pumpkin spice and everything nice in a bar of soap.

last night, my two-year-old (coincidentally almost six, as she says) niece lilly jay and i made rounds up in oley and yellow house, some escapades of which i'll write about in a future post. but one place we stopped before picking up her cousin lillee grace was the soap shop in oley, amber hills herbs & gifts.

lilly jay implemented use of her nostrils well and picked out raspberry and lemonade, manderin neroli, and  fresh ginger & lime to take home to her mommy and daddy. we already had a bar of amber set aside for her papa from the batch of soaps in one of my bathroom cabinets. we ended up letting lillee grace's mom pick out a soap from the small collection too, and she chose the fresh lime & ginger.

while at the shop, owner tammy abraham gave me a sampling of her latest scent endeavor which i had suggested she try out when i last visited-- pumpkin spice soap.

with fall being just around the corner, and pumpkin as its own sniffing  episode i can't get enough of at any time of year, i thought it was the perfect new scent for her to try out in her recipe-swept minutes.

bearing a somehow lightly but pleasantly pink shade to the chunky bar, blueberry seeds are also incorporated and mingled into the autumn-rich, happiness-instilling soap.

as they're freshly made and new, they're not on shelves yet, and i believe she has just a few more than a half-a-dozen bars from what she prepared weeks ago, once all sets dried in their trays. so if you are interested in the pumpkin spice soap, call the shop a 610.689.0025.

mystery plant-- an answer revealed.

all summer long, i have been itching to find out the name of this plant. it has wide-brimming white flowers that are open by early morning, but once the sun peels out and shoves shadows out of the way, the blooms tighten up and close for the rest of the day. 

the little white dots in the middle of this scene below are the flower.

they are like puffs of whipped cream on paper-thin pieces of nature attached to greenery.

by searching on google, i discovered a blogspot page that finally answered my question-- this is called moonflower. unfortunately, i can't find that same blog again to give the blogger credit.

moonflower is related to the morning glory, which makes good sense in that it opens in the evening and closes up by morning.

weeds grow in dump trucks too.

certain scenes evidence that we have incredibly good garden soil at our 30+ acre location i'll call my place of employment. below, notice the three to four foot tall weeds thriving in the back of this dump truck. the truck is stick shift and has no second gear. it is a trooper ! and apparently so are those weeds, baking in the sun.

but as ghetto as it appears, the truck bed has been cleared of these weeds by now, as we had to take it to the mechanic to be worked on. still. those are some vivacious weeds, in my ever-humble opinion.

so you can tell some other trucks were being used in its place for a few weeks. it's not a vehicle we use every day, especially with the whole second gear being missing and all. that takes a talented driver to maneuver.

mums, asters, and pansies are here !

a shipment of 100 nine inch mums, 40 eight inch asters, and 48 four-and-a-half inch pansies came in today at the garden center. mums and asters are $5.95 each or 3 for $15.00. the little pansies are $2.95 each. stop in if you'd like to check some out for the fall !

a good amount of the asters are already showing their blooms in light purple, darker purple, and some with yellow centers. a few white- blooming asters came in too.

but the mums are mostly still budding, and budding well they are. there should be an assortment of colors in red (including a rustic sun-burnt hue), orange, yellow, white, pink, and purple.

i'll take more photographs once they're actually in full bloom.

the mums are sold as hardy mums and usually come back the next year if you plant them in the ground, not just leaving them in a decorative pot. the asters come back too sometimes but tend to get quite leggy and should but cut back in june if they do become tall. and the pansies sometimes survive as well. it's always nice when certain plants unexpectedly come back the following year.

a beauty-- a thing called butterfly weed.

some endeavors are so embarrassingly expressive of the unkempt that i leave the camera in the house while i'm outside. that speaks the case for my flowerbeds overgrown with weeds half as tall as me by my brick (public-side) sidewalk. it also includes a non-picky plethora along my inner flowerbed and garden in the yard behind the fence. i've let my landscapes run away from me far too long, so no vision-scoops for the before and after because how badly i let it go is just that embarrassing. 

but instead, something positive out of an hour and a half's work, four trash cans full of weeds and prunings later-- a captivatingly thriving specimen in my garden. this is a new one for me, but an old perennial, i've been told. butterfly weed. it may be making a comeback in recent years.

several months ago, i saw a photo of it noted in the reading eagle newspaper as a butterfly bush. i kept thinking, if only you'd hire me, that error would not be uglying up your page ! oh well. some will know the difference, and i guess plenty won't ever notice the mistake unless they learn otherwise.

some puffs of mint's flowers span around the butterfly weed. the little dabbles of orange clusters are just so pulling heart-wise as one plant after another loses its luster toward the dwindling down of the season.

the silent speech of sunflowers.

i think it's crucial to see that there are inspirations and reminders at so many corners, along so many strips of road. eyes have more purposes than we'll sometimes realize in the bustle of our days, with stressors knotted around us.

yesterday, i vision-gulped some sunflowers in a yard along swamp pike on my way home from work. this stitched a line into my head, and i wanted to run with it. i knew a house down the block had a nice patch of sunflowers along its fence, so before work this morning, i threw my stuff in the car and ran toward the golden yellow calling out in magnets.

lemon of stalk-struck sparks

you toss heat across where 

fingertips have tapped lightly-- as the oven 

you are, with your face a pie of seeds.

 bees comb out your freckles 

with their kneeless limbs

 where legs and necks blur, trailing 

skyward, a sunflower.

jrh.

hasta la vista meets hosta la vista.

yes-- hasta la vista meets hosta la vista. 

i always wanted to make shirts for my brothers that said ''hosta la vista'' with a few samplings of the plant across the fabric of the front. it's on the life to-do-list, i suppose.

i have a whole potting area setup going on in the shade now at work outside of the barn. usually, we have a makeshift potting area out back behind the barn. but it's in such blazing sun, and that area has been cleared for a new purpose.

so with a much-appreciated umbrella from matt's house, i've been making new plant babies out of cut roots of hosta from his yard. he claimed there were 100 to separate. most are frances williams hosta, a cultivar with wide, gorgeous leaves.

since it will take a while for these to sprout back, here is a scene of frances williams hosta from the past.

hosta multiply quite well over time, which means in a sense, free plant children. they're great for bartering but need shade and in fact love shade. in too much sun, they crisp out badly. so do i-- we have all this in common, as it turns out.