This joyful burst of color ruled my days while I painted and painted until the work came to life on the canvas. I love my sunflowers and grow many in my gardens.

The goldfinches love them too and come to feast on the seeds every year, dodging the neighborhood cats in the process. Birds smartly dressed in gold and black hang upside down from the drooping flower heads heavy with seed. I smile at their efforts.

Painting yellows is an exercise in alternate shadows. Sunflowers require shadows in browns and golds to glow with sunshine. Mix the wrong colors and the painting will drop dead in its tracks.

But those lovely butterscotch colors glowing with red oranges, now there is a palette that tells the story of summer sunshine, summer heat, summer light bathing the gardens.

A wealth of golden light dances through the late summer garden, one glorious blast of delight before fall comes and swiftly claims the garden in a different palette. Swiftly here high in the Rocky Mountains, that is.

The mornings have a distinct chill now, even in August when the thermometer rises into the eighties daily. A new scent is on the breeze, we know fall is barely hidden around the next corner.

But the sunflowers blaze with their awareness of the sun, reminding us to be awake to this moment, to this splendid torrent of grace.

Summer Awakening is 48″ wide by 36″ high with painted gallery wrap edges and can be either hung without framing or with framing. The painting is available at RiverStone Gallery.

This article appears in the following carnivals:
Happiness Carnival
Garden Fest Carnival

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2007. All Rights Reserved.

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I doubt my poppies will equal last year’s display. Oodles of weeds went to seed out there last fall when I was working too hard on the book to tend the gardens. I have not been able to catch up on the weeding this spring, so the gardens will be what they are this year.

Every year I look forward to an explosion of poppies. I do have some rubifragrum poppies with buds, which makes me smile. The Shirley poppies are still way too small to be doing such a thing.

Some irises are blooming for the first time, so I get to discover what color they are. My neighbor had a large box of them she had no time to plant so she gave them to me. No one knows what colors were included, so I guess we will find out this year. These first ones are a deep purple.

I have done a lot this year, but I have so much more I want to do. The weather turned too hot too soon as we have been having temperatures in the eighties, which has been making my newly transplanted tomatoes wilt more than usual. It should be cooler tomorrow, which will help them adjust more easily.

The first task this spring was to clean out the hoop house. Every year when I remove the dead plant debris the hoop house looks like it barfed a giant dead plant hairball.

I then mulched the interior of the hoop house. You can see the plastic wall in the right corner, which is where the 8’ x 16’ insulated and heated section sits in the hoop house. I start all my seedlings in there, particularly the tomatoes.

Once the tomatoes are in hand, I begin dreaming of poppies in earnest. I usually have thousands of Shirley poppies. Last year people were driving here just to see the poppies in bloom, including many complete strangers. I hope to have a good bloom this year, but it will be a bit different.

This last photo shows what I hope to see again this year. As with the other photos you can click on it for a larger image.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2007. All Rights Reserved.

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