I’m loving these pictures! What a lovely idea to go through our gardens alphabetically. And I’m getting so many wonderful ideas from all of you. Arenaria was a new one to me. Now it’s on my wish list for sure! I’m a sucker for tiny white flowers. sandyslopes, that sky blue winky is beautiful! Astilbe, NOID. Always gives me a good show, though. Another NOID. Very tall and grand. This clump was chopped to bits last fall for a trade so it’s not quite up to par in the pic. Aquilega pink Barlow. My first foray into the Barlow style. The flowers nod in the most shy, enchanting way. I also loved the leaves. They are glaucous and very attractive all year, in contrast to the plain green, rather weedy looking foliage of the McKana’s Giant type. Aquilega, random self seeded bicolor. My husband loves these, with their showy spurs. He doesn’t usually take too much notice of plants, so when he mentions one, and looks forward to it every year, I take notice! Lol. Allium karataviense breaking ground. The leaves are prettier than the flowers! Here the alliums are later, in bloom. Not the showiest, but the foliage makes up for it. Allium christophii. Such a showstopper! Those enormous heads covered in stars. My little boys love them.

okmulgeeboy, My dad loved wild greens and always had at least one poke plant and one lambs quarters plant in the back corner of the yard right by his compost pile in the 1960s in our little Fort Worth suburb. No one ever really ate the wild greens except him. My father-in-law, who lived in Pennsylvania, was that way with dandelion greens in late winter/early spring and my husband still talks endlessly about dandelion greens. I tell him they are out there in the yard if he wants to collect them, clean them, eat them, etc. but he doesn't do it, so I think they probably weren't all that great---but they remind him of his dad who's been gone for 16 years now. I tried to grow dandelion greens for him in my garden and never could make it happen, but I got credit for trying. It always struck me as funny that I failed at growing dandelions from purchased seed and giving it a serious effort, but they reseed themselves all over the place naturally and grow in the yard and pastures with no help from me. Jennifer, I love The Worst Hard Time. I re-read it every summer when the droughts get tough here to remind myself how easy I have it compared to the folks back then. My dad would tell you that they made stuff grow even in the worst years because failure was not an option---they had to grow their own food or die of starvation. The few remaining photos from those years so people I barely recognize---my dad and his siblings looking so horrifically thin, but they survived. They lived across the Red River in Spanish Fort TX just SW of the southwestern corner of the county where I live now, and they were so close to the river that the kids would walk to the river, fill up a bucket with water, and walk back to the garden to water one plant...over and over again. With 9 kids (there were several more, but they didn't survive the first year of life), there always was someone fresh to haul water, but it was a never-ending task. They mostly raised what would tolerate drought and heat, so field corn and pinto beans, and they ate them for three meals a day....cornmeal mush for breakfast, cornbread for lunch, and beans and cornbread for dinner. In spring they had greens...turnip greens, collard greens, whatever was green and edible. For my dad's entire life, he ate red beans, greens and cornbread for dinner every Wednesday because he loved it and because it reminded him of his childhood. It wasn't much food compared to how we eat nowadays, but it kept them alive, and they supplemented the meals with milk from their cow, eggs from their hens, occasional meat from a hog they had slaughtered, etc. All the kids quit school to go to work around 3rd or 4th grade because the dollar a day they each earned from, for example, picking cotton from sunrise to sunset, was the only cash income the family had to buy shoes, sewing needles or salt or whatever they needed from the little general store. I admire my grandmother for being able to feed her family on almost new money and erratic crops. Even when she had cream and butter from their cow, they almost never got to enjoy it...she took it to the general store to barter for something they needed more desperately. My grandfather worked so hard to raise their animals, the few that they had because those animals put protein in their bellies and milk in the babies' bellies, and to farm, but it never paid off for him financially. I didn't understand until I was an adult that my grandparents were poor white sharecroppers their whole lives. For their entire lives, until the day they died (and my grandparents died young before my dad even had grown up), it was just a daily struggle to survive that I find hard to imagine. I think they were a million times tougher than we are. When World War II broke out, it saved my dad and his brothers...they couldn't leave the farm fast enough to join the military. They were patriotic, their nation needed them, and they wanted to serve. They had no idea when they left the farm that they'd be eating three square meals a day and it was all kinds of wonderful food that they'd never had growing up....plenty of meat, potatoes, a very wide assortment of veggies, fruit, etc. They all gained a lot of weight in the military, they said, and they still were skinny when they came home after the war. For the rest of his life, my dad spoke