Heat Wave.

6-28-21 VERMONT: Ninety plus yesterday on the thermometer and the same coming for the next several days. Fortunately, the evenings are in the low seventies and the window fans cool off the house at night. Outside activity slows to a minimum, especially in the afternoon. It’s almost too hot to type. The dogs are not happy.

I have lots of bird news and sightings. An immature red-tailed hawk picked the top of a hemlock for a perch, but too close to the barn, where barn swallow have a nest and are busy feeding chicks. The parents drove the hawk away by repeated diving at him[her]. I posted the video yesterday.

I sat outside in the shade on the hot afternoon with the cam and caught a kingbird, least fly catcher, chipping sparrow, purple finch, goldfinch, mourning doves, all of which I have seen here before, but the exciting news was the brief visit from a scarlet tanager. He left before I could get the camera turned on. 

There’s been a bird house on the south side of the little barn for years, but this year I saw activity there—house wrens are raising a family. 

The trails in the pasture are mowed. Without Brady the horse grazing there, the grass is shoulder high in some spots. I like the look of the tall grass, but not trying to walk through it. 

Judy and I were exploring the mowed trails when we rousted a momma bird from a nest in the pasture. She flew away and the chicks scrambled in all directions when Maizie went to inspect. Judy took the dogs away while I waited behind a tree to see if everybody re-assembled. After a short time she, a turkey, was back and calling for the chicks and, presumably, found a new nest site. 

New blooms: catalpa tree, delphinium, milkweed, meadow sage, hairy beard tongue, daylily. 

Roses and the little barn with some of the grass mowed in front.

A brief look at a house wren carrying dinner.

The red-tailed hawk ane the swallows.

The baby swallows in the nest under the barn shelter.

A kingbird at the top of a dead pine. They are fly catchers. Most of the flycatchers are smaller birds.

The least fly catcher, that's it's name, is half the size of the kingbird, but they share the same job.

Looking back from the end of the pasture toward the house. This is where we desturbed the Momma turkey.

Mrs. Turkey back to round up the brood.

A young red-tailed hawk gets blitzed by angry barn swallows who don't want him in their neighborhood.

Loch Ness in Vermont.

6-23-21 VERMONT: After a dry week we got rain, 0.8 inches, Monday  night and another 0.15 inches on Tuesday. Yesterday was cool, we had a fire in the evening. Today was warmer and very sunny, and I got back outside, I pruned shrubs around the entry steps and weeded a couple beds.  

Val and Steve left for NYC Tuesday after taking us all to dinner at Jesse’s Monday night before the rain.

The rain left everything well watered. Monday AM the mowers were here, and I walked them though the pasture to make trails free of tall grass and, hopefully, ticks, but leaving the wild flowers and, especially, the milkweed unmowed. 

Today I saw a turtle in the upper pond for the first time this summer. A couple of days ago I was sitting outside the new house with the camera looking for birds when I saw something swimming across the pond, faster than the frogs or turtles. I got a couple pix of a big snake, maybe four feet long. It swam to the bank and disappeared. I went to look immediately, but there was no sign of it or a den. We sent the pic to several folks and the consensus was—garter snake, very big garter snake. I favored a diagnosis of water snake, but the herpetologist at the Montshire Museum of Science said garter snake. 

New blooms: feverfew, lychnis, Russian sage, money plant, false indigo, water lily.

The snake at the halfway point. The tail is at the right margin of the shot.

The game cam saw a turkey in the pasture and a bunch of deer.

My favorite peony, a single, looks more like a flower, than the big doubles.

Goats beard is happy in deep shade.

Water lilies. These are pinkish, later ones are white.

Steve and I with identical beverages, made with gin and a small amount of dry vermouth.

Nice sunset after the storms.

The Summer Begins...

6-19-21 VERMONT: It’s too dry again. We’ve had short showers today, but maybe a half hour of rain all together with no real accumulation. 

We came up Wednesday. Lucy and Cory were here already, and Val Steve came up Thursday and Maggie arrived Friday. Today we had a visit from Anna, Gardner and Gardner Sr. Judy has been wining and dining the crowd. We did all go to Cloudland Farm Friday. 

Val and Steve brought up a spruce tree from Brooklyn that had been growing on their deck in a pot for several years and released it to grow wild in the pasture. Hopefully, it will survive and thrive. 

I have started working on a backlog of pruning, staking, weeding and watering. There is much more to do. The roses on the fence are magnificent and the peonies spectacular. 

In bloom: Solomons seal, valerian, anemone, columbine, lamium, buttercup, daisy, yarrow, weigela, Wentworth viburnum, geranium, diablo, knapweed, meadow rue, bleeding heart, peony, baptisia, chives, Siberian iris, flag iris, cranes bill, lupin, bishops weed, vetch, sweet william, centaurea, master wort, primrose, hybrid daylily, johnny-jump-up, dianthus, thyme, Asian lilac, goats beard, lady’s mantle, bridal wreath spirea, red spirea, roses, spider wort, bedstraw, forget-me-not, Rogersia, false indigo, celandine. 

Val, Lucy and Cory at the pond.

A few of the peonies.

The 'fence' roses showing a lot of red.

The pasture grass is high and growing since there's no horse to eat it down. Brady, our summer guest for twenty years, died over the winter.

