May is for flowers! The first white echinacea opened today, and many other lovelies are in full bloom, like the Chocolate Cosmos, and a fancy mullein I planted in the fall. I hope it gets tall like the wild ones. Sorry, I can’t seem to get a good picture of it yet.

It’s the time of year when the poppies and nigella begin to look a mess, so I spent quite a while today pulling them out of the area by the front door. The picture above shows the situation “before.”  I also removed one of the three salvia clevelandii that live there; you can sort of see one at the back, reaching for the sky with its long branches. The latest landscaper was a hopeless over-planter, I am realizing every day. I love that salvia and its herby scent, but it gets big. One of them to “anchor” the bed would have been plenty. They are casting too much shade, and crowding the Clary Sage that will bloom next month.

I discovered the above thing clinging to the inside of a planter box and a milkweed plant. I pointed my phone’s Seek app at it and it knew immediately what it was. The common name it gave me was too unpleasant for me to want to pass on, but it is a kind of slime mold. Probably some of my readers are familiar with it.

My zucchini, sunflower, and zinnia seeds have sprouted. And I think the amaranth, too, though the leaves I see are such tiny ones, I can’t be sure yet. It’s nice to be home enough that I can go out several times a day, set the hose nozzle to “shower” and moisten the ground for them. Here’s a little poem in praise of seeds.

Seeds

The seeds I sowed –
For week unseen –
Have pushed up pygmy
Shoots of green;
So frail you’d think
The tiniest stone
Would never let
A glimpse be shown.
But no; a pebble
Near them lies,
At least a cherry-stone
In size,
Which that mere sprout
Has heaved away,
To bask in sunshine,
See the Day.

-Walter de la Mare