remember, nothing lasts

Summer was made for fun, but those long, hot days at the pool, beach, or lake can be tiring, and sometimes sneaking in a quick nap is in order. Whether you curl up in a shady spot outdoors or a cool space indoors, here are 18 products we love that will take your warm weather snooze to the next level.

Discover the Most Long-Lasting Flowers for Yard and Garden! From perennials to stunning annuals, let’s explore the perfect floral choices to transform your yard and garden into a beautiful long lasting oasis.

While I’ve spent a fair amount of time tending to outdoor plants, my experience with indoor plants was relatively non-existent. The curiosity of the feline members of my household was such that having plants or even cut flowers was not prudent. After one incident with a broken glass vase, I decided cats and indoor plants did not make a good combination.

Here are the Best Long Lasting Flowers for Yard and Garden! From perennials to stunning annuals, let’s explore the perfect floral choices to transform your yard and garden into a beautiful long lasting oasis.

Janet Campbell Brayson,  10th February 1951 to 6th May 2023

I HAULED THE GARBAGE BAGS OF CANNAS and other tender bulb-like things from the cellar yesterday, where they’d slept quietly for months, to clean them up for action. Do you remember how to sound the wake-up call for cannas, callas, dahlias and other such tender things? This slideshow is a good step-by-step reminder.

SOMETIMES I GET TWO VERSIONS OF A DOODLE from Andre Jordan, and he wants me to choose. And usually I can’t.

BETWEEN DEEP FREEZES YESTERDAY I grabbed the scissors and a bag and out I went: last call for vegetable-garden snippets. Why leave those final bits of kale and collards, parsley and pak choi–tattered as they may be–to winter’s ravages? Combined with some onions and a winter squash that weren’t storing well in the cellar, among other things, they became stock.

‘Bob White’ didn’t make the Brooklyn Botanic Garden top 10 in their 2005 article rating crabs…but it was #11, the alternate behind ‘Hozam’ (or ‘Holiday Gold’) among the yellow-fruited forms. The article is worth a look if you’re thinking of adding a crabapple to your landscape, because choosing can be a challenge, and they have the great ones profiled.I grow my yellow-fruited crabs just beyond a stand of yellow-twig dogwood, Cornus sericea ‘Silver and Gold,’ so that my distant view of the whole gleaming area right now is quite nice: linear gold beneath a haze of golden baubles. The photo shows a small section of the combination.The birds will be back, I’m sure, for ‘Bob White,’ but offcolor fruits (read: other than red) seem to hold little interest until they are really hungry.  I’ve talked about this before with hollies, and the same hold true with crabs.  At least they have some consideration for my winter cheer, I suppose. By the way, I replaced the ‘Bob White’ thebark borers

A NY FLOWER WOULD BE HARD-PRESSED TO COMPETE with the two most colorful ferns in the garden here, which have been showing off since the first crozier poked through the soil surface in early May and won’t stop till very late fall. No wonder I grow so many Japanese painted ferns and autumn ferns; they make shade gardening look easy, adding heavy doses of purple and silver or coral and gold, respectively, and never asking for so much as a deadheading in return.Japanese painted fern (Athyrium niponicum ‘Pictum’, Zones 5-8) is well-known to most gardeners the last decade, a showy thing with varying proportions and intensities of silvery-gray and purple coloration on its parts.

NOTHING LASTS. I KEEP SAYING IT, reminding myself of this essential fact of every living thing–from the magnolia blossom to the Japanese maple leaves (above) to–yes, that’s right, say it out loud with me–our own human lives.

IT HAS BEEN MONTHS SINCE I uploaded a photo gallery, and right now it’s definitely carpe diem…or carpe not at all, with the last bits fading fast. Here, then, are some of the final stars, the stalwarts of recent weeks, who despite harsh times gave (and give) mightily.