Treasures of My Garden: September 19, 2008

A special critter edition of Treasures of My Garden comes your way today, courtesy of a morning spent cleaning up the yard in preparation for autumn.


One of about, oh, a billion diadem garden spiders we saw today. They've all been staking their territories on our fence and the females are huge this late in the year. The kids were fascinated, though not nearly as much as arachnophile Mommy. ;) I could have spent all day watching her.


Earlier in the summer, we got a special gift from our neighbor. Though I couldn't manage to get a picture of them then, it seems that at least one of them may have stuck around. I found this guy in the middle of a huge pile of rocks that I was trying to move (don't ask). Both Annie and Airius were eager to catch him, but neither one has my mad toad-catching skills. I took pity on the guy and let him be when the kids chased him into the borage. Fortunately, I didn't move the rock pile far. He may stay yet.


A spotted leopard slug, one of several, also found in the rock pile inhabited by the toad above. These bad boys are very common in our garden and especially love the stump of the redbud tree we lost in a lightening storm last year. They get enormous and are my least favorite garden critters.

Treasures of my Garden: June 20, 2008

Ever heard of The Church of the Old Mermaids? It was founded by my favorite author, Kim Antieau, and I'm a firm devotee. Old Mermaid legend has it that the desert used to be covered in ocean. That ocean must have come all the way to Ohio because we've been finding shells in our garden. The one above is a shell impression in a stone. A fossil? I don't know, but it's gorgeous, and it's become part of our garden altar now.


The shell I uncovered today while digging up some more lawn. Its graceful inward curves are filled with dirt, but Annie kept insisting that she could hear the ocean and that I should hear it too. Later, she said she heard a voice coming from the shell. I asked her what it was saying. She whispered in my ear, "she sells seashells by the seashore." LOL Reminds me of Sister Laughs a Lot Mermaid...


I may not have heard the ocean in the shell, but I somehow hear it in the trees. Not the ocean, exactly, but Lake Erie, where I am most at home. There is a very distinctive rustling of the wind in the limbs of our Mama Maple that instantly transports me back to those days of my childhood and teenage years when I could hear the lake lap at the shore from my bedroom window. Oh, how I miss home! Thank you, Old Mermaids, Old Sea, for giving me these little gifts...

Treasures of my Garden: June 7, 2008

Anyone know what species of butterfly this is? It's a subtle bug. The colors are all shaded with gray, it seems.



A pair of trusting mourning doves foraging amongst the Hypericum and Echinacea... and sitting on my rosemary seedling. *sigh*

And last but not least...




I found this while ripping up some sod for the pepper bed (yes, I'm late getting everything in). It's a white porcelain something-or-other. Perhaps a knob? Seems a bit big and bulky for a knob though. The hole goes all the way through, so I know it was meant to be screwed into or onto something. In my odd sort of logic, I take this as proof that our bungalow bathroom once had white porcelain fixtures. LOL I REALLY want our bungalow bathroom to have had white porcelain fixtures, can you tell? :D