A Bluestocking Knits

Spring

Our front garden is well into the lupines-and-poppies phase, and is a bit of a show-stopper on sunny days -- which we've had quite a number of lately.  Spring is definitely here! 

I bought a packet of seeds of just this California blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) this year, and am more than rewarded -- it was sweet here and there last year, but in drifts it is delightful.

Penstemon "Margarita BOP", even more intensely blue-purple in real life.

California figwort or California bee plant (Scrophularia californica), one of my three new plantings this year.  The flowers don't get much bigger than this, but they are a pleasing dark red which adds a hint of color, and the bees are quite happy with them just as they are.

I had thought this was a goner, a new desert willow tree (Chilopsis linearis), as it turned into a stick barely hours after I brought it home in November and stayed that way for months -- I knew that it is deciduous, but it was so sad for so long that I had almost given up hope, and then suddenly there were tiny buds.  The artemisia behind seems almost to be caressing it!

Lacy phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia).  This is I confess my least-favorite in Theodore Payne's wildflower mix, as it gets leggy and dull soon after blooming, as well as elbowing everything else out of the way and flopping down on top of them, but the new whorls are charming.

Autumn sage (Salvia greggii), not really a California native, but it was an unexpected gift, and makes a striking pop of deep magenta all-year round.

Climbing penstemon (Keckiella cordifolia).  This had been thoroughly trampled on last spring -- by that lacy phacelia -- so I'm happy to see that it has leapt skyward this year.  It will have long tubular red flowers, a bit more orangey-red than I quite like, but if it blooms fairly soon it will be striking against the purple arroyo lupines, and whatever its color the bees will be happy!

An early mountain garland, playing hide-and-seek amongst the poppies!

And something of the full effect, albeit with the unmistakable tinge of suburbia in the background.

Indoors, I am racing through a reread of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series -- have just started number 19 in the series, The Hundred Days -- no less rewarding than reading them all for the first time.  I pass silently over the occasional sentence fragment for the joys of things like this, Jack reproving a young midshipman, from Master and Commander (as part of their studies, midshipmen took noon observations to calculate or "work" the ship's position, written, preferably neatly, on a piece of paper and given to the captain) --

“Mr. Babbington," he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down.  "Take your hands out of your pockets.  When did you last write home?"
Mr. Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact, a valid accusation.  He reddened, and said, "I don't know, sir."
"Think, sir, think," said Jack, his good-tempered face clouding unexpectedly. "What port did you send it from?  Mahon?  Leghorn?  Genoa?  Gibraltar?  Well, never mind.  Write a handsome letter. Two pages at least. And send it in to me with your daily workings tomorrow. Give your father my compliments and tell him my bankers are Hoares."  For Jack, like most other captains, managed the youngsters' parental allowance for them.  "Hoares," he repeated absently once or twice, "my bankers are Hoares," and a strangled ugly crowing noise made him turn. Young Ricketts was clinging to the fall of the main burton-tackle in an attempt to control himself, but without much success.

Or this, from The Ionian Mission -- Jack, as it happens plays the violin and Stephen the cello, and one of their deepest pleasures is to play of an evening when there is no great-gun practice or other such man-of-war business --

"Oh well," said Jack: and then, "Did you ever meet Bach?"
"Which Bach?"
"London Bach."
"Not I."
"I did.  He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair.  But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library.  We searched through the papers -- such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees -- we searched for hours, and no uncle's pieces did we find.  But the whole point is this: Bach had a father."
"Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me.  Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case."
"And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry."
"A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not?  Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?"
"I mean the piles were kept in the pantry.  Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great passion according to St. Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, 'cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together.  It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it.  I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing.  How I should love to hear it played really well -- to hear Viotti dashing away."

I decided to make a batch of ship's biscuit, using the recipe and method from the Aubrey/Maturin cookbook of the world, Lobscouse and Spotted Dog.  The method involves repeatedly folding the dough and beating it thin with a mallet or rolling pin for a half-hour, I kid you not.  I'm not sure why -- and I admitted defeat, dripping with sweat, after seven minutes and got out the given alternative, a pasta machine, to finish it, but it makes a beautifully smooth dough.

