Brother Tim and I renewed our family autumn arboretum walk tradition last weekend. We had a glorious, sunny day and there was a lot to see and many seeds followed us home.

I planted all the seeds that followed me home in pots this weekend to scarify them and see what comes up in the next year or two.

Many of my tonsai starts came from similar annual trips. And this rose, with which I have a love/hate relationship, came from an arboretum seed decades ago.

This is a robust and maleficent marauder, seeding around my garden and likely others, but it has beautiful, cheerful hips in the fall.

After an arid summer and early autumn, the rain came yesterday and is forecasted to stay for about ten more days, at least! The air is finally cleared of the anxiety-inducing smoke from the local wildfires and the plants are all voicing deep sighs of relief.

Today was a fun day spent in the greenhouse between bouts of computer work. There are some fun things blooming or preparing to bloom in there.

There is a lot of general cleanup to do in there and lots of propagation, too. I took cuttings of salvia, fuchsia, and pelargoniums–lots and lots of pelargoniums! The frustration with pelargoniums is that they have excellent cutting material now, in the fall, but it isn’t really a great time to propagate them. The success rate on the cuttings can be really low. I’m hoping if I take better care of them in the next six weeks or so, they will do better than in years past.

Foliage colors have been sad this year, more brown than bright. But my tonsai trees have some brilliance despite their diminutive sizes.

With the travel to London and Lodi in May/June, I haven’t spent enough time in the garden and indeed no time writing about it. I’ll drop a bunch of photos here, though, as there is a lot going on that is lovely and new in the yard this year.

After repotting the rest of the Tonsai plants and updating the blog inventory, there are now 88 tonsai starts logged! Each one has so much potential to become a wonderful little tree.

I have big plans for the garden space to the south of the greenhouse but I haven’t had the time or money to implement them yet. That area was covered with weeds and looked pretty sad.

My weekend travel plans were interrupted by a covid exposure so I hunkered down and started cleaning up the area. I got about 2/3 of it done.

Below are some flower/plant photos from the garden/greenhouse this week.

Every day something else blooms in the yard! Seattle has a potential of snow this weekend but the plants are laughing at the forecast and just doing their thing.

Here are a bunch of photos from the last few days.

Today Leon installed an amazing dragonfly sculpture he created on the Douglas fir trunk! It is very cool!

Today I transplanted over 200 petunias–they are a scented, climbing variety and I’m hoping they get enough growth to be valuable for patio pots and filling in around the garden. And lots will be given away.

The memory garden is filling in quickly. The growth is miraculous, really. Where does it all come from? The photo on the left was from 2/26, and the one on the right is from today.

One of my favorite bulbs has reappeared for about the twelfth year in a row–my Fritillaria imperialis. The form is so interesting and the color is a bright spot in a shady spot under the Douglas fir.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Camellia in our garden. It has gotten completely out of hand in size and has adopted a poor shape. The flowers don’t make a nice show, typically, because I’ve neglected the shrub as a whole. But taken individually, I can find beauty in the flowers. It has two kinds–smaller ones that are less than double, and huge blooms that are very double. This year it must be stressed because most of the flowers are the smaller type.

Below are some Pleine flower pictures from the greenhouse this week–so fantastic and showy, somewhere between starlets and harlots.