A Peek At My Garden and Farewell to a Dear Friend

via Two Women and a Hoe

Isn't this vintage sign great?  It's so easy to get lost in the garden at this time of year.  It's certainly been true for me the last few weeks!  The soggy spring in Massachusetts has led to mega weed pulling sessions around here. I've got the sore back, mosquito bites and poison ivy to prove it too!  It's only June and I've already had one miserable case of poison summac (it was even in my eyes- like how did I do that?) and right now I'm getting over a slight case of poison ivy.  But, it's always worth it when I look out a window and see something new in bloom.  Here's a few photo shots from my garden this year.

  Japanese Anemones and alchemilla mollis still wet with dew...

My foxgloves have naturalized everywhere.  When we first moved here seven years ago, I brought one plant from our last home and this past fall I was pulling them out by the roots and composting them.  So they are pretty happy here -- too happy, I guess!  But, I still love them especially around the rock walls and peeking out from the hemlocks bordering one side of the garden.  

This year I found a welcome surprise in the garden -- lupines! How they got here I don't know, but this was the very last one.  I think they are biennial - I should check that out -- if so, I probably won't see them again until 2014.  

I also have peach leaved campanula that I adore even if the constant rain has bent their stalks.  Once up in New Hampshire I saw a garden that was filled  with them.  Hopefully, mine will do the same eventually!

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Farewell To A Dear Friend

Our sweet golden, Haley passed recently at the age of 15 years and 11 months - exactly to the day. She almost made her 16th birthday.

We buried her on top of the hill behind the stone wall in the photo above, under the hemlocks where she loved to lie in the shade on a warm summer day.  As Milan Kundera said, "To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -- it was peace."  I think we will sit on the bench beside her grave in the cool shade under that deep green canopy of hemlocks and remember the unfaltering loyalty, love, and friendship this great dog shared with us.

R.I.P.

Haley Bree Skinner

6 July 1996  - 6 June 2012

"A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself."

                                                 - Josh Billings

xoxo,

Millie