Ship's biscuit is a component of lobscouse, a sort of meat stew -- presumably the crushed biscuit serves as a thickener.  The recipe sounds intriguing enough for me to want to try it, though I will have to wait six months or so for the biscuit to be properly hard enough to stop a musket ball.

(I thought I should get a head start on Julia's quilt, so I asked her the other day what she would like.  "Sheep," she said promptly.  "Or kelp forest."  Ummm...)

I am stitching a bit most days on Laura's star quilt, finding it a bit plodding, I must say -- though I was heartened to see that although from the top it looks like I've managed very little, when I turn it over and see nothing but quilting lines, I'm actually a tolerable ways along.  This photo may not give the proper effect, but I certainly take heart from it! --

 

10th Update

Here is the status as of this afternoon of the main projects I've got going.  I usually wake up early most mornings, and so after breakfast I stitch for an hour or so on the miniature Kurdistan prayer rug, before I put in my contact lenses.  I continue to find this an utter pleasure to work.  The strange white diagonal lines are the traveling threads on the back!

Granny Sampler Afghan all stitched together -- at last, she said wearily -- and the border almost finished.  Still have about two-thirds of the ends to weave in, though.  Sigh.  On the bright side, it was looking very, um, extemporaneous for a while, and looks much more cohesive now, so I'm quite pleased with it.

A loaf of Finnish rye bread, from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess -- amazingly easy, since there was almost no kneading, to my surprise.  Even better that it tastes delicious and used 180g of the rye flour that's been lurking in my freezer for years.  (I might have to buy more now, actually, this is so good.)

Swatching with the KnitPicks "Palette".  I wrote here quite some time ago that I wanted to knit the Victory Jumper with it, and I still think the yarn would suit the pattern well, but I think what was bothering me at the back of my mind so much that I've left it for a full year was that it's just a bit itchy to want to wear against the skin.  What I'm thinking now is something more like this lacy waistcoat/vest from DROPS ...

These faux tiles would obviously look a bit more "realistic" when attached more snugly -- I've started gluing them to a paper base, which is curling a bit when just propped up against the front façade of the tea-shop-to-be -- but I'm just not very happy with them, I'm afraid.  I could live with the uneven surfaces, but the fraction-of-a-fraction difference in sizes is quite glaring at 1:12 scale.  So it's on to plan B, but unfortunately I don't yet know what plan B is.

Still pretty happy with this.  I'm really fascinated by Quaker samplers -- I think what pleases me most about this particular one (aside from the ligatures, of course) is the combination of complex motifs with serene colors.  I've made a few tweaks of the chart here and there, and haven't yet filled in the empty spaces with their smaller motifs.

Tomato seedlings, hardening off the last few days before getting planted.  Some of the seeds didn't sprout along with their brethren, and so I put another seed in those pots -- then lo, up came the first one! and now some of the pots have two seedlings.  With limited space in my two new raised beds, I had ordered seeds of two heirloom dwarf varieties, and then the seed company sent a third packet "similar to my selections" free, so I have eight little pots altogether, the purple cherry tomato "Dwarf Velvet Night" and the bicolor beefsteak "Dwarf  Beauty King," plus "Dwarf Sleeping Lady".  (I think I wrote "Sleeping Beauty" on the stick!)

The arroyo lupines and the lacy phacelia in our front garden are looking a bit decrepit now, since being the first ones to appear they have been setting seed for some weeks, but the mountain garlands are in full glory at the moment -- I think they are what I was most looking forward to, so it's lovely to gaze across the field of them (stopping before one's eye gets to the line of cars perpetually resident along both sides of the street these lock-down days, as so few of our neighbors are going anywhere at all).  Though this photo doesn't really convey the delicious colors (nor the hum of the delighted and slightly drunken bees), I've left the photo full-size, so you can get the full effect!  The shrubs that I can still find (!) are all doing well, and the little California wild rose has buds on it, hurray!

