Sunday, May 15, 2016

Meadow in a Can


 ​Geranium  Blair Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas  13 x 10"  33 x 25cm  SOLD

 Roses yellow/coral   Laurie Fox Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas     16 x 12   40 x 30 SOLD

 Sassi on a Cloudy Day   Blair Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas   12 x 19.5" 30 x 50cm 

 ​First red rose of summer  Blair Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas   12 x 12    30x 30cm

Sassi under clouds   Laurie  Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas   12 x 12    30x 30cm
 ​Iris with Buttercups  Blair Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas 16 x 12"   40x 30 cm  

Iris with fig leaves   Laurie Fox Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas 16 x 19.5"  40 x 50cm  SOLD

​Chicken Family   Laurie Fox Pessemier   Acrylic/canvas  12 x 16   30 x 40cm


Pint-size chickens adorn our yard, enveloped in our knee-high prairie.  Some have funny “Mohawk” haircuts, and I suspect these are the potential roosters.   Harika puts them through their paces, and we are careful not to feed her chicken.   The yard is a veritable jungle for the under 16” set, and I imagine cities and festivals, churches and bordellos below.

The buttercups are less prominent this year, but we have an array of purple flowers:  tall, dark spikes; teensy magenta flowers; a multi-petaled purple dahlia affair with ragged edges; aster-like lavender blooms, red-violet clover and many irises.   A few buttercups and a smattering of daisies set it all off nicely.  Blair jokes about how I always wanted to plant “meadow in a can”, and now I have that, in spades.
The roses surrounding the house have begun to bloom.  The bees are busy.  We’ve have two or three new swarms a week, that Ludovico and Fabbio capture in large plastic bags and carry off to a new hive.  I’ve been really surprised how that works – the maverick queen, an upstart in the hive, takes off and lands on a tree (this sometime takes longer than one would like, and the mass of bees buzz around), then hundreds, maybe thousands of bees surround her, creating a football-like mass.  Sometimes the bees cover the entire tree limb, which the gardeners enclose in a plastic bag and cut off.  They place the new “hive” in their car/truck and drive off.  Blair says he hopes there won’t be an accident.
I’ve planted a few things myself, somewhat to the chagrin of Ludovico, who feels all the flowers are his job.  I couldn’t wait another minute for the geraniums, which have been growing absurdly spindly in the “cantina” this winter, to produce a flower, and bought a few thriving plants.  I figure the subterranean variety will bloom sometime in late June or early July when we are in Connecticut.  I planted cosmos and nasturtiums and marigolds, from seeds; we have sage and rosemary and a thyme plant. 
All of the fruit trees have their fruit on:  figs are nearly ready; cherries just a couple of weeks away.  The apples, pears and peaches look to August, and later all the nuts and grapes. 
Needless to say, I have some pretty fierce allergies transpiring.   I have to spend time indoors to stabilize, then I venture out to paint.   I am taking honey made by these local bees as a vaccine against the pollen, but this year it is taking longer to work.  I use an antihistamine as well.

Friends from Paris have come to visit for the weekend.   They are amazed at the difference in our lifestyle.  But I think there is as much going on in our patch of lawn as there is in the whole of magnificent Paris.

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