in glowing terms of how wonderful the food on his navy ship was, and he was still in awe that they always got three meals a day, three "good meals", as he put it, while in the navy. He never had three guaranteed meals per day until then. As children the only fruit they ate was basically one orange per year, which they each received as a Christmas gift--their only Christmas gift. Imagine those poor children growing up and then being on a navy ship and then having fruit of some sort available most days. It must have seemed like Heaven to them. I wonder how many of us would thrive under those conditions and struggle nowadays? I love your memories of the farm, even the spiders! Those country women were strong and tough, and I guess it is because they had to be in order to survive. My dad's family survived a tornado by running from the house and into their tornado shelter/roof cellar during dinner one night. Dad would tell us that the tornado picked up the house with the food on the table and the kerosene lantern lit and sitting on the table, and sat it down about 50 feet away (no foundation, just a tiny wood frame house sitting on four cornerstones, and the tornado didn't move the cornerstones) and nothing on the table spilled. They came out of the cellar and finished dinner. This story both fascinated me and horrified me when I was a kid. For them, the worst part of it was that the house was moved so much farther away from the cellar and the water pump than it had been before. I am sure there was an outhouse when they were kids, but by the time Dad took me to see the old house in the early 1970s, the cellar had collapsed, the outhouse was gone and the guy who owned the place was storing bales of hay in what remained of the house. That little house where they all lived would fit into my living room/dining room now, and it is hard to comprehend their living conditions in that tiny little shack. Nancy, I think everyone has some sort of pressure canner horror story. I don't remember my dad's canner ever exploding, but remember it locking up, pressurized, and he couldn't get it unlocked to remove the lid. I guess, as a kid, I stopped paying attention to what he was doing with it but he must have gotten the lid off of it at some point and that batch of jars removed because we continued using that canner for years. My mom hated canning and wanted nothing to do with it (all her life she described herself as inherently lazy, and she was being truthful), but my dad made her can with him when he was canning stuff. Her "I am lazy" excuse just didn't fly with him. lol. I never would have learned to garden, can or sew as a kid if my dad hadn't taught me because she wasn't going to. Without realizing it at the time, my dad was teaching me to be self-sufficient in ways that mattered to him, even if they didn't matter to my mom. I'm grateful to him for that and so much more. okmulgeeboy, That jiggling of the weight is, to me, the sound of summer in the kitchen. Well, that and the sound of the jars as the lids ping and seal---a favorite sound. I remember the old canners that had the petcocks on them, and don't miss those. The canners we have nowadays seem so much safer. I do still wear a water-proof oilcloth apron when canning---and if you ever knew anyone who had some sort of steam burn or spill burn on their body from a canning accident (I never did have such an injury like that myself but knew plenty of older relatives who did at some point in their lives), you know why I think it is important to wear that oilcloth apron. Larry, I love your memories! My mom's parents farmed and ranched but not successfully and never had two nickels to rub together, not even long after they gave up farming and ranching, moved to the city, and took paying jobs. So, they qualified for some sort of government food assistance program in the 1960s and the 1970s and they gratefully accepted the food, though it really hurt their pride to take it. What I remember from all that is that we kids thought the government cheese was the best cheese on earth and we loved eating it at my grandparents' house when we went to visit them. One of our neighbors when we first moved here in the late 1990s used to tell me stories of coming to Oklahoma in a covered wagon when he was three years old. He was in his late 80s when we met him, I guess, and I loved his tales of Oklahoma's early days. His uncle came here first and lived in a dugout on the banks of the Red River, not far at all from where we live now, and one by one all the other brothers moved here and brought their families so they all lived pretty close to one another here on separate little farms. He remembered that dugout of his uncle's (and didn't have much good to say about it either), but his family built an unpainted house from lumber when they moved here and he was grateful they didn't have to live in a dugout like his uncle's...even though they were too poor to paint that house after they built it. One cool thing about this part of the country is that those days are not so far behind us....we still have a couple of really old folks here (older than 100) who are like walking history books of our county. Fred's house was built by his uncle in the early 1900s, and that uncle must have been pretty prosperous because there was a second structure, located maybe 70 feet from the house, that had a nice hip roof and lots of windows, and it was their summer kitchen. It was still standing when we moved here and I believe it is still standing to this day. How cool is that? I'd love