Here’s the view out my living room window for June 1. This is what I see when I sit to drink my morning coffee. You can see the winter damage on the rhododendron closest to the house–more pruning is needed.

The bloom color at this time of year is pink, purple, blue, white. Yellows and golds will come soon and then in mid-summer the hot colors–the flame of crocosmia and hot pink phlox.

The tree peony only had 2 blooms this year–winter was hard on it as well. The blooms were deep magenta, big and blowsy, reminiscent of the tissue paper flowers I made when I was a kid. The plant always blooms in late May and inevitably the weather turns hot just about the point that the blooms appear.

These blooms are short lived in the best of conditions but the heat propels them along even faster–the buds open, flowers spread their petals out, and whomp they’re gone, in the space of a hot day. I wanted to get a picture of them this year but didn’t move quickly enough.

Sometimes I clip off one of the flowers and bring it in to float for a few days in a shallow dish of water but this year the 2 flowers bloomed and fell in less than a day. Once the bloom has passed, this is an unassuming plant with fairly ordinary green foliage–but for a day or two in spring, it prances and preens–look at me, look at me.

The regular peonies, which are dotted around the various garden beds, are slower to bloom and they retain their blooms in full glory for longer–the challenge is knowing when to cut a big bouquet before a pounding rain, again inevitable at this time of year. So far only one flower has appeared and I cut it yesterday to put in a glass vase on the mantel. Hopefully the buds that cover the plants will survive the rains to come over the next couple of days.

There wasn’t much of a garden here when I moved in–some foundation plantings and a small bed in the back. But this modest array of shrubs and plants got me started on my gardens and many of the plants have lived on: a peony; 4 rhododendrons; an andromeda; several lilacs, including one with deep purple blooms; an azalea with hot pink flowers; a patch of white Siberian iris; some Jacob’s Ladder, coreopsis, and Ozark sundrops. I’ve lifted and divided and replanted in new locations and it’s all going strong.

Although life in a garden is often a story of transience, of beauty that blooms and fades quickly, falls prey to pests or storms, it can also be a story of continuity, of resilience. I don’t know who planted everything originally. Maybe the couple who were renting the house. I like to think it was the original owner–a single woman like myself who had the house built in the late 50s and lived here for many years. There was once a deck on the back of the house—I like to think of her sitting on that deck sipping coffee before work, looking at the rhododendrons in full bloom.