Pink

August, I’ve decided, is a good month. Previously, I disliked it because it tends to be overly warm which does not suit me. However, Summer is inevitable and at least August is at the right end, tapering off toward Fall which is possibly my favourite time of year.

The other thing about August, I’ve come to realise, is that it is the best time for the flora. Flourishing crops fill the fields and wildflowers dance along roadsides while flowering bushes come into bloom everywhere.

So August is colourful. Cheerful.

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Even a bedraggled garden like mine provides interesting images, if you look.

Early morning when everything is fresh, especially after heavy dew or overnight rain.

If I bore you with so many photos of wild carrot flowers, I apologise, but we have a veritable forest of them and each flower is different. I take far more pictures than I ever share!

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The rounded shape of this one caught my eye. Mostly, in full bloom, they are flat, but not all and I find them enchanting.

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You have likely heard enough about the sunflowers too and to be honest, they don’t make a very pretty picture now that the flowers are so heavy and the stalks are bent.

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The tallest, however, is only now producing a bloom, so it stands erect – 12 feet, we reckon.

We didn’t set out to grow such tall sunflowers. All we wanted was flowers that would produce seeds for the birds. Hopefully, our sad looking lot will still do so.

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The flora is full of other life. Some of these creatures are welcome and many not. The above are apropriately called leaf skeletoniser caterpillars and they were attacking one of Grant’s much-abused oak trees.

Weeks ago, they had been stripped by Asian beetles, or as Grant calls them Foo-king beetles.

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Some bugs are cute. This one appeared to reach out to me.

Ha. Don’t trust cute. It’s an assassin bug, Zelus luridus. Reportedly, their bite is painful.

Hopefully, I shall never find out.

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Look who I found on the Rose of Sharon, no doubt in the middle of its breakfast.

Why, I don’t know, but I can’t be mad at grasshoppers, even when one gets into the house and sings to me in the middle of the night. Maybe Jiminy Cricket lodged in my brain when I was very small. How could I be mad at him?

My mother never complained about grasshoppers either, but perhaps her gardens just did not attract them, as she had no tolerance for any creature that attacked her flowers.

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Once, when my parents lived in Florida, I did hear loud, long moans when their lawn was devoured by mole crickets.

Overfed cousins of grasshoppers?

The grass in Florida was a problem from the start. My parents moved into a small house that had a modest lawn which Father felt he could manage, but he wished to have an old-fashioned mower, the kind you pushed without mechanical assistance.

The length and breadth of Saint Petersburg I drove looking for such a thing. Eventually, I think one was found in a catalogue and it was dispatched – at some expense, no doubt. But alas, Florida grass was something my father had never before encountered. It is tough. Mower-resistent. Manual mower, at least.

So Dad gave in and agreed to, I believe it was an electric mower. I’ve forgotten what the complaint was about that. It would have been so much easier to pay one of the neighbour’s kids to do the job, but Father always preferred doing things the hard way. I have a suspicion that my brother is the same, so perhaps it’s a Smith thing.

No, no, it’s not because I am not like that at all!

Anyway, after all of that – mole crickets.

If only they had arrived sooner, they could have saved so much bother.

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Just for fun, I looked up that house which seems to have acquired a porch and a palm tree. Otherwise, it just about looks like the place I visited often in the 1980’s. Of all my parent’s homes that I knew, it was the one they seemed least suited to, as if they did not belong, but it may be that only I felt that way.

My mother made friends with the neighbours and adapted, as always, while Dad pottered about grumbling and doing his best to avoid contact with anyone else, as usual.

That house, when I knew it, was the most pink thing I had ever seen, and by the time of my first visit, quite a bit had been done to reduce the pinkness, but even my mum could not do anything about the oven door!

Yes, it too was pink.

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