Hunkering Down

“So it turns out now is a good time to spend more time at home. On the bright side, that means nobody will judge you for canceling plans and spending all day at your sewing machine! And there’s nothing like creative thoughts, beautiful things, and busy hands to bring peace to the stresses of life” -- From the Missouri Star Quilt Co. newsletter for 14 March 2020

I liked this quote, its calm lightheartedness and sensibility in these trying days of uncertainty and sometimes panic. It had already occurred to me that if we were required or even decided to hole up at home for a few weeks, or even a month, we might run out of milk or toilet paper but I would have quite enough things to keep me from being bored!  If nothing else, I've been steadily acquiring books faster than I can read them, so there is always a stack at hand.

I was going to do a quilting of criss-crossed diagonals on the New Boro quilt, but I stopped after one pass, and only partly because it was such a pain wrestling the thing into my sewing machine -- I rather like the single diagonals against the strong horizontals and verticals of the stacks.  I am also pretty happy with the piecing on the back, its unstudied air.  The binding is purchased, I admit, and is more sapphire than navy blue, I would have said, but isn't usually as bright as it looks in the photo, and it was, frankly, easier at this point than making my own.  I've got it all sewn on and am about a third of the way along in tacking it down on the back by hand.

I went to an estate sale of a member of a nearby miniatures group last week.  Estate sales are always bittersweet -- sometimes you can find really wonderful things, but of course it's sad to think of going through someone's belongings after they've died.  More than one of the folks there was heard to murmur, "This will be what happens to my things after I'm gone." I hope the lady would have been glad to know that, for one, this charmer will be loved by me --

not to mention the miniature Martha Washington cabinet just like my grandmother's full-sized one that I still have and use.  The seller's label on the doll says "Kewpie with flowers" but it's nothing like a Kewpie except in her little-girl tummy, so if anyone knows her maker I'd be very grateful to hear.  Her clothes appear to be stuck on pretty firmly, so I can't tell if there's a name underneath.  She has the look of some of the Hertwig Limbach dolls, to my untrained eye.

I put together this kit for a toy train by Gary Handschug of Magic Touch Miniatures -- maybe this was a souvenir at some NAME house-party, as it was clearly meant to be completely assembled by the purchaser, but everything was already glued together except the dividers and the silk-ribbon hinge on the box, with a note on the instructions saying that he'd already done the assembly.  All I had to do was sand it and paint.

The cars don't actually link together, but the illusion is certainly there at this tiny scale, so I'm quite charmed regardless.  I roughed it up a bit to make it look like it has been played with!

Tomato seedlings getting a bit bigger indoors before I put them into the ground.

And of course there's my Granny Square Sampler afghan still waiting.  I have to finish it this year, I've already made a date block! --

It is a glorious day today after quite a lot of rain -- very welcome rain, mind you!

The wider photos don't convey the vivid blue-purples of the arroyo lupines and the orange of the poppies!

Stay well, be nice!  We are all in this together!

"But in the Leape You Must Add One"

I get the chance to post on February 29 only once every four years, so why not take advantage of it this year?!

"There is always in February some one day, at least, when one smells the yet distant, but surely coming, summer" -- Gertrude Jekyll

The tidy-tips (Layia platyglossa) have now made their appearance in our wildflower garden, mostly clustered with the arroyo lupines and California poppies that have already made an appearance in the northwest corner, and the first happy blooms from an autumn sage (Salvia greggii) which was part of a bribe from that same local wildflower enthusiast I gave the arroyo lupine seeds to last summer, who was eager one afternoon to see our gigantic backyard pine tree up close (he told me that it is in fact a Mondell pine, which is good to know as I was never quite convinced by our first arborist's guess that it is "either a stone pine or Aleppo").  I didn't quite know what to do with the two five-gallon salvias the Y.W.E. offered me -- one a Salvia leucantha like the one I've already got which is drought-tolerant and handsome but isn't really a California native, the other a Salvia greggii still with rather fetching red blooms on it, so they sat on the back deck for a few months until I decided that while the red one is not a California native either, it is appealing enough not to let go to waste, and so I planted it in an anchor spot at the northeast corner of the front yard, where it will get pretty much all of the available sun there is, and I hope add a pleasing note of red to the wildflowers' blues and pinks and oranges.  I'm afraid that it got a bit decrepit while it sat forlornly on the deck, but only a week or so after planting, it began to show new leaves of a shiny reddish-green, and last week the first flowers opened.

