Inside out

I find this mozzie today, on the in-side of my mosquito net. No folks, this ain't the malaria belt, it's Brooklyn. It kind of summed up the way I felt about my day.

Long days

I started this blog a few days before my first Rose Party last year, so it's easy to remember that the Iceberg roses were in full bloom in the last week of May, 2007. This year, they have already begun to open, and will probably bloom fully in two weeks' time. The April days feel distinctly June-ish, and I am clinging possesively to cool evening breezes and the promise of temperatures in the 60's Fahrenheit. July cannot stay away long enough.

Last weekend's (it feels like last year's, this week has been so full) corydalis has settled into its pot happily, sharing with a chatreuse liriope ("Pee Dee Ingot" - uncomfortable name), a violet and three lilies already risen to ten inches. I think they are Formosas. The corydalis up close looks very Alien. Sigourney should grow them in her garden...

While I was watering this evening, a mockingbird, left, duked it out with a kestrel on the aerials across the road.


Two weeks ago I took this picure and labelled it Lily. Um. No, it was in fact the beginnings of the Veronicastrum I planted last, late summer.


That's not a bad growth spurt. Twelve days, sixteen inches.

The way the catnip looks at the end of an unattended day. And the reason little pots are a high maintenance pain. No, I like watering them. It's a good feeling.

The scary roses. I'm not really ready for them.

New York Spring: Street Tulips

I would have loved to have seen the tulips in Istanbul - Bevan Ali sent some pictures, though not of the black ones on his little terrace facing the steep street on whose other side is a baker who makes pies that are carried back hot, flaky with phyllo and filled with lamb and feta, for breakfast. Sigh. They have more of the parrot kind there (tulips, not pies), pointier, spikier, sexier. Here, this week, the very tall fat tulips are open, very soon to fade, and are, I must admit, striking.

Below -Park Avenue with beautiful old crabapples behind.


East 92nd Street planters

Tree pits

Um. Loud tulips.


Loud tulips

Tall, fat Tribeca tulips.

New York Spring: Boerum Hill Crabapple

I looked left down Douglass Street (which I'd never really paid attention to), as I was walking down Smith towards Stinky... and saw this huge crabapple. Taller than most. Packed with flowers.

New York Spring: Carroll Gardens

A trip to Stinky for some more of their smoked duck breast (very good but not in the same, unctuous league as the duck prosciutto of Granville Island), took me further south of my beaten path. I walked up through Carroll Gardens and found what one finds when one takes a different road. New things, revelation. Like, open lilac! Corner of DeGraw and Tomkin's Place.

A blue door and a pink cherry next to the little shared garden that was too shaded for a good picture: the difficulty of early evening in the grid: bright light slicing down streets running east- west, somber evening in the cross streets.

Clinton and DeGraw. A fruiting cherry. I know because I've seen it in summer. Full of cherries.


A very lovely magnolia, just when I thought I was magnolia-ed out. DeGraw between Smith and Clinton.

New York Spring: Up and Down

Congress Street

2nd Avenue

New York Spring: Cobble Hill Crabapples

I declare it, officially, crabapple week. I adore them, and include them as often as possible in rooftop gardens. They are small in stature, beautifully formed, with character, not just straight- up-and-down, and have flowers ranging from spotless white to delicate pink to burgundy, with changes of colour as each flower opens, too; they bear fruit which, as Martha proved in lock-up, makes very good jelly, and then splash out in fall colour. Lovely little trees, and they are in full bloom.

This is at the entrance to Cobble Hill Park. Impeccably smooth, full, rounded blossoms on a curvaceously rounded tree. 

    The Kate Winslet of trees.Farther in, against the lane, pink-tinged blooms.

And on Congress, one door up from the flowering quince, deep burgundy flowers, reminding me of the crabapple that grew in Bloemfontein, long ago, against the high, white wall.