Carrollton Yard – July 2022 (3) — The 21st Century Matriarch

The final in my Carrollton Yard in July posts….

The ferns are on the north side of the house and generally in the shade. The place is well watered by the sprinkler system. But even with those advantaged, the 100+ days are damaging the fronds. The ones that get the most sun were brown…cooked in the heart. I noticed that almost all of them that were still green (even a little ) were producing spores.

The mulberry trees in my parents house are very old…and several have been cut down completely. The ones that remain have been dramatically trimmed to reduce the weight of their canopy. There was a pile of recently trimmed branches at the back of the large patio…cut by the crew into fireplace length (plenty for my mother’s enjoyment of almost daily winter fires!). I took pictures of the cut ends…and realized that even the smallest ones took over a decade to grow!

And the mulberries are still putting out leaflets on their trunks and big branches! There were at eye level on the trunk closest to my parents’ garden room. The room is the best in the house – where they work on puzzles and spend a lot of their day. The few of their backyard is spectacular from that room!

I enjoyed the garden decorations among the foliage. Most have been in place for years – some are toys left over from when grandchildren were young (the youngest is now in his 20s).

On the edge of the side patio there is a rock with several kinds of lichen.

I used my phone’s (Samsung Galaxy S10e) digital magnification to get closer views. I like the colors and texture of the lichen and then the bare rock where, perhaps, some long ago lichen weakened the rock and water eventually washed it and the rock particles away.