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Is Summer Here

© Howard Deutch

 

  

    It seems like only yesterday we emerged from the winter's snow to greet a late spring. Now I can almost feel the brisk winds of autumn on my neck. The first honking of migrating geese overhead bodes a grim message of winter's imminent return. Is summer here yet?

 

 

    Why does it seem that summer is so fleeting? Has the fact that it has been so cold and wet somehow detract from the season? We always look forward to a warm and hopefully sunny summer in order to absorb sufficient warmth and light to enable us to survive the following winter. Will we make it this time?

 

   

    The fledgling movie industry had an outpost in Ithaca N.Y. in its early days. Perils of Pauline was made there in central New York. They were forced to move elsewhere due to the lack of sufficient sunshine. We spent our undergraduate years in Ithaca. Then, several years after graduation, moved back for seven more years. We have since moved some 60 miles away but are still under the same set of clouds.

    We did have sufficient sunshine to permit the Canna Lilies to flower. I guess I can't complain too much. The seasonal Japanese beetle infestation is on the wane. I have survived the double whammy of the Viburnum Leaf Beetle, larvae and adult phases. Slugs have permitted the majority of the flowers to bloom. Euonymus scale insects held back. Aphids have not been too numerous. Fungus has been less devastating to the Aconite but did in the Rudbeckia triloba.

 

 

 

 

    We seem to have had the wettest and coldest summer that I can remember. One advantage has been the necessity to only have to water the planted pots, leaving the beds to Mother Nature, that fickle creature that in turn both rewards and dooms the gardener.

 

    Native wildflowers flourish like weeds in some areas and are cultivated as a garden specimen elsewhere. My Euphorbia Snow-on-the-mountain, Euphorbia marginata, is one of these. I first spotted it in a botanic garden where it was no more than two feet tall. These past two years that I have grown it, the plants shoot up to double that height before developing the conspicuous white streaked bracts and flowers at the top that give it its name when seen on mountainsides. Luckily I am not sensitive to

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