Foxgloves are out in the side yard!
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
Category: Sundays
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Posted as part of Silent Sunday.
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Usually, this rose is the only one blooming in my front yard. This year, because of the rainy spring, it has plenty of competition from the roses around it.
Nevertheless, it is performing like a champ.
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
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Nothing can beat the red of a Fourth of July rose. It’s almost overwhelming, to look at that section of the garden (hidden behind a magnolia tree and thickets of overgrown holly).
For today’s One Word Sunday — RED — I picked the bloom with the deepest red and went in for the close-up.
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I bought a new flower (geranium) for a hanging planter in my backyard. The hanging planter’s been empty for years, I don’t know why I suddenly felt like I wanted it filled today.
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day:
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Posting for Silent Sunday:
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Storm of Steel, p. 82:
The long-drawn cry went up: “Gas attack! Gas attack! Gas! Gas! Gaaaas!”
By the light of the flares, a dazzling flow of gas billowed over the black jags of masonry. Since there was a heavy smell of chlorine in the quarry as well, we lit large straw fires at the entrances, whose acrid smoke almost drove us out of our refuge, and forced us to try and cleanse the air by waving coats and tarpaulins.
The next day, we were able to marvel at the traces the gas had left. A large proportion of the plants had withered, snails and moles lay dead . . . The shells and ammunition splinters that lay all over the place had a fetching green patina.
The following day, the whole process is repeated: “Gas attack!”
There was a sweetish smell in the air . . . In the ring around Monchy, powerful drumfire was raging, but that ebbed away before long . . . The British had set off clouds of gas and smoke at five in the morning . . .
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Self thinks this is a rhododendron. A giant rhododendron. Either that or a giant azalea (lol) She dropped by the Mendocino Coast Botanic Garden this morning, and everything — azaleas, magnolias, rhododendron — were in bloom.
This neon pink bush was a few yards from the main entrance. They sell rhododendron in the nursery (and they now have a café!)
Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day.
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Self is enjoying Storm of Steel a lot, which is saying something. Junger is such a keen cataloguer of his emotions. Solipsistic? Maybe. There is a reason André Gide called this the best work on war that he had ever read.
On p. 80, he describes the experience of being shelled:
- Light and heavy ‘toffee-apples,’ Stokes bombs, shrapnels, rattles, shells of all kinds — I could no longer identify everything that was buzzing and whizzing and crashing around me . . . It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death, and so I huddled in my hole in the ground with my hand in front of my face, imagining all the possible variants of being hit.
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Spring is all about roses. Nothing but roses. All the time.
The one rose that did exceptionally well while self was in Manila was her Chrysler Imperial rose. She can’t wait for that bud to unfurl. It looks HUGE.
Posting for Journeys with Johnbo’s Cellpic Sunday Challenge.
Kanlaon 