Lilies in the rain

One unblocks the gutter by poking a stick into the 2 inch opening through which the rain from three rooves must drain. Look at all this beautiful water. Into the sea.

There are a lot of drops here, so forgive the sense of redundancy. It has been rainy and cloudy forever. Still: yesterday's promised floods did not materialize.

I was looking forward to the crashes of thunder and bright-lit sky through the skylight over my bed last night. Not a peep.

These buds are Orienpets - crosses of Trumpet or Aurelian hybrids with Oriental lilies.

The sun came out for 3 minutes just now. Tonight we have 30mph winds.

A wasp is buzzing the terrace. No sign of bees.

"A necklace of raindrops"...that is the story I was trying to remember recently. A photograph on Bonbon Oiseau's blog brought to mind the childhood story I loved and had forgotten till the moment of looking at the waterdrops on a blade of grass. Written by Ted Hughes or Joan Aiken. The latter, I suspect. Hang on a second for google: yes! Here is the book I had, same cover. It's so moving to see it again, fuzzy as it is. I wonder what happened to mine? I see Amazon and others have a subsequent edition. Mine seems to have been published in 1968, yikes. I would have said 70's. But I know nothing about her, other than she wrote beautifully.

I bought two old books at a newish used book store on Thursday. I was lured by two large books of old roses and their prints displayed in the temporarily sunny window...but at $50 each, and rather bent, they were beyond what I should have been buying. So I walked out with a first edition The Garden Decorative, by F.M. Wells, published in 1903. Its first owner, H. M. Carter, signed it, and dated it, 1908. Its second owner was Senga Mortimer, no date. Several of the other garden books arranged in the window had been hers, too. I bought the little green, cloth-bound book for $7. It is printed on good, stiff paper.

"Just as the spirit of the nouveau art is making its presence felt in the interior of our houses, so is the trend of modern feeling working in our gardens..."

I also bought, for $5, a larger, but also first edition, green cloth-bound and stiff-papered The Little Garden for Little Money by Kate L. Brewster, published in 1924. Once Senga Mortimer's, too.

Mrs Brewster starts, " Nice people like gardens, or liking gardens makes people nice."

I used to think this true, but have subsquently met the exceptions to this rule. Still, I think that gardening makes people nicer than they would have been otherwise.

I also found some 1954, 11th printing, Arden Shakespeare editions - Lear, Macbeth, Richard ii, Merchant - and bought all four, for $5 each. My huge Shakespeare anthology walked out of my house some years ago. Blue cloth hardcovers again, and more of that nice, stiff, ivory paper. I asked the grumpy owner, or at any rate the person selling the books, if I might leave my number in case any more came in, and he snapped at me to check back instead, after tossing my plastic money card back at me. OK...

The solid grey cloud blanket is breaking into feathers and the sun shines intermittently.

And I must get back to drawing a garden.