Saturday 3 July 2010

Our Summer Garden

This is our garden in the summer. Ingrid and I consider ourselves extremely blessed and fortunate to have this beauty around us.


The birch tree in the left corner of our small front garden.


Left. Ingrid's garden at the back. It's a bit wild but that seems to fit and we like it that way.






This patch (picture right) is looked after by Barb, our next door neighbour. That spot is where there used to be twin trees that got blown down onto our roofs in a possible tornado a few years ago. The trees were on the property borderline and the stumps were difficult to remove. Barb asked us if we minded if she turned it into a garden. Hello? Would we mind?


Our willow tree. We get a lot of spring snow-melt running through our back yard so this willow is a great help. We had some tree people in to give it a hair cut last winter to get rid of dead branches and reduce wind resistance. Having that blow down is not what anyone would want. If you zoom in you can see the house of another neighbour who borders our property.



This is looking straight down to the bottom of our yard. It's actually quite swampy at the bottom right through until the end of June.



Left. Another view of Ingrid's garden, this time in the early evening.



My sundial in the front garden. It's not a very good sundial as sundials go. I calibrated it at midday at the equinox (allowing for daylight saving) and by two o'clock in the afternoon it was already showing the wrong time. It was made in China so I put it down to a latitude problem. Maybe they heard it was for Canada so they designed it for the Arctic Circle. Or maybe whoever ordered them gave the suppliers too much latitude. (I made that up myself.) Whatever. I still keep it because it reminds me of an age when time was measured in seasons and the smallest unit of day to day measure was an hour. I can sit in my garden and let the nano-seconds take care of themselves. The only time I have to worry about is whether it's time for another beer.