Exit, Pursued by a Bear

garden pix, mostly

More garden shots

My father found these perennial sunflowers under a bridge near Simcoe, if memory serves. He wasn't of the generation of gardeners who had been talked out of wild collection - I have fond memories of long walks in the woods with him for which we were often equipped with plastic bags and a folding latrine shovel, and returned with odd muddy treasures.

We only had to flee an enraged farmer once (in upstate New York), but the consensus in the car as we drove away was that he must have been in a bad mood to start with.

Planting them may or may not have been a mistake - they're invasive in Jville, but still spectacular in fall.

And here's the front garden this morning. Click on image for larger view:

Red!

There are a couple of points in a reno project which I find satisfying. One is starting – usually this follows a long period of dithering and planning, and has a pleasing clarity.

Another is the stage when a new paint colour actually goes on the wall, which of course follows much fussy repair and sanding, and at least one unforseen problem.

The point of this project wasn't really the repainting, but putting in a ceiling in the front hallway and installing noise insulation – it's directly below Mr. W's room. Still, the front hall did look scungy, and it was as good a time as any to fix that. I may yet refinish the inside of the front door, but we'll see.

We did a lot of thinking about exactly what red to use, and ended up with a Benjamin Moore red called 'Red' – go figure. The original idea was the intense red of Chinese lacquer, which this shade matches sort of reasonably. I had them mix the colour as an industrial coating, the same kind of paint that institutions use on cinder-block walls.

The hope is that the front hall light will light up the red in such a way that it can be seen dramatically from outside.

Rhinoceroses snort and snuff

We took Mr. Wuzzle to the zoo this morning, arriving at nine sharp, when the gates opened. He seemed to take much of it in, though when we asked him what his favourite animal had been, he announced 'Dinosaur!' I think he meant the hippopotamus.