever's going on down there and how much it will cost (Blake's definitely not getting a car when he turns 16) and how to vanquish an insurance company we anticipate to be reluctant.
After SPM left, I dragged RDC out to make him repeat SPM's compliments. He thought we (read I) could remove the groundcloth, as there's not a bindweed problem out here. "There's not a bindweed problem because I look for it every day," I told him, as with perfect timing I spotted quite a long vicious parasite winding up a penstemon strictus. The groundcloth stays.
As we inspected the catmint cuttings, wondering if they'll survive, and looked at the emerging flowers on the penstemon pinofolius (yellow, flame, coral, a welcome sight in my blue and lavender and white garden), and plotted for more thyme, and wondered how high the salvia will grow this year, RDC noticed a moth feeding on the catmint. We watched it for a moment. "That's a hummingbird!" we realized together.
I think it was our first summer here that I saw a hummingbird in the large, anonymous bush on the north side, also initially mistaking its wee brownness for a moth. But it was a hummingbird--and I haven't seen one since, until this one. I've known from the start that bees love the catmint, which makes me if not RDC happy. It is listed as a hummingbird attractant. And it is! This makes me so happy.
Not all wildlife makes me so happy. As I type this the next morning, I'm listening to a squirrel in the nectarine tree, sounding like nails on a chalkboard, gnawing on the fetal fruit. Little fucker. There are dozens of baby plums that they'll destroy next, and then they'll work on the pears. We watched "Amy and Amiability" last night, an excellent "Blackadder" episode even if it didn't feature the Shadow killing their excessively tailed selves. I am becoming Anya, squirrel-wise.