Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
8/13/99 - The drought is still with us; in fact, our state has declared a drought emergency, which limits our use of water. We can't water lawns or run sprinklers, but we are still allowed to hand-water flowers, bushes, and trees. I will have to water the flower beds in Gertrude's Garden daily until we have rain. Yesterday, I watered for an hour and a half, going around the entire garden. There isn't time to really soak things, but if the ground surface is wet regularly, the soil remains moist.

This morning I worked on the Wings begonias edging our driveway--I wrote about them in last week's "Weekly Diary." I pulled weeds, which are doing well in the beds, since they share water with the flowers, and cultivated the soil so that water sinks in rather than running off. I picked the seed clusters to encourage blooming (there is still plenty of time before seeds need to be gathered). Trimming the lawn edge shows off the flowers, and digging a little furrow will keep the soil in the beds when it finally does rain.

A reader in San Francisco tells me that she would like to see close-up pictures of the flowers in Gertrude's Flower Garden, so that she could decide whether she would like a particular flower in her garden. This seems a helpful thing to have in my "Weekly Diary." but it will require better photographic equiptment than my little, old "point-and-shoot" camera with which I have been snapping photos for years. I am, therefore, in the process of buying the required camera, lens, and other necessities, so that in a few weeks you will begin to see, I hope, more interesting flower pictures.

This week's garden picture (taken with my old "point-and-shoot" camera) is intended to convey the "English" garden effect achieved by mixing various kinds, colors, and heights of flowers in one bed. Somehow each species seems able to arrange itself, in the midst of all the others, to show itself to its best advantage--a different effect than that achieved by the beds for which I have carefully chosen and arranged fewer varieties of flowers. Here you can see coreopsis (tickweed), coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Black-eyed-Susans (Rudbeckia), nicotiana (tobacco plant), some late-blooming larkspur (Delphinium ajacis), and yellow Star Zinnias.


8/20/99 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary
8/6/99 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary

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