A Touch of Victoriana

Another garden tour today in the town of Elmira, and mercifully the heat wave has temporarily taken leave.
This garden-owner had a beautifully restored Victorian home and displayed some of his china collection from the 1800's. This is transfer ware.
It was easy to imagine family members choosing the coolest porch to sit, fanning themselves with paper fans and sipping fresh lemonade.

This closely resembles the doll carriage of my childhood, which I hasten to add was way past the Victorian era.
Garden tours are a reminder that almost any garden is enhanced by a back-drop of sheltering trees and my own less -than- twenty years old place is stuffed with as many trees that the property can handle.
That's my legacy to future owners.
What's not to love about summer?

Hello Rain

Here is the deck thermometer yesterday. Okay it is in full sun but we won't quibble--it was hot and humid, the kind of day you spend forcing yourself to at least get the bed made.

The deck this morning.
If you've had a lot of rain lately you won't be impressed.
Last month we had a lot of rain and that meant more lawn cutting but less hand-watering so it balanced out.
We will savor this rain. These days we look for funnel clouds and cringe when the wind starts to howl, so a gentle rain is just fine.
My only complaint about this summer is that it's flying by.
Slow down, please.

This Was Home

This house, center-left, is my old house in Toronto. It's well over a hundred years old, situated in Cabbagetown, a central downtown area where 'way back, these were rooming houses for laborers, and front yards were planted with cabbages,or that's how the story goes.

On a recent quickie visit to Toronto, we detoured past my old house, down a narrow one-way street.

It's in a row of five houses linked together, each one seventeen feet wide. We were a mixture of "white painters" and homes for the helpless, a noisy union hall at the top of the street and a pub at the bottom.

At first, the front "yard" was cement and eventually I had a portion jack-hammered out and set in a raised bed where I planted the magnolia tree you can see flourishing at the left of the big window, and we installed the old stained glass transom over the front door.

We lived so close to the city center that we could walk anywhere.

Looking out the back kitchen window there were chestnut trees towering above and from the third floor deck we had a good view of the needle-like C.N.Tower in the distance.

We raised our six kids in a shoe-box house in the suburbs and when they flew the nest we moved into this umpteen room beauty and we used every inch.

Eventually this area became prime and when Hal got too sick to work, we sold the house for many times what we paid for it and we moved into a tiny place close to the hospital.

I've moved on and life is good but I still dream about that house and it's two ghosts.

I hope the present occupants are happy there.