Creatures Add to a Garden

"...it is said that a toad is worth twenty dollars a year, and I suppose a frog helps, too.  In my garden there are more frogs than toads, as we have a pool, and their evening chorus is such a din I have been expecting the neighbors to complain, but all I have heard them say is they like it."

Elizabeth Lawrence

the Charlotte Observer
February 5, 1961

Indeed, creatures do add to a garden, and this little fellow was just as happy as can be perched lazily atop the leaf of a crinum.  The observant eyes of Sukey Pratt and Ellen Archer, two of our wonderful garden Keepers, caught this tree frog hanging out in the humid morning air.

Yours in Dirt,

Andrea

Summersweet... for your nose, a treat

"Walking down the garden path on a sultry afternoon in late July, I met a fragrance that took some time to trace. It was the mountain summersweet, Clethra acuminata, a delicate, elusive perfume that comes and goes with the breeze."

Elizabeth Lawrence

the Charlotte Observer

November 30, 1969

The summersweet to which Miss Lawrence refers is still in her garden, just beginning to reveal its first delicate fragrant blooms.  I experienced the same wonder on a hot July afternoon as I walked down her garden path two years ago.  The fragrance of the mountain summersweet is said to smell like heliotrope, but I agree with Miss Lawrence - it is more like vanilla.  It's a scent I never tire of noticing.

Come delight in the fragrance - and many blooms - of July in the Elizabeth Lawrence Garden!  As always, I am...

Yours in Dirt,

Andrea