For once in their lifes they stood still long enough to get a good picture :-) Click on the pictures to enlarge them, they usually gets better then.

I´ve never noticed the strange form on this spruce before. I wonder if it always has had this round top or if anything happened to it sometime.

The blackberries are in bloom now. We call them Bear berries.

There will be a lot of berries on this bush alone if lucky. It´s not always the get to ripe here, it all depends on how the autumn gets. One cold night and bye bye to the berries.

Finally I found a blue Jacobs ladder or Blue gold as we call them too.

Incarvillea zhongdiaensis. This one can stand our cold winters but rot if the winters are wet.It´s related to the Catalpa trees.

My dogroses will soon be covered in pink flowers.

I´m making a small hill of all the grass I´ve dug up on the pond spot. I´ll also cover it with some of all soil and sand that has to go somewhere. Usually I have about one feet of soil and then pure sand. On the pondspot it´s of course the only place in the garden that there is soil almost half a meter down :-)

This is not the shape the pond will have in the end since I´m making it wider. 1,5 meter isn´t that wide after all :-) But I did want a small pond and small it is :-)

Almost there now. I´ve made a mark on the spade so I would know when I reached 75 cm.

This is an old picture that I borrowed from the internet until I can take a picture my self. The midsummer pole. It might look like a christian cross, but it´s anything but. If you think as durty as You can You can see what it is :-) It´s a gigantic phallos :-) Midsummer has always been a pagan fertility celebration and for some reason the christian church never got rid of it. So every year people dance around the pole singing about the little frogs that are so funny to see :-)

Midsummer has always been an important holiday in Sweden. We celabrated it long befor christianity arrived here. People thought that plants had magical powers on midsummer nights and it was also the night fertility was highest. When the christians came they tried to make it a holiday to remember John the Baptists birth, but that was really never accepted here in Sweden.



I promised to show a picture of the swedish flag. Not the best picture but I took it from my car driving. It´s blue as the sky with a cross yellow as the sun.

This is how far I came with digging away the lawn on the pond spot. After that it has rained all the time more or less.

So every midsummer eve morning people gather to make the Midsummer pole. Usually it´s rather high and made like a big cross. The pole is dressed with branches with leafs and flowers. On the end of the horizontal pole hangs two flower wreaths. Some may think that this is a christian cross, but oh how wrong they are :-)

A yellow foxglove. We call it Thimble flower.

Helenium hoopsei.

Midsummer is after Christmas our biggest holiday. First we make the pole and after that music is played and we´re dancing around the pole for a long, long time. Mostly we do it for the children nowdays and thinking of what the pole really stands for it´s a bit fun for out of country visitors to se us all dansing and singing around the midsummer pole :-) :-)

Cuckoos wort.

The first picture taken with my new mobile phone. The camera is quite good.

After that we start to eat! The most important food on midsummer is new small potatoes and pickled harring in all its varieties. It seemes we have pickled harring on every holiday dinner :-) For us not to happy about pickled harring there is ofcourse a lot of other things to eat. Meatballs, a swedish sausage called Prince sausage, salmon, chicken and lots of other things. Later on the day families play games like crocket or boule.

Dogrose bud.

Now the Dogroses has started to flower in my garden.

Unfortunally hevy drinking is common too. This is one of the worst nights for the police to work on. Tomorrow some people will be hit by a drunk driver and some of them will die. But the worst day in traffic is actully Thursday (yesterday) and on Sunday. Every one wants to get to their summer houses as fastas possible on Thursday (most of us don´t work on Thursday and Friday even if they aren´t holidays) and on Sunday they are tired from the celebration when they drive home again.

One of the many geraniums that grows in my garden.

This moth was sitting on my Brugmansia, I think You call it Angels trumpet like we do (the brugmansia I mean). This is taken by my camera.

I´m not celebraiting midsummer because I think it´s sad that it all turns towards winter again. I know it´s stupid to think like that, summer has just begun and the warmest period (if lucky anyway) is till to come. But I can´t help it. In a day or two I´ve forgotten about it and things are back to normal again :-)
Have a great day now!

This is the same moth but the picture is taken with my mobile phone. Wit a few adjustments I think it´ll be impossible to se any differens between the two cameras, at least on close ups like this.

The wild Goose berries are starting to ripe now. They are very small but oh so tasty.

It has been raining all morning, sometimes just a drizzle but mostly heavy showers. A weather best watched from a window. But I had to drive to Falkoping today to buy a gift for my nieces doughters baptism on Sunday. It was a long time since I had yo buy such a gift but I remember that I then bought a cup and a deep plate in china and cutlery with the same cute bunny pattern on it.

They didn´t have the same patterns any more, but they had pictures from our most popular childrens songs from early late century on it instead. Painted by one of our most loved painters (and writers) ‘Elsa Beskow’ (Click on her name and pictures that she has painted will be shown). Her most popular paintings were of those painted to childrens tales and children songs.

This little weed is called Earth smoke both in swedish and english (Fumaria officinalis). It´s an annual that is more than welcome here in my garden. It´s not agressive in any way and I love those small flowers.

This is a Fox glove hybrid of some kind. If You want it in Your garden it usually dies, but if You don´t want it, it becomes a terrible weed :-) I usually take away over a couple of hundred plants in my garden every year :-)

Tomorrow it´s Midsummers eve and that is a big holiday here.Many will get drunk for the first time in life and perhaps a sexually transmitted disease at the same time. Not to mention the result that will come in nine months :-) If the weather is nice there´ll probably be a messy holiday with lots of fights and alcohol related problems, so the police and many others are hoping for a rainy day. I personally thinks it´s sad that everything turns towards winter again, so I woun´t celebrate it at all. But in a couple of days I forget about that and then I enjoy the rest of the summer :-)

This one we call Dragon nepeta in sweden. Like all nepetas it has a strange scent on its leafs if one strokes them. In the beginning it´s rather a gentle flower that looks as if it has problems surviving, but that´s just a disguise :-) It doesn´t spred very fast but the plant it self gets so big that it sort of kills anything that comes in its way :-)

The iris bud I showed the other day has now opened. Really beautiful I think. Now I only have to find out what kind it is. I think it´s something I have sown myself.

