Trowel in hand

This past Saturday was simply a picture-perfect autumn day for yard work. I spent the afternoon cleaning up the vegetable garden, pulling up the dead zinnias, salvia, sunflowers and gomphrena. I'm always astonished to think how tiny they were when I planted them. A few snapdragons are still in bloom, and I harvested them -- that is, once I found the garden shears that had slipped out of my jacket pocket and hidden under some leaves.

Then I finished planting tulip bulbs (100 this year) and carefully dug up the Peruvian daffodil (Hymenocallis) bulbs pictured here. I didn't know what to expect when Leo and Helen Daiuta kindly gave me a few of these last fall, but they turned out to be a marvelous addition to the garden: spectacular white, fragrant flowers on tall, leafless green stalks. I'll let the bulbs dry a bit, and then they'll spend the winter in the dark laundry room, along with the basket of gladiolus corms I lifted a few weeks back.