The cut-your-own sunflowers that I photographed last week are now blooming.
(Streifzug means ‘foray,’ ‘ brief survey,’ or ‘ramble.’)
Like every flower, she has a little
theory, and what she thinks
is up. . . .— Frank Steele, from “Sunflower“
Streifzug means ‘foray,’ ‘ brief survey,’ or ‘ramble’ (if my online German/English dictionary does not deceive me).
These photos are from yesterday’s ramble or, more specifically, bike ride.
The sign says, “Only paid-for flowers make friends*/joy.” Sonnenblumen are sunflowers. These are not quite open yet.
Blumen Selbt Schneiden or ‘cut your own flowers’ signs — with honor-system money boxes — are not uncommon sights alongside fields in the Stuttgart area. These long rows were beside a walking/biking/farm access path near our neighborhood.
(On the same ride, I also passed a house with a sidewalk shelf of already cut flowers in jars and a coin box.)
The fields around the rows of cut-your-own flowers are filled with wheat, beans, corn, and grass for hay.
Also, as you can see, our weather has much improved since Wednesday. Temperatures are now well into the seventies.
*See the comments here about the translation.
Right now — at midmorning in Stuttgart — it’s 59°F. Our high today is predicted to be only 69°,with all-day clouds and intermittent rain.
It’s been this way since last week, and it looks like summer will not return until next Wednesday.
But yesterday about 5:30 p.m., I caught a few minutes of sun shining through my little arrangement of miniature roses, spirea, and wild strawberries.
An hour later, it was raining.
Today is Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. I don’t have a lot of flowers, but I am enjoying some orange hawkweed, which I hope will pop up in more places in the long grass this summer and next year.
Tomorrow is Garden Bloggers’ Foliage Follow Up, hosted by Pam at Digging. If grass counts as “foliage,” this is my contribution as well.
You can read more about our backyard in Stuttgart, Germany, here.
To scroll through larger versions of the pictures, click on ‘Continue reading’ below and then on any thumbnail in the gallery.
In a field by the river
my love and I did stand. . . .
She bid me take life easy,
as the grass grows on the weirs. . .— W. B. Yeats, from “Down by the Salley Gardens“
“Figurines de pierre (stone) dans un potager,” between 1859 and 1910, by Eugène Trutat, via Bibliothèque de Toulouse Commons on flickr.
Unfortunately, the old image is not very clear.
The location of the vegetable garden was not noted, but the Bibliothèque assigns it to the Germany album. Trutat took a large number of pictures while traveling in the Rhineland-Palatinate region in the early 1920s.
enclos*ure 