This handsome fellow planted himself in one of our walkways. But what is it? My guess is it’s some kind of verbascum.

Here’s a glimpse of the swimming pool that became a garden, now in its fourth year -hard to believe it’s been that many already.

Took advantage of the nice weekend weather and worked in the garden. This year our problem is that everything’s filling all the spaces and getting crowded. We’re going to have to be fairly ruthless.

Took some photos and posted them to flickr. Click the image or follow this link to my flickr garden set.

We’ve had several cherry tomatoes, but this is the first full-size tomato of this summer. Always an event!

Since converting our swimming pool to a garden we have had a lot more wildlife around. This year two pair of kestrels have taken up residence. We also have a lot of butterflies, beas, and hummingbirds.

This caterpillar is a swallowtail. They like plants in the carrot family, and this one was enjoying a lunch of dill. Eventually he will turn into a butterfly that will look something like this.

There are a few more photos in my nascent garden set on flickr.

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This year our garden has been a little deficient in red flowers. An exception is the Maltese Cross, which produces large globular composite flowers. These are doing well. Above you can see them in the garden; below is a close-up (not too well focused, but it will give the idea) in a cut bouquet.

Hey! I see a weed!

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Panorama of pool garden, year 2 on CleVR.com

We actually took a step backward this year, in a way, because we expanded the garden by taking out more concrete, and so we undid some of our work from last year. But the garden recovered nicely and is doing well, especially considering our cold, gloomy June. The monster plants on the right are tomatoes, which are already starting to bear fruit.

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We have many bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds in the garden this year.

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This year we decided to expand the garden that used to be a swimming pool. We broke up the decking that used to surround the pool.

We had to tear out the old drip system, and I’m redoing it now. We had to undo some of the plantings as well, since the paths and