which_chick | (no subject) (Reply)

This is my horse Meatly. She's hugely pregnant -- under normal circumstances, her belly is only about two inches further out than her hips on either side. We think she's probably got another week or so to go. *sigh*

As we can see from the above image, the mock orange has made with the flowering. Yay mock orange! You have earned a year free from the shovel. It'd be nice, though, if you expanded your efforts to beyond two small branches. You *are* an entire seven-foot shrubbery, you know. This hyar smacks of a half-vast effort, if you ask me. Sure, you're only REQUIRED to have seventeen pieces of flair...

This is a gallica rose called Charles de Mills. In wet or humid weather, he's prone to balling (Not what you may be thinking. Balling, for roses, is when instead of blooming into intricate blossoms of a gazillion petals, a rose's buds make intricate gobs of undifferentiated icky mildewed slimy ick.) but this year looks to be a good one for him. Note his interesting purple-red color. Rest assured that my camera is having trouble with the color. It's more maroon and darker than you see here, though it does fade to bluer tones on the outer petals. Catalog descriptions claim that gallica roses don't have any scent to them, but he has one. He's also incredibly healthy and winter hardy. Let's all have a big round of applause for Charles, with whom I am well pleased.

Today I also discovered that the allegedly striped rose from the plant swap is NOT striped. It is a pale (insipid) pink. It is NOT a single (five-petaled) rose. It is fully double. It's also appallingly healthy and hardy with a heavy, spicy scent that can knock over small mammals at three feet. While not what I expected and not what I had hoped for, I like it enough that it can stay.

Also, I'd just shut off the computer and was about to head to bed when I opened the front door to call Tumnah (the preferred cat) in -- she hadn't come in for dinner like Tine (the annoying, less-preferred, snot-nosed cat) had, when I was struck, STRUCK by this animal not ten feet from my door. Unlike people who claim they have seen the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot or whatever, I actually have decent footage of what it was I saw when I opened my door because it did not run off and I had ample time to boot up the camera and take a couple of shots of it wandering around my freaking back yard (which, admittedly, is only "yard" by virtue of being herbaceous instead of woody).