I love to garden in the evening.  It’s cooler and the sun isn’t beating down.  Tonight, while planting a couple of zagreb coreopsis I saw my first lightening bugs.  Sometimes we call them fireflies, but that’s only if we are in “serious” company.  🙂  They were lightenin’ bugs when I was a kid, and that is still the most comforting name for them.  A friend once observed that they only glow when they are flying up.   One year when we were scheduled to have a particularly spectacular display of meteor showers, I went with friends out into the country to observe them away from the clutter of town lights.  We stopped first in a deserted parking lot about a mile away from the small town I lived in at the time.  I looked up and for a moment thought I was seeing hundreds of falling stars.  But it was just lightening bugs.  When the stars did begin to fall, it was hard to believe that I had initially mistaken lightening bugs for meteors.

A pair of small hawks flew over the garden this evening and landed in a tree in the park.  They chattered a bit, and then one flew back.  At first I thought they might be screech owls.  I hear one almost every night. I didn’t get a good look at them as they flew into the park.  I realized they were small hawks when one flew back into the neighborhood.  I’ll have to look up small Michigan hawks to see if I can tell what they were.

A friend did a little “guerrilla planting” in my yard this afternoon.  He planted crocosmia and something else.  It looks sort of like a geum, but he couldn’t remember the latin name, and I don’t remember what he said the common name was.  I love crocosmia.  It has such a vivid read flower.

As he was planting those in my garden, I was gathering more plants at a huge garden center in Allendale.  I bought three zagreb coreopsis, three heathers, some coral bells, and some perennial salvia.  I got something else, too, that is shade loving.  It has an interesting leaf that I thought would go well with the hostas, but I can’t remember the name of the plant.  I haven’t planted it yet, but as soon as it is in the ground I will bring the tag in and record it in my garden book.

I hope it rains tonight.  Though we’ve had a lot of rain the garden is dry.  Or, the new plants are dry, and so are the potted plants.  I felt a few drops before I came in, but I watered pots and new plants just in case.  The wind has picked up, though.  I can hear it.

I must clean the fountain tomorrow. I miss its burble.