cool summer doings

The weather is cool, I mean. And this week it's been cloudy as well, which is nice for taking pictures of flowers. When Kim posted a picture of an unusual coneflower on her blog I was so taken with it, if I were more the sort of person who acts quickly I'd have run over to Lowe's in hopes of getting one of my own.

But I'm not. My style of impulsiveness sent me out back with my camera to study my own basic purple coneflower.

I began to think how fun it would be to have a collection 

of different sorts of coneflowers.

August is full of special feast days in my parish, and we are also getting ready for our big food fair that happens in September. On one overcast day I took a picture of the rose mallow and manzanita at church.

And another day I snapped this one, of a crew of us making 40+ pans of spanakopita to put in the freezer. Those are tins of butter, stacks of filo dough, and a spinach-cheese filling on our table. We will defrost the pastries the weekend of the festival and bake them to sell hot in the Greek booth.

My loving man stopped on the way home from the dentist at a dahlia farm, and brought me this custom collection of big ones. Nice warm colors to make me remember it's summertime.


And at home my one red zinnia is climbing past three feet tall, twice as high as its neighbor. I bought two plants that were supposed to be the same, but they obviously are not.

I'm glad I haven't had only the garden variety of pretties this summer. I'll close this random photo report with one of the sweetest flowers in my life when she was at our house, dear little Ivy.

The sun came out this afternoon, and I expect to see more of it next month, and feel heat. Then I'll be posting some tomato pictures, too! But I hope I won't have to wait quite that long.