The same flower from above.

My new mobile phones arriwed today :-) It´s an Ericsson C702 with a 3,2 megapixel camera and a Samsung something. The Samsung something is going to be a spare phone, it´s rather uggly but since it´s extrasafe toward dropping it on the ground it´s a perfect phone for me :-) There´ll be no digging for the pond today since the weather is like it is, but it´ll be better tomorrow they say. I´ve already bought some plants to have in the pond and until it´s filled with water they have to stay in a rainwater barrel.
Have a great day now!

Paradisbuske or in english 'Beauty bush' (Kolkwitzia amabilis) I´ll take a picture when all flowers are open.

I have a Gullklematis or Orange peel clematis in english (Clematis tangutica) climbing in one of my apple trees. By doing so the apple tree "flowers" for so much longer.

I can never get enough of pictures of clouds :-)

My phone company called me a couple of days agoo and asked if I wanted to prolong the subscripsion I already have on my mobile phone. I´m quite happy with it but she asked me how I used my mobile. I told her that I mostly used it to send sms and mms to my aunt (well others too, but mostly her). So the woman I was talking to, told me that there was a better subscripion for me.

The natural little pond still has some water in it, but it´s now totally covered with duckweed.

Iris setosa ssp. sibirica. Ssp means subspecies.

I really look foprward to this iris to start to flower. It has a creamy yelow color that I like. But who knows how it´ll look when it opens up? I´ve never seen it flower before.

The problem was that she sounded just like one of my best friends, so it was easy to like her :-) :-). So now I´ll get two new mobile phones for almost the same price as my old subscription. I have no idea what kind of mobiles :-) memory is short :-), but I know one had extra protection against dust and that´s a good thing when one works as a powder painter. The other one had extra protection against bumps. I have no idea why, most of the mobiles I´ve had never got broken when dropping them and I drop them frequently :-)

I´ve started to dig away the lawn on the spot I´ve chosen to have the pond at. I started with the edges and then working my self in to the center. But it was to hot to continue for to long :-) We have had a wonderful summer day here today. But I have a four day weekend comming up so lets hope it woun´t rain to much. The grass that I dug up is now the beginning of a small hill on a place where it now only grows grass and weeds. Probably a lot of the sand and soil I´ll dig up will find its way there too. What I shall do with the rest I dig up I have no idea. I´ve only come to the thought of digging a pond, the rest will be solved during digging I hope :-)
Have a great day now!

This is a garden variaty of a very common geranium in Sweden. I love the blue color on it.

There was no sunrise to take pictures of this morning, but the sky was so beautiful anyway.

It has been and still is a wonderful day today. Sunshine and birdsong all day exept for the early morning, then it was only birdsong. The day just rushef through and I went home a bit early because they called to tell me that my pakages with the rubber carpet and the protection carpet, that goes under the rubber, to my pond had arrived today. Even if it not is going to be a big pond the pakages was really heavy. I wonder how much my friends rubber carpet weighed. Their pond is like a little lake :-) :-) I know that it arrived with a lorry and there were no room for anything else on it :-)

They have let out cattle in a new field today. My dogs are afraid of cows so they were nowhere near the fence.

But the big bull had an eye on us anyway :-)

I mowed the lawn too this afternoon. Since there were no wind to speak of the flies and mosquitos had a great time stabbing me on places I didn´t reach. The Horse flies has come too now, I felt that when they startied to bite me in the neck. But I don´t think that we´ll have so many of those this summer. It has been so dry since winter here that most wet areas has dried out. I live beside a bog so usually we have quite many of those kinds of flies, but dry springs usually helps us with that problem :-) If one has horses these flies are big problems, our laws says that horses (and cattle) must be outside all summer and when the horse flies comes they can suffer a lot from them. So I know people that lets their horses stay indoors during days and lets them outside during nights instead. Not legal but better for the horses I think.

This is the spot I´ve chosen to have the pond at. In front You can see a small Katsura. The frost took all leavs so it looks rather naked as it is now. In the back to the left there grows a rose, Rosa multiflora a japanese wild rose. This one spreads so much in The US that it´s forbidden to plant in some states and if one finds it in the nature it must be killed. here though the klimat makes it so much friendlier. The flowers are small but there are loads of them. You´ll se in a couple of weeks when my are in bloom. In the back to the right there is a big apple tree.

All irises are beautiful I think, but this one isn´t as beautiful like the one I showed yesterday.

A while ago I started to wonder about the clouds in heaven. How come do they exist like they do. I know about dust gathering small water droplets around them, but why does they become a cloud? Why not just a thick fog around the planet? What keeps them together so to speak? Is it some kind of gravity doing something?

Another thing I´ve been wondering about is the asteroid belt out in space. They say that planets was made of asteroids that collided and that gravity sort og drew other aseroids to them. The bigger they became, the stronger gravity became and more asteroids fell on the new planet. In space these asteroids collide all the time, but they don´t make a new planet, why don´t they? Have gravity forsacen them :-) I know that this has nothing to do with the rest of my blog, but it sort of just came up in my head when I looked out the window right now :-)

How Teodor can find it comfortable to sleep like this I don´t understand :-) He makes a mess on the shelf too :-)

Well I think I have time for a cup of tea on my kitchen stairs before the mosquitos find me.
Have a great day now!