cranes

Our favorite nursery, Santa Fe Greenhouses, aka High Country Gardens, has been having its three day summer sale, and we came back with a car load of geraniums and herbs and strange dark brown and yellow striped petunias - like wasps - and a huge pot of flowering basil, and of course catmint, to augment the flowers that we already have.  I'll draw a veil over the unfortunate moment when I thought that - at last! - I'd spotted a little pot of cilantro, and was almost assaulted since I was, in fact, stealing it from someone else's tray of plants ... but the victims of my attempted robbery were kind enough to point out another specimen for me.   Round the back there's something called a Garden of Inspiration - which isn't (or isn't primarily) somewhere one goes and sits when one's stuck with one's writing, but rather shows one what one can do with judicious planting and water systems (and purchases from SFG, no doubt), and garden sculptures, here in our desert climate.  Along one wall was a whole flock of cranes in flight, made out of goodness knows what substance, but most arresting - not that I can see us adopting these, since we have quite enough live birds of our own, including a baby flicker - like a black and white woodpecker with a red head - at the bird bath today.