Pink etc
Last night’s blog was over 1500 words . . . plus the links. So I thought tonight I’d give everyone a break and hang some photos.
Which I think I had better number, given WordPress’ villainous ways with photos. Siiiiiigh. How many updates have we had? How many times have they done nothing about this?
So, please meet Apocalypse, my third hellhound. (1) The small demure-looking one.* Who finally has her case.** What an epic that has proved to be.*** However, she is now suitably accoutred for travelling around in a pocket, and having keys and penknives absent-mindedly dropped on her head. Yes, the wallpaper on her opening screen is a rose.† (2) And yes, she’s sitting on a plant catalogue. J Parker’s Wholesale Autumn 2010 catalogue, to be precise.
But I thought we might have some photos of things that aren’t roses. Just so you’ll know. I do grow other stuff. Although pink is always good. (4) 
[Gaaaah. See footnote ** for photo (3) ]
This is Brackenridge Ballerina. (5) Speaking of pink. And I was thinking recently, in a rather dazed manner, that this year I’ve got all my dahlias staked. Which it’s a good thing, since BB is about six foot tall. Stop, stop! Four foot is plenty!
But the comprehensive staking of dahlias doesn’t happen in my garden(s). Although if it weren’t for the slug problem Recumbent Dahlias might catch on. I was using them as ground cover at Third House last year but the disbursement of slug bait was extreme. This is Rothesay Reveller (6) whom I love to pieces and grow every year—as the season progresses her swathes of white and purple will become ever more dazzling—and if you look closely you’ll see that the serrated quality is not just colouring. I swear by my copper rings for the thwarting and contravention of slugs, but anything that grows against something else has to be protected from circuitous assault. The Reveller grows up against the little picket fence that marks off the hellhounds’ courtyard, and the slugs had been doing an upper-storey cat-burglar number on poor Reveller when she was still only picket-fence height before I unhooked one of the copper rings and hung it flat against the fence. ::Tiny cries of slug indignation::
And here are my famous trailing petunias. (7) Have I posted this photo—or one like it, they’re into their second flush right now—before? It’s just that they are extremely eye catching, especially to me, since I walk out my front door and there they are. Trailing. 
Not. Covering up all that excellent plastic baggery which is in fact working a treat for keeping my hanging baskets from cracking like the Sahara this year—and while geraniums will put up with a surprising amount of abuse, petunias really need their water. Oh well. I have let down the posh elegance of my little street every year, why should this year be any different? It’s just that I prefer to let it down by deliberate affront, like the Reveller††, rather than by simply screwing up. But speaking of petunias and delicious affront, aren’t these good? (8) I hope they’re available again next year. They could become a regular, like the Reveller. 
* * *
*Although her default ringtone at the moment is barking. No, I mean literally, although that too.
** Of course it’s pink. Don’t be silly. However, when I was changing the hellhound bedding in the car recently it occurred to me that my pink thing could conceivably be thought of as out of control. [OH GODS. Do I number the photo according to its place in the text, which would make it (3), or do I number it for its position on the screen . . . which I don’t know yet because I write the footnotes as they happen . . . ] 
*** No postpersons have been killed, although the one this morning had a narrow escape.
† I was cruising the iTunes store for garden and plant identification apps—which is an entirely exasperating and unsatisfactory category, by the way, if there are any gardening programmers out there—and was offered Plants vs Zombies. Snork.
†† Dahlias still generally are so not done by serious gardeners. The same serious gardeners, pretty much, who won’t grow roses, although roses are slightly less déclassé than dahlias. Serious gardeners can stick it up their respective . . . noses. Even Peter, who after all married me, and while our courtship was brief it was intense and he can’t say he had no idea what he was getting into, had trouble with my instant attraction to dahlias. Roses he could handle^ but it took me a couple of years to force him to compromise his high principles and allow dahlias. He now grows them happily at the mews. I don’t even have to yell or pout or anything. Principles haven’t a prayer against a determined spouse.
^ Well, he thought he could, till I started putting them in by the hundred
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