Cold Friday in June

On a cold Friday night in June, just as the days approach the dark of the moon, the sunset lights the sky with splotches of color. Clouds painted pink and apricot and blue float in sculpted wonder over Lake Huron's marble waters.

In that magic moment of sunset comes the day's reward, a moment of beauty and peace as evening shadows creep across the sky.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Secret Lupines

Growing lupines has been a challenge at the lake house gardens. At first the plants liked one bed near the shoreline. After a year or two, that fizzled. I moved them to a shadier spot and that worked, but only for a season or two. So I moved them to a woodland location and totally lost all of the plants.

Lupines can self seed and do so fairly aggressively. I thought I had scratched all of the baby plants from one bed last year. This year, a secret lupine made its way up through the chartreuse leaves of a burning bush. The bush must be acting like a mother plant, protecting the lupine, because this lupine is outdoing itself with majestic purple spikes that burst from the bush like teenagers ready to graduate.

The secret is out. The lupines are back.

Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Garden on a Truck

Todd Clancy and his crew brought a load of garden soil for the lake house today. Last year's garden, in sandy ground, was a minor disaster. It was hard to keep watered through the drought months. The deer liked the baby plants and I lost interest when the soil just would not produce.

Todd's company plowed cable past our house and happened to cut our irrigation system late in the summer. When he returned to fix the leaky sprinkling system, he wandered over to my garden.

"Gee, you guys need some good garden dirt. I'll bring you a load, okay?" Todd came to that conclusion after eating a few of the skimpy grape tomatoes that still existed at the end of the dry summer of 2012.

So, today I have a new garden, thanks to those few stolen tomatoes and a willing Clancy crew.

I can taste this year's tomatoes already.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Film Noir Hostas

I took a pencil sketch of the hostas from Saturday's blog post and ran it through one of my darkroom programs. The result is a sort of "film noir" approach that is achieved by a heightened graininess that is paired with a low key black and white approach.

I'm not sure that I like the result, but it is a good exercise for me to take my artwork and put it through darkroom programs like Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Colorful Barn Roof

The barn at Graywood Farm will be getting a new solar roof very soon. In the meantime it is covered with tarps, giving it a colorful appearance when viewed from a distance.

Last Thursday's storm produced nearly two inches of rain. Rain is not a good thing when you are putting a new roof on an old barn. Hence, the tarps, a precautionary measure against more rain.

The barn loft, empty for now, has a new oak floor. Here's a link to a blog post from two summers ago with a  June 1991 photo of this barn in use during haying season.

You can read lots more about the restoration work at Ed Eichler's Graywood Barn Blog.

One last note for today. My dad, Stan Hayes, died four weeks ago today. He would have loved seeing this photo and reading about the Graywood barn. I miss him.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Up High and Down Low

Ed and I spotted this mass of organic matter up high in a cotton wood tree near the lake house. We are always on the lookout for an eagle's nest, but figure that this is probably a squirrel's nest. Enlarged on a computer screen, this structure appears to be made of leaves.

Thanks to the optics and zoom function of a simple point-and-shoot camera, we can get a closer glimpse of this nest. That's the "up high" of this blog post.

Next, I took the same camera and set it for a close up function. I activated the self timer for 10 seconds, put the camera on the ground near a freshly made ant hill and pushed the shutter button.

Presto, Eduardo! Now we have an ant's view of homecoming. The camera's eye gives us a glimpse of nature again, only this time we are "down low."

The ant hills and the cottonwood trees line the highway near our lakehouse. Obviously, it does not take much to entertain me on a morning walk.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler

Sturdy Hostas

My pen and ink drawing of a hosta in a yellow pot turned out pretty good. I accented the drawing using watercolor pencils and a waterbrush.

These are the hostas that came from my Mom and Dad's farm years ago. We have clumps of them at our farm and also at the lakehouse. Over the years we have given divisions of these plants to friends and family. It's a tough cookie, this green leaved wonder with the creamy edges on almost every leaf.

Copyright 2013
Wanda Hayes Eichler