June Garden Pictures

It's absurdly late to be posting these pictures; the garden no longer looks anything like this. Most of the plants pictured here are no longer blooming, some are completely dormant and leafless, and a few are dead, the victims of the same neglect on my part that prevented me from getting around to posting these pictures. What can I say? It's been an extremely stressful summer. I've been working impossibly long hours for many, many months, and nothing else has gone very right either. But I want to catch up on posting my garden pictures, so here are the ones from June. I hardly managed to take any in July because July was so horrible, so I mostly have just August and September left to catch up with.

The plant I got most excited about in June was death camas (Zigadenus fremontii). Its intimidating name comes from the fact that when not in bloom, it closely resembles camas (Camassia quamash), a bulb that the indigenous Nisenan people regularly dug up and ate. Death camas is also a bulb, but if you mistake it for camas and eat it, it can kill you. So if you decide to forage for California native bulb to eat, make sure you don't get any death camas mixed in with your camas.

As long as you don't eat it, death camas is perfectly harmless. I only grow death camas, not regular camas, because regular camas doesn't grow as well in my area as death camas. So there's no danger of me mistaking my death camas for regular camas. And I grow my death camas in a large pot so that Boston can't easily get at it.



( More pictures of long-gone flowers! )