It’s been a very dry hot summer here. Fortunately, early August has suddenly gotten about 10 degrees cooler. Our garden looks green only because we’ve been watering the hell out of it (literally) every day for nearly 2 months.  (It’s felt like actual hell at times.  It’s been hot enough for the infernal regions, at any rate.)

I’ve learned how exhausting a mother’s role can be. We’re suckling (sometimes by hand), nearly every tree, shrub, perennial and annual in the garden.  Only the cactus, the agaves, and the yuccas don’t seem to really need us. They’re very independent.

The prolonged heat and drought have also confused many of our horticultural progeny. The crape myrtles started blooming on July 5, nearly a month ahead of their usual start date. Our Franklinia altamahas (clearly suffering from water stress) started blooming 2 weeks ago.  They normally flower in late August and early September. And, our fall-blossoming anemones have already sent up multiple buds on stalks, though they haven’t opened quite yet.  But they will, in another week or two.  Global warming seems real to me.

Pink Mandevilla (early August)

A ruby-throated hummingbird (a relatively dull female) appeared earlier this afternoon. But she wasn’t feeding from our new bright-red feeder or the aptly named scarlet-colored cardinal flowers nearby.  (Hummingbirds are supposed to prefer the color red.)

Instead, she seemed intent on extracting the remaining nectar from the club-like heads of the nearly spent purple liatris blooming some distance away from our living-room window.

On the black cherry at the back of our property, I can see a male Baltimore oriole (more yellowish than orange) perched on a branch.  He’s bathing in the shower from an oscillating sprinkler whose fan of water shoots high enough to reach him.

He’s so brilliant and gaudy, he seems painted.  He’s fluffed all his feathers out to catch more water and bring it next to his skin.  It makes him very disheveled, as if he’d gone to the Easter Parade in his p.j.’s rather his formal holiday attire.

I’m pretty sure we saw the same male about a month ago.  Baltimore orioles are rare enough here that it seems unlikely there are many others about.

The hummingbird and the oriole feel like little gifts, little rewards for a lot of hard work.  Of course, they’re not.  They’re just “doing their own thing,” leading the fluttering, feathery bird’s life without reference to us or our feelings.  But still, I’ll take them as gifts, anyway.  It’s why you garden in the first place.

Encountering a brief sniff of the sexy perfume of the asiatic lilies out front; the fuschia flowerlets of our new sage, the tiger swallowtails flittering excitedly over the pink racemes of the veronicas—these are the art-for-art’s sake which make the effort worth the effort.

I love to run my fingers along the smooth, tender, tapered, magenta stems of the Blue Hawaiian elephant ears in the pot a few feet away from me.  It’s like touching the skin of a strange, wonderful, red baby.