I went to the California-natives plant sale at the local arboretum in December, and came home with a select group of sages and penstemons and a California wild rose as the first of what I hope will be in a few years a garden of shrubs and perennials interspersed with annuals.  At the moment, most of them are just sort of "chillin'," as Julia would say, and so I will introduce them here later when they do something interesting.  Otherwise most of the yard is still a field of lacy green wildflower promise --

I put some more things in my two new front-yard kitchen garden beds -- seeds for two different kinds of chives (pink-flowered and white-flowered), one towards the front of each bed, Italian basil, tarragon, and French green beans (the long, thin kind) in a row at the back, joining the savoury, oregano, sage, and flat-leafed parsley striplings planted a few weeks ago.  It all looks rather dreary at the moment, since I mulched it with the last of the leaves I swept up from under the mulberry tree, which hadn't relinquished them until after New Year's (!).  I started some heritage dwarf cherry tomatoes in seed pots indoors, so will plant two -- possibly three, let's see how fearless I am when the time comes, for the beds are only 4' x 4' and I still want to put in lots of cilantro.

Well, I seem to have been crocheting a little too much lately, as I've developed a rather alarming ache along the outside of my left forearm.  David practically shrieked, "Stop crocheting now or it will swell up and you'll be in pain forever!"  I've knitted for most of my life and never had a problem, but clearly there is something different about crochet, either the specific muscles used or where I'm holding the work in relation to my near-sighted eyes.  So, alas, I've rolled up the old sheet with my granny squares pinned to it, to keep it out of temptation's reach for a week or two.  It is just over halfway-assembled, so that the siren call is fierce indeed.  But the New Boro quilt is still wedged into my sewing machine with about half of the first pass of quilting done -- huzzah! -- so I could work on that instead, and Julia has requested a custom-made skirt and top for her birthday in April, which must get started soon.  I decided that I will add to this ensemble a new purse, as the one I made for her three years ago is far too small even for Julia's minimal needs, and she agreed that the Squiffy Sling Bag (sic!) by Mrs. H will fit the bill nicely.  And I want to retrieve my 1:12 shops from the garage, where they were stored when we had the family Thanksgiving here and have not been touched since!

I've also started another sampler, which jumped the queue a bit in order to be a gift for an old and very dear friend who is going through some difficult times -- this is the "Peace to My Friend" Quaker-style sampler by Jacob de Graaf of Modern Folk Embroidery.  It is more than a little curious, seeing the photos on that blog post, as I am more used to seeing the white-on-grey image from MFE's online shop than the periwinkle-on-natural! which is as it happens more like what I have used, some "natural" linen with a slightly-tealy blue floss.  It is wrinkly in the photo because I started it using a hoop, but realized that it's a little too big for that, and moved it to my table frame.  After the riotous colors of the "Froth and Bubble" sampler, this is very quiet and contemplative --

First Colors of Spring

We have been watching eagerly the past few weeks for the first blooms in our front garden this year.  We had one solitary arroyo lupine last summer, and Julia and I gathered quite a lot of seeds from it as the pods ripened, "just in case," but we needn't have been concerned, as while we were not looking, it was gleefully bursting more pods and sending its seeds hither and yon.  I ended up giving most of the jam jar's worth that we collected to a local flora enthusiast, who I think (hope!) scattered them around, oh-so-fittingly, a nearby arroyo.  Amusingly, many of our own volunteer seedlings this year made the journey across the sidewalk to the parking strip, but seem to have lost their nerve once they arrived and stayed right at the very edge.  The only spot where the parking strip is now covered with seedlings is at its lowest point, where presumably the runoff from what little rain we had pooled and filled before running over the curb and down into the street.  (It will be interesting to see if anything comes up in the neighbors' yards!)  That low spot is where our first seedlings came up, in fact, and where this charmer is, which began to show color a week or so ago.  This morning, as I was stepping out onto the porch, I saw a glint of bright orange through the greenery and thought, "tch, someone's left a bit of trash on the sidewalk," but it was this --

