Saskatoons and raspberries

This must be a banner year for saskatoons (and the wild raspberries aren’t too shabby either). The sask. berries are giant and the bushes are loaded. I’ve been picking for days and days.

Purple Pavement rose

We bought this shrub a couple years ago, and it hasn’t bloomed until now. Last year I nearly tore it out as dead. Fortunately I waited. The leaves are similar to the rugosa roses so I imagine eventually this will be one of the large shrubby roses. Fingers crossed.

Here comes the freight train

We’ve named it the freight train many years ago – that wind that comes up from the north-west. The sound it makes as it rushes through the trees and down the path carries portent – and usually brings trouble. This particular storm worked its way across the province, found its way to the Compound, and after entertaining us it struck Camrose with less entertaining results. Mulder did OK, likely...

The underclothes first

Not exactly the kind of photos my mother would want me to post on the internet, but hardly racy enough to fret over. Cotton twill for the corset with a nice stripe visible in the weave. Wow, does that fabric ever press nicely. The corset trim is a pre packaged binding tape with lace. I bought it for a bedskirt years ago. But no one will notice it’s missing from the side of the bed that is up against the...

Night and Day

The only surviving tea rose here at the Compound. The buds are so beautifully dark before they open. Quite set back by the June cold snap, I think we’ll only get these two blooms.

Clustered Bellflower

Campanula glomerata. Planted on a slope that the dog decided to use as his path to the lower backyard, yet they keep coming back. Very best cut flower, lasts for a full week or longer in a vase.

Pearly Everlasting

Anaphalis margaritacea. Fairly hardy, a bit weedy, but doesn’t mind the clayey soil at the end of the flower bed. Great cut flower. and blooms for 3 to 4 weeks

Therese Bugnet

A hardy rugosa. This is her first year to bloom but is supposed to be quite shrubby eventually. Planted up on the knob, that just the kind of rose we’re looking for.

Survival of the Sickest

Subtitled: “A Medical Maverick discovers why we need disease” Interesting (why do we have diabetes? To keep us alive during an ice age) until it reached the mitochondria and jumping dna code and my brain went “huh?” Semi aquatic ancestors made our nostrils face down…. did you know that?

Lucy Maud Montgomery – The gift of wings

Biography that ‘looks far beyond her own published journals’. There was a lot of stress in this woman’s life – loopy husband, crooked publisher, lazy sons. It’s amazing she was able to write what she did.