Crossview Gardens

Mom and I took a walk up the road to Crossview Gardens last Saturday.  Wow.  Just ... wow.  Leila and Harold Cross have been working on their garden since about 1993 (according to their daughter) and they open the garden to visitors during peak weekends in the summer.  There are a zillion varieties of flowers, mostly daylilies and liliums, but over the years they have each developed flirtations with other flowers.  Like hostas.  Or trees.  Leila's current obsession is echinacea.  Some of their website is a bit outdated but you can check it out here for more info.  Oh for a fistful of green thumbs.  Here are my photos, which are practically photoshop-free:

Sorry about the selfie in there but I needed something to show the scale of those buggers - about seven feet tall!  I'm going back this coming weekend to see if the giant banana-looking buds have opened.  I can't remember what they are called, but the flowers will be bigger than my head.  Woo hoo!

I turn my back for one minute....

....and suddenly weeks have gone by.  Where have you all been?  What have you been doing?  We have a lot of catching up to do, but it's late so we will save that for another day.  For the highlight reel, there was the balloon festival in Stowe:

That would be the inside of Peanuts 4Ever (I was holding it open during the initial inflation), Ron flying away, an oddity we saw in the parking lot, and four dorky cousins mere days before Delaney headed off on her European adventure.

Next up, my tomato plants have been loving all the rain we've been getting, the zucchini and peppers are okay, but I don't think the pumpkins are going to make it:

Thirdly, I painted something for the first time in a hundred million years.  The 9" x 12" panel went through several stages of purple nonsense a while back and sat there ... waiting for inspiration ... until a few days ago when I still had no inspiration but needed to paint something.  The first layer of background was light grey and light purple stuff, then it became a wicked dark purple with streaks of the lighter stuff showing through.  The dark background was overpowering and reminded me of my awesomely weird crow so I painted him a friend.  But it went bad, so I smeared it all over and did it again.  The new predominant background color is what you get when you obliterate a crow.  It's like roadkill with palette knife.  I will take a better picture during daylight hours but for now, here he is:

I thought about naming him "Bad Hair Day" but that's what Carol Hagan named a buffalo painting a while back and I don't want to copy.  You will, however, notice he's got that flappy hair thing going on, so I present to you "The Donald."

Fourthly, lastly, most importantly, we have poodle pictures.  As a prelude I will mention that I have this bad habit of pulling out any white hairs I find on my head (or in my eyebrows) but it is getting to the point where if I keep it up I will be bald.  I find several every time I look.  Apparently it runs in the family:

Saving the best for last, Big Nose Poodle:

That's my girl.