It will be interesting to see the effects this spring, as clearly the arroyo lupines, California poppies, and lacy phacelia seeded much more rambunctiously than the others.  I did help it along a bit, with another Payne's #1 packet and also their Hummingbird mix -- because we did the whole area this year -- so watch this space!

In other news, I have been plugging away at the New Boro quilt, piecing a back out of the scraps from the front along with the remains of the coffee-brown Kona, which despite my numerous calculations -- overly generous, surely! -- left not enough to bind the thing, unless I am willing to piece it every few inches, which I am not.  Well, it isn't at that stage yet, any way, as I am still wrestling it into the sewing machine for the quilting part until my arms get tired and I need a break.  When I do, I join a few more squares onto the Granny Sampler afghan --

I decided not to do the central rectangle arrangement that Blair used, but "free-form" it, which is probably much more fiddly, but I'm actually enjoying the randomness of it, contrary to my usual Germanic tidiness (which alas only manifests itself in my knitting).  But if you're going to make a crazy afghan, just go all-out crazy, nicht wahr?!

There are some new squares in there, as I decided that I hadn't made nearly enough, and so looked around for some other patterns, and now I'm going to make another batch of the small three-round squares for filling in the gaps.  I'm using two of the numerous join-as-you-go methods, both of which make granny clusters, one of which goes in a straight line across the edge of one piece while reaching up to grab (via slip stitch) the other piece, and the other of which essentially flips every other cluster's bottom edge up to attach the second piece.  The set of four squares just in from the lower left in the photo uses the first method, and you can clearly see even from this distance that the "chain" across the top of the row forms a distinct chain ridge (in the middle here because I worked clusters around one square before joining the second square to it).  The two newly-married squares (one is a rectangle, actually!) next to it are joined with the second method, which leaves the chain ridge in the middle instead of the top, but because of the flipping back and forth also makes the ridge noticeably less distinct.

I am amused to find myself much more comfortable with crochet now -- which was my actual goal here, the afghan is a bonus -- but I still am not quite sure why my first stitches of the flipping method (no, maybe I should call it something else) don't sit straight, so I am beta-testing, as it were, a slight modification.  Instead of "ch3 in corner of first square, DC3 in corner of second square, DC3 in next ch space of first square," I did "ch3 in corner of first square, DC1 in corner of second square, DC2 in corner of first square, DC3 in next ch space of second square," then continuing to alternate clusters as usual.  Maybe part of this is because here at least I'm not joining corner-to-corner, but corner-to-middle-ish -- that I don't know.  Well, I don't mind the slow progress today, as it is a lovely afternoon, with puffy white altocumulus clouds gamboling across the sky so that the sunlight where I'm sitting in the living room is now pale, now bright, though occasionally I do set down the crochet to go out and admire the way the tops of the camphor trees echo the lacy fluffiness of the clouds.

Farewell-to-Spring

Despite their being on the list of contents in the "Payne's No.1 Rainbow Mix" that Julia and I scattered in February, I didn't realize that these too had come up in our front yard -- Clarkia amoena (also known as Godetia amoena), or farewell-to-spring.  They had sprouted along with the others, but I thought that they were just mountain garland (C. unguiculata) that hadn't bloomed yet.  Then, when most of the other flowers had started to fade, these burst forth, in a veritable plethora of pinks, from pink-throated white to palest purple to soft pink to unbelievably-vivid magenta.  The flowers remind me of azaleas, with a similar shape and slightly-ruffly-edged petals, and with the sheer volume of blooms, crowded together in masses of pink.

They give the front yard quite a different character from six weeks ago -- it's like two wildflower gardens in one packet!

