Home and Garden

I awoke early this morning and quietly dressed and slipped outside to potter in the garden for a few minutes before breakfast. I pulled up the sweet peas that were so pretty and fragrant for so long, but are now a tangled mass of brown vines. Later in the day, I took my camera out and watched a pair of white butterflies flit among the lavender.

A friend gave us a pot of Balloon Flowers (platycodon) that put out bloom after bloom. I'm hoping to do some moving of plants in a week or two and am thinking about where I will place this one. 

Dahlia bloom in perfect symmetry. My dahlias didn't survive our cold and prolonged winter (I didn't lift the tubers), but there was a bag of free tubers in the staff room at school one day, so I took a few, not knowing what would result. These make me very happy. I'm glad they aren't orange!

And another luck-of-the-draw dahlia. They are tall, with spindly stems, but seem strong and aren't drooping at all.

Cosmos growing alongside bright white phlox. This year, the white seems whiter, or perhaps I'm just noticing it more. The blooms stand out so well against our green cedar hedge. 

Faded blue hydrangea blossoms are just as pretty now as when they were bright blue. Each bush is changing in different ways, but all the colours are becoming mellow as they absorb the waning summer sun.

A dozen or so figs found their way into the kitchen this morning. I'm trying to use up supplies just now, before going grocery shopping, so I tried to think what I could make with them. I remembered a fig flatbread that Mary of A Breath of Fresh Air had mentioned, so I looked up some recipes on line. There was some pizza dough in the freezer; I pulled it out and put it on the sunny front porch to thaw. 

I used this recipe as a base. There were enough figs and dough for two flatbreads; both have figs and caramelized onions. One has blue cheese and was drizzled with balsamic reduction and sprinkled with basil leaves.

The second flatbread was topped with cranberry goat cheese. They were both good, but I preferred the blue cheese and Tim preferred the cranberry goat cheese. 

Did you notice the cutting board in the above photo? It's shaped like a book and the title is "Romeo and Julienne." A fun gift.

It's hard to believe we're heading into the last half of August. This has been a different sort of summer, with several shorter trips that make it seem as though I'm always packing or unpacking. The garden has not received as much attention, nor have I accomplished nearly what I'd hoped in terms of house projects. Ah well, there's still a bit of time before school begins. I'll only be teaching afternoons this year, which will free me up considerably. 

"Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." Henry James