The terrace with thyme and dianthus in bloom.

The barns through the trees.

Packing Up.

6-14-21 SHORT HILLS: Sunday we were back on Waverly Place at North Square Hotel and Restaurant for brunch with Anna, Gardner, Lily and Sam on a cool afternoon. I had been there on Friday for my class lunch with Paul and Roger. Washington Sq. park was jumping. Tomorrow we will go somewhere for dinner before leaving for VT Wednesday, if my car is back from Subaru service.  

We’ve had some showers on and off with maybe a quarter inch of precip. The afternoons have been in the seventies. I have done more pruning and second fertilizing of the house plants and some of the foundation plantings. 

New blooms: winterberry holly, beautyberry, linden tree, rosebay rhododendron.

Linden tree as 'Unter den Linden' in Berlin. It's usually crawling with pollinators.

Beautyberry has small flowers that could be missed, but the fall berries are a vivid purple. We have a volunteer that I just noticed for the first time.

Winterberry Holly is in the same family as the evergreen hollies, and it also makes red berries in the fall. It also has separate male and female plants. These flowers are females, and this shrub has made berries in the past so there is a male plant somewhere in the hood.

Rain.

6-10-21 SHORT HILLS: We had a big T-storm two days ago with lots of flash-bangs that seemed rather close and lots of rain. The gauge had 1.6 inches the next morning. Some branches on the catalpa tree were broken and have been pruned. 

We are going back to restaurants. Sunday we were at Taste of Asia with Bill and Lynn, yesterday was Bebe and Ronnie at Lorena’s, which is in a new location. Tonight we see Richard and Elaine in NYC. Masks are mostly off, doctors offices the exception. I’m a little worried about the Delta variation of Covid causing a new surge with so many unvaccinated people around. 

New blooms: catalpa, elderberry. 

Holly Blue butterfly. I watched him for a long time in an attempt to catch some flight pix, but couldn't get any. The wings are bluer on the dorsal surfaces.

Another view of Holly Blue.

A cardinal scolding me for being near his nest tree.

Here's the Southern Magnolia flower on the second day getting it on with the pollinators. The next day, Day Three for this bloom, it was brown and over.

Today the Southern Magnolia put out two new flowers and has a big bud, about midway bwtween the flowers, for the weekend.

The Catalpa tree is in bloom. It has a lot of these white and purple flower clusters. The big leaves make it easy to spot these trees on the roadside.

A closer look at he Catalpa flower. When fertilized, the flower makes a long, 12 inches, seed pod that kids call 'cigars'.

Heat.

 6-6-21 SHORT HILLS: Mid-nineties today, and it’s hot, hot, hot and humid. Two weeks until the solstice arrives. I have been busy pruning. I also re-potted Judy’s famous ferns. The largest one was so big that I had to cut it into three pieces and repotted all three, so now there are five total ferns. 

We have been getting regular rain and have had another 0.85 inches over the past few days and nights. 

The house wrens are using the bird house and are busy flying in and out, presumably feeding chicks.

New blooms: southern magnolia, hydrangea, Asian holly.

I saw this handsome guy flitting around and thought he was a butterfly, but he is an Ebony Jewelwing, Calopteryx maculata, a damsel fly. The females are brown.

One of the House Wrens about to pop into her nest. They are very difficult to photograph because they are always moving, hopping from branch to branch.

Here's another pic of the St. John's Wort after an over night rain.

The lawn looks great this year. I use no fertilizer on the grass, just let the leaves remain in the fall, chopped up by mowing. Plenty of rain helps. Sun and shadow. 

Southern Magnolia makes big flowers. They open, almost one a day, for several weeks and each one lasts only about three days. This first one is on the tree top so I can't get the best pic until one opens lower down.

Spring Explosion in NJ.

6-2-21 SHORT HILLS: We got back yesterday to a warmer place than we left, awash in green growth. There were several branches down on the lawn, so there had been a significant storm. The rain gauge had 3.25 inches, much more than we had in VT. 

Judy and I cleaned up most of the fallen debris, and I gave the house plants a Miracle-Gro feeding today. They were looking hungry. There is much weeding and pruning to do.

New blooms: lilac, roses, peony, tree peony, red spirea, Stewartia, Japanese snow bells, kousa dogwood, holly, purple rhododendron, St. John’s wort. 

Emblematic of June, the peony.

A similar look, the Tree Peony, related to it's peony cousin above.

The flowers are bigger and bolder than earlier in the spring, like this rhododendron.
Another dogwood, the kousa or Japanese dogwood has striking flowers.

Stewartia, a small tree, has lots of these flowers, marked with one red-dotted petal. Maybe it's a signal to the pollinators.

St. John's wort, Hypericum perforatum, is technically a shrub, but dies back every winter and re-grows from the gound every spring.

Rose bud. I think the roses are prettiest at this stage with the promise of the flower to come.

Although the flower is nice too.

Not as showy, holly tree flowers are either male or female on male or female trees. These are the female flowers. Those green nodules become the red berries, the ones without petals are already fertilized.

The male holly flowers. The pollinators need to visit the male trees and then the female tree. That seems complicated, but our yard is filled with holly volunteers so the system works.