Spring Fling

A few months ago, Julia and I tossed around in our front yard a packet of "Payne's #1: Rainbow Mix" from the Theodore Payne Foundation, and for the past few weeks already, have been enjoying the wonders of a yard-full of California wildflowers in bloom. The mountain garland has been the last to come out, but now we have the full complement of colors, and a large patch of our once-sadly-drought-stricken former lawn is now a charming riot of colors and textures.

Arroyo lupine (Lupinus succulentus).

Lacy phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia).

One of the biggest delights, I think, is finding different "bouquets" in the photographs, like the blues and oranges above, or the pinks and blues and yellows below.

Globe gilia (Gilia capitata), with a painted lady butterfly, though I don't know if it is the American one (Vanessa virginiensis) or the West coast one (Vanessa annabella).

Mountain garland (Clarkia unguiculata), also known as elegant clarkia.  These come in a wide range of pink shades, from magenta to salmon, and there are even a couple of white ones here.

California poppy (Eschscholzia californica).

Only one arroyo lupine emerged, but it is clearly setting seed!  Later, I will gather these to spread further next year, Miss-Rumphius-like.

Tidytips (Layia platyglossa).  I know there were California goldfields (Lasthenia californica) in here too, but I can't seem to find any now!

Coast poppy (Eschscholzia californica var. maritima), also called maritime poppy.  Instead of the California poppy's pure orange, the coastal one has orange in the center, lightening towards near-yellow at the edges of the petals.

Desert Canterbury bells (Phacelia campanularia), also known as bell-flowered phacelia. The photo doesn't actually do justice to the intense cobalt blue.

Bird's eye gilia (Gilia tricolor).

Happy spring!

Thoughts on the "Gladys" Socks

When I was staying at my mom's this past summer, I spent some of the down-time in poking around the internet, as one does, for sock patterns, and -- in addition to the Hermione's Everyday Sock pattern which I chose to suit the yarn I had -- I came across Gladys by General Hogbuffer [sic] (who blogs here, though as you can see I am reluctant to put that into the past tense), which pattern went into the other pile, of those for which I don't (didn't) have yarn yet. 

(Love this gusset!)

It isn't a new idea, I'm sure, to use gansey patterns on a sock, but this one is attractive in its combination of simplicity and complexity, and I had in fact just seen a display of Manos del Uruguay's Alegria sock yarn at a local yarn shop and thought it would work beautifully with the pattern, so I went back the next day and bought a skein -- this color is "Silver".

Mary Berry would certainly say this yarn is "scrummy"!  It is a pleasure to knit with, beautifully soft, and has great stitch definition.  (It comes in a ton of colors too, both solids and multi, so I'm looking forward to using it again, certainly on a scarf!)

The only modifications I made were to make it considerably longer than the original -- I like a long sock -- and to use a regular slip-stitch heel instead of continuing the pattern down to the heel turn.  I did take the General's suggestion to cast on a larger number of stitches and decrease down after the ribbing -- since mine would be higher on the calf than the original, I put a third of the decreases after the ribbing, another third after the first rig-and-furrow section, and the rest after the second rig-and-furrow.

I'm delighted with the pattern and the resulting socks, so am putting some other House of Hogbuffer patterns on my to-do list -- certainly Onopordum and Maudie!

I'm very admiring of all of the lovely winter photos that are appearing on other blogs, so here is my contribution.  It isn't much -- sigh! especially here on our former lawn -- but it has been wonderful this past week having rain.  Lots of it! about three inches -- over 7 cm. -- and a nice, steady rain that didn't just fling itself into the storm drains and race away to the ocean, but stuck around and soaked in.  Lovely!

At the beginning of the holiday season, I had one decrepit Schlumbergera that had collapsed under its own weight and cracked just above the soil level, thereby slowly starving itself, but I managed to save some cuttings and re-pot them -- white with pink throats.  It didn't seem quite like Christmas without a Christmas cactus in bloom, and so rather impulsively I bought a new little one at the garden center -- red! -- and as it turned out, my mother-in-law potted up some cuttings from one of hers, and she gave that to me -- magenta!.  So here they all are, outside on the walk to our front door, having a refreshing rainwater shower!

O and P, and a Birthday Tea

I have been stuck on "O" for the ABChallenge for an inordinate amount of time -- I could only think of subjective things, it seemed, like "optimism" and "ornerieness" -- but as David was leaving for work he said, "Look at the huge flowers!" and I smacked my forehead (mentally, of course).  These are Mexican evening primrose, Oenothera speciosa.  Many gardeners think of this as a weed, but I love the blooms' delicate pinkness and the plant's cheerful lack of temperament.  I got these from my mom about six weeks ago -- she begged me to take all of them.  I suppose it is that in more-cultivated gardens it tends to insinuate itself everywhere, but here in my inhospitable driveway bed, I think it will be less rampant.

I got "two for one" this morning, as I had planted the oenothera in an empty spot next to this penstemon, which is the California native "Margarita BOP".  Yes, BOP in full caps, as it is short for "Back of the Porch" since it was discovered in that location at someone's house by the folks at Las Pilitas Nursery in central California!  My plant was pretty last summer, its first in my garden, but this year it is covered with buds and flowers, fairly exploding just this week.  The plant itself is rather small, but as you can see, well worth it for the mass of bluish-purple flowers.

As for the "tea" part of this post, Julia turned sixteen a few weeks ago -- a big milestone for all of us. I asked her if she wanted a party -- she hasn't for quite some time -- and she said promptly, "Afternoon tea!"  I think she had sort of written off afternoon tea as one of Mom's Anglophile quirks -- until I took the family to Brown's Hotel in Mayfair one memorable day last summer, and she got to experience first-hand what a real, if exceptionally luxurious, afternoon tea can be.

I was quite willing to cater an afternoon tea, less formal than Brown's of course, with my higgledy-piggledy blue-and-white china, but heartfelt nevertheless -- cozily lavish, if you will!  There were egg-and-cress and cucumber sandwiches and chicken salad in puff-pastry shells, then my trusty Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea scones recipe with strawberry jam and Devonshire clotted cream (the sine qua non for Julia), and a selection of cakes, including rosewater shortbread (a variation of one from River Cottage) and a modified version of Nigel Slater's seed cake recipe (with a bit more caraway seeds, despite his caveat, and some cinnamon and clove, and a rather amazing crust of demerara sugar inspired by Oakden's version -- I do like seed cake).

I was inordinately pleased with the flowers, which for once in my gardening life are all home-grown.  There are three newly-opened "Gertrude Jekyll" roses (with a truly wonderful scent), some gangly stems of yellow bladderpod (Peritoma arborea), sprigs of purple de la Mina lilac verbena (Verbena lilacina "De la Mina") and "Margarita BOP" penstemon, a single big bunch of feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium), some long white fortnight lilies (Dietes iridioides), and sprigs of dark salmon-pink coral bells (Heuchera something-or-other).

Chocolate and raspberry cupcakes, with raspberry and white chocolate cream icing -- inspired by ones from Martha Stewart but adapted from a recipe at Serious Eats.  (Instead of having a jam center, I just put the -- seeded -- jam in the batter; I also used 1/3 cup of cocoa as it was a bit dry with 1/2 cup, and doubled the amount of white chocolate and jam in the icing for more flavor.  Quite a hit.)  You will have to take my word for it that I am not a fussy baker nor especially handy with a piping bag, because I thought these turned out amazingly pretty.

Fresh blueberries and lemon curd in ready-made tart shells, improvised.  Also a success, and easy-peasy!

And we are still basking in the glow of a very enjoyable afternoon!

Lilting with Color (Sissinghurst Gardens, part 2 of 2)

This is the second post of photos from our visit to the gardens at Sissinghurst in Kent, this past July. (The first post is here.)  It was a wonderful afternoon, and I was utterly charmed by the place, as you can probably tell by the fact that I couldn't leave out any more photos!

"But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung ..."

from "Winter" by V. Sackville-West