to have a summer kitchen so our house wouldn't heat up on canning days too. Also, that house had a front staircase and it had a back staircase that came right down into the kitchen. At first, I thought the back staircase was just for convenience, but then I came to realize it really was a safety feature because if the house caught fire when everyone was upstairs sleeping, there were two routes to come down to escape the fire instead of just one. I've always loved that house and hope Fred's family keeps it in the family now that he is gone. There's just such a long family history in that house that I'm afraid a new purchaser wouldn't appreciate. My dad's family did all those outside chores under a tree, no roof, but were grateful for the shade of the tree. They did have a smokehouse to smoke the meat after they butchered a hog, but the smokehouse was no longer standing by the time I got to see their childhood home once I was a older child (I think I was about 11 or 12 the one time my dad and his brother took my cousin and I to see it, and we were the only kids from our families who ever got to see it). My dad used to joke about them being sharecroppers. The man they rented the farm from had given up on farming and moved back to Tennessee. They were, of course, supposed to farm on shares and send him his share of the profit from the farm in lieu of rent every year after they sold the cash crop. Of course, they never made a cash crop and never sent him any money, so once a year my grandfather had to write that letter to explain about the heat and drought and lack of a cash crop and that there was no money to send him, but surely next year would be better. Then, they lived in fear of being evicted off the farm until they heard back from their landlord that he understood---he couldn't make a living on that land either, so he didn't expect my grandfather could as well. When my dad would talk about the pigs and the chickens and the milk cow and all the crops when I was a kid, I thought it meant they had plentiful food if nothing else, but later on I realized that despite their hard work they barely had enough to survive. Yet, all their memories really were happy ones. My dad got a stick (like a twig from a tree) and a piece of string for Christmas one year, and he thought that was the best thing ever---it was really the only toy he ever had, just a stick and a string, but he was a little boy and entertained himself with it. Another year there must have been more money and they each got an orange and one piece of hard candy, and they remembered that as their best Christmas ever. It wasn't until my great-uncle Charlie died in the 1970s that I learned he was the source of one pair of new shoes a year for my dad and his siblings, and the oranges and hard candy at Christmas. He must have been a more prosperous farmer than my grandfather was. For all that we fuss over our gardens and work in them and enjoy eating the harvest and preserving the excess, we still don't have the struggle they had to raise edible crops. If I had to walk a quarter-mile to the Red River to haul home water one bucket at a time to water the garden, well then, I wouldn't have a garden! The weather here was nice on Saturday and will be insanely hot (upper 70s) today, and then we turn drastically colder Tuesday and have a chance of snow. I hate the Oklahoma weather roller coaster that we have every winter, and you'd think I'd be used to it by now. I haven't ordered onions either. I haven't started seeds, although today is the day I usually do that, and I might manage to find time to do that late today. If not today, then tomorrow. I do have wildflower seeds stratifying in the extra fridge out in the garage, so at least there's that. I'm hoping today's sunshine and heat dry up the mud in the yard, and then maybe I'll get a couple of days where I won't have to mop up doggie and kitty pawprints off the floor when they come indoors. I swear, it is like the dogs, especially, stomp around in the mud and puddles just to see how much mud they can track in on their paws every time they come inside. Signs of spring really are appearing now, but I'm looking at the February forecast and weather outlooks and thinking spring still remains a long way off. Dawn

GardenHo, good to see you back! I hope you're feeling better every day. At least you got it over with before gardening season. Last year I got knocked down for two weeks with a bad cold.... in MAY! I was so mad at the timing. So many pretty grasses. I can't bring myself to plant any because I battle so many grassy weeds, but I like seeing how pretty those big clumps can look, especially when they flower. peren.all, I'm so taken with that photo of your Monarda 'Cambridge Scarlet'. The lighting with the boulder, the trees, and all the pretty flowering plants. Beautiful! Myosotis sylvatica (Forget-me-Not) Muscari latifolia Muscari 'Valerie Finnis' - really is powder blue Monarda 'Jacob Cline' Hummers love these! Monarda 'Grape Gumball' Monarda 'Pink Lace' ....with a hummingbird moth Monarda 'Raspberry Ice'

Dear Paula, I'm so late this year but I will not miss to tell you that I'm glad your are still cancer free! I already checked a few of your jokes and they get better every year :-) It has not been a good gardening year over here, the weather was crazy and frost was really late and rain in June/July, so I was not able to take the pictures I would have wanted. But soon it's time for new ones. The sun is shining for two weeks now and I hope I can detect a few signs of life soon.