green on blue

Give these another couple of weeks, and these will be startlingly yellow sunflowers against the blue wall at Cafe Fina.  Lunch there was very welcome ... a respite from revising, rewriting, etc.  Sunflowers aren't, I know, dandelions - but they are yellow ... I was procrastinating by looking in the Bridgeman Images collection for images that I almost certainly won't use (but in case of emergencies, it's good to know where one might be able to lay one's hands on something at the last minute), and found this exquisitely awful painting by the Swedish artist Sven Richard Bergh, The Knight and the Maiden (1897), which is simply too good not to share ...

 

another mailbox (and other people's hollyhocks)

Another very local mailbox.  I can't imagine that the hand is waving two fingers while someone yells FIGHT ON, because when these relatively new neighbors moved in, their car number plates showed that they were from Texas.  But one never knows ... In any case, I think the fingers indicate the house number - 2 - and aren't intended to cause trigger responses in any passing Trojans.

This was a very quick walk before having a start-the-week breakfast at Harry's.  I'd hoped this would set me up for a hard day's work, but it would take more than that to super-charge me for re-punctuating footnotes and paying for images ...

 

forked wings

Here, on Monte Alto, is an avian change on the top of a mailbox from the customary black crow.  It's a ... a quail?  A completely fanciful bird?  Whatever it might be, fork heads have been resourcefully deployed, albeit in a way that ultimately suggests a strange designer handbag rather than a pair of wings.

 

the trees made it!

When I came out here in late April, it was just after a very heavy frost, and - some of you may remember - the locust tree blossom was all shrivelled up, and it looked touch and go whether the leaves would perish as well.  I was enormously relieved when we rolled up earlier this week, and they were as green as they usually are at this time of year.

I've been staring out of the window at this view a lot, today, because I'm trying hard to grapple with getting my bibliography into something resembling official Chicago Manual of Style.  

 

dandelions, and more

Book revision, so far, hasn't really touched on the dandelions chapter, which is one of the better ones: I'm still trying to give seaweed a better shape, argument, point.  But it was a wonderful surprise to see dandelions on sale at Agua Fria Nurseries today!  Very healthy, flourishing dandelions, in the herbs section - but at the same time, they were looking like a book illustration, not least because they had the battered plastic of the greenhouse covering behind them.

It was the annual, start-of-our-summer plant shop - and I had a notably smaller cart than usual, and it was notably more expensive than even last year.  But I always love going there, even if I do seem to take photos of the same things (though the dandelions are new!) year after year.  This time I'll strip the lilies and seed-heads of their color ...

but I think I should keep the bright green of the nettles (tea! soup! I remember once having nettle and barley soup at a long, long ago health food cafe and shop on the Cowley Road, Uhuru ... a cafe long ago, to be sure, but I see that they are still going after fifty years! as a food shop.  Fifty years!  Congratulations to them.  They opened in my final year as an undergraduate... which I realize makes it fifty years since I did my Finals examinations, which remain pretty vividly seared into my memory.).

 

Moth would like you to know

that she is supervising my final book revisions, and she has a number of suggestions to make - most of them critical.

 

buffalo gourd

It's the annual resurgence of the buffalo gourds, bringing splashes of bright yellow to the verges, and starting off on their quest to bring into being the most bitter (and for that matter poisonous) fruit possible.  I know I've commented in the past that they have their uses (as purgatives, or for making soap), but I think I'll content myself with the knowledge that their function is to be cheerful.