Sunday Favorite -- A Walk Around That Old House

It is Sunday, and I'm re-issuing a post from May 20th of this year,
when flowers were in bloom and the sun was warm!



I need the cheering up of this cheery post. It has been raining off and on for several days, and more importantly -- our dear dog Dion is in the emergency animal hospital.

He collapsed Saturday evening after a normal dinner and walk. We still don't know why.
Please keep our sweet boy in your thoughts.

Update as of 2:30 PM --- Dion is home again! He is doing well, will recover, and it is still a mystery why he collapsed last night. Probably something he ate, which is not surprising; our Dion would eat Howard's Jeep if he could get hold of a pair of tin snips.
Thanks for your good wishes! He scared the life out of me.

******************************************************

Thanks to Chari of Happy To Design, who gives us the chance to recycle old posts on the day of rest with her Sunday Favorites blog party. Click here to find more of these re-runs!



(From May 2009) . . . . Come with me as I saddle up Dion and take a stroll around That Old House.
Please forgive the slow pace; Dion needs to read his pee-mail along the way. . . .

Ready for our walk? On goes Dion's macho Harley-Davidson leash, and we are off!

**********************************************

It is a perfect gift of a day -- sunny, warm and breezy. Let's walk clockwise as we leave the sunroom . . . and Mother Nature has come through handsomely for us, with the first iris blooms of the season:

Right next to the house, a gathering of iris plants!

Iris blossoms are so over-the-top, no elegant restraint in their makeup.
They are flowers, and darned proud of it.

Around the front of the house... do we have window boxes on the porch?

Nope, just flats of impatiens waiting to be planted!

And...

a big sprawling angel wing begonia that I hope is big enough to distract you from the peeling paint:

Dion de-coding secret messages left in the fading azalea next to the porch steps:

If you squint your eyes and don't look closely, the porch looks pretty good, with its Boston and asparagus fern hanging baskets, and when I plant window boxes and some foundation plantings other than dandelions . . . it will go a long way toward distracting from crooked shutters and faded paint!

Crab grass and other assorted greenies masquerading as a lawn in the side yard:

And our mystery:
Look closely at the side of the house.

There are no shutters on this side, although their hardware remains. But that's not the mystery. Enlarge the photo below, and notice the clapboard siding on the front of the house.
It is original cedar (ca. 1832):

Do you see? At the top of the wall, the siding is narrowly lapped, and as you come down the wall, it widens, until it gets to the level of the bottom windows, where it's widest of all. On the rear part of the house, built in the 1880s, the clapboards are of uniform size.

I figured this couldn't be just sloppy carpentry, so I did some research
and discovered that it was most likely done on purpose.

This side of the house takes the brunt of the weather, with the upper floors more exposed to wind and rain. The savvy fellow who built this house gave his upper clapboards minimal exposure to the elements, while allowing maximum exposure for the lower ones which would not take such heavy weathering. It was a common practice.

Clever, no? And it worked; those cedar clapboards are still in good condition after all these years.

Well, let's keep walking, toward the back of the house.
A little patch of Lily of the Valley is fading fast:

Further along the back wall, a round flat grindstone leans against the old stones:

And I present to you the world's ugliest conifer, below. What the heck is it?
It looks as if it is waiting to be beamed back up to the mothership.

Across from the wall, a sprawling rose bush is ready to pop hundreds of dark red blossoms:

The bleeding heart is still going strong:

Along the wall, another iris has burst forth!

Nearby, a clump of chives cuddles up to rampant spearmint:

You can just glimpse some gazania and cosmos Alida popped into the border yesterday.

Annie tidied up the ivy . . .

and now we need to tidy up the tidying:

Back to beauty; in a nearby pot, a hibiscus begins its summer show:

And Oriental poppies are almost ready to pop!

Time to go back inside. At the edge of the granite slab that serves as our doorstep, a basket of pansies has been valiantly blooming since March, and showing no signs of stopping:

You can just make out the pink begonias Anne tucked in along the conservatory border yesterday.

I hope you enjoyed our stroll around That Old House,
and the "mystery" on the side wall of the building!

Dion has decided he wants to stay outside for a little while.
This will last until he realizes that I am inside, where the refrigerator lives.

Enjoy your Wednesday! -- Cass

Or . . . Enjoy your Sunday. Don't you miss the early flowers?
I know I do -- although the begonias that Annie planted by the sunroom foundation are still in full bloom!