on hiatus

Don’t get me wrong, I like the heat. But as long as we’re stuck in this holding pattern until the rest of the bathroom/kitchen wiring gets done, I curse the sun. And now they are predicting a heat wave. Crapcrapcrapcrap.

So I’m using the opportunity to bone up on gardening, which is like a foreign language to me. But it’s one I better learn fast, because the yard is huge, and probably the nicest part of this house (no lie, Joe’s brother just landscaped his front yard and paid a small fortune for a few plants.)

So far, here’s what we’ve identified:

• three bushes of these gorgeous Roses of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus)
• a large sweet gum tree
• a monster pine tree
• a giant wild black cherry tree, non-fruiting, and two smaller ones (trees reproduce like Angelina Jolie if you’re not ever-vigilant about not letting the seeds take root)
• two crabapple trees – these get beautiful flowers in spring
• a forsythia hedge
• several azalea bushes
• three rose bushes
• irises that haven’t bloomed
• a boatload of flowering hosta
• tulip bulbs in the front beds, possibly some hyacinth
• two peony bushes
• ivy
• a small pussy willow
• a single branch of white lilac
• a Gypsophila bush, commonly known as baby’s breath

And what we haven’t:

• a nasty sticker bush that, strangely, had yellow flowers in the spring but no berries
• some kind of groundcover plant I thought was a weed
• a shrub that we think is viburnum only it has purple flowers

Yeah, I’ve got my work cut out for me.