Dear Carol, Mary Ann and all of other friends, I'm hot, and yesterday, the water well broke in the middle of my shower. It's 8:00 a.m., and the temp is already 81F with today promising to be another scorcher above 100F. From the weather map, I see most of the continental U.S. is in the same shape. As long as the air conditioner holds steady, we'll be fine. The guys from the water well company will be here soon to fix the well, and I'll celebrate with a shower and watering the garden. The well didn't have any problems for 40 years, but, in the past six months, they've replaced the pump, fixed a fuse, and now a broken pipe. In spite of all of this mayhem, the potager is pumping out the vegetables. Without me to squish them, the squash bugs were victorious after I returned from Buffalo, but...

The rains have come and gone throughout most of the spring and now well into summer. The garden looks overblown and flousy like a middle-aged woman in a flowery housecoat. Going to St. Louis and Buffalo has left her with her roots showing, and it's now up to me to get her a pedicure and maybe even a massage. Spent daylily scapes have turned brown in the sun and stand like skeletons waiting for me to put them in the compost pile. A lot of talk in St. Louis was about daylily rust, but I don't have any in my garden this year. Luckily for most of Oklahoma, the fungus, Puccinia hemerocallidis, still dies during our winters. Therefore, I'm not worried about recycling spent scapes. The vegetable garden is full of very tiny blooms on parsley, dill and fennel. I let these bloom so that the smallest of the pollinators...

Okay, so Russelia equisetiformis, commonly known as firecracker plant or coral plant, isn't native to the United States. It is, however, a transplant from Mexico and other tropical climes. When the summer sun tries to do its worst, this little plant (in Oklahoma anyway) laughs and then really turns on her own heat with tangerine or yellow bells hummingbirds and butterflies can't resist. In the middle of summer, as I stand on the deck sweating while watering the containers, Russelia equisetiformis always makes me feel a bit more cheerful. She doesn't ask for much, just good soil and drainage and enough water.  Then, she blooms and blooms until colder temps shut her down. Hardy in zones 9 through 12, firecracker plant is a small shrub in places like Florida. Further north like my Oklahoma home, it is most often grown as an annual, but this fall I think I'll bring...

Yesterday, as we were driving, my youngest daughter, Bear, broke into my garden writing reverie by suddenly saying, "Annie and Joey are my best friends in the whole world." I smiled at her reflection in the rear view mirror. "Yes," I said, "You will all probably be friends for your whole life." This wasn't any pie in the sky notion, or something a mother tells her child to give them dreams on which to fly.  Annie and Joey's mother has been my best friend for fourteen years, and our younger children have been friends almost since the day they were born  Beneath our feet, they played on the same blankets, toddled on short stubby legs, and later climbed trees together. Aimee and I were both SAHM when we met. I'd recently quit being a legal assistant to parent my children full time.  Diva was three, and ASW was eighteen months....