Summer again

It is certainly rushing by us at a great pace. We leave a week from tomorrow for Scotland and have the usual list of things to get done before that. In the meantime, though, we are planning a beach picnic with friends for tonight that will be based on a salad nicoise with fresh tuna fish, our own beans and tomatoes plus some marvelous white anchovies from the local gourmet store. And a nice Tavel rose.

Last weekend we went to Washington to help Theo move out of his apartment and also just to have a good time. That's a picture of him and his remarkable roommate (now ex-roommate), Andrew Exum, at the end of a very pleasant dinner at the Cosmos Club. Andrew left for Lebanon a few days after Theo took off for Denver; you can read about it on Andrew's blog, abu muqawama, which is linked here. Roger and Theo also went to the Legg Mason tennis tournament, which has been a staple of Theo's summers for several years, while I stayed at the air conditioned hotel and read Andrew's book, which I highly recommend. As you can guess, Theo was well organized and the actual work of packing and moving was pretty limited--fortunately, since it was a very hot weekend. We've talked to Theo once since he got to Denver and all sounds well.

Back at home we are trying to keep up with our garden produce--the corn, although a trifle on the small side, is fantastic as are the potatoes although there aren't very many of those. The red things in the middle are okra--we keep picking and not eating them; I think we're put off by the color. We had more ordinary okra last summer and enjoyed it a lot.

We are starting on the process of reworking the plantings. We have a full plan which involves new fencing, a new granite path, and foundation plantings that are almost entirely grasses. Once they are established, grasses require very little work and they suit the house well. We have seen a number of plantings of grasses in a beach community we visit annually on Long Island and were also very taken by the grass gardens at Kew. Other people around here use them some but no one else has all grass; we'll see how we like it. The biggest challenge comes from the fact that I have never before gardened with them and need to learn types and characteristics from scratch--quite challenging. We have a formal plan by a landscape architect that we like, Anne Penniman, and she sent us to an excellent local nursery called Acer Gardens where we stumbled around, taking pictures as we went. I now think I can tell the difference between fountain grass and miscanthus but you never know. The picture is of one of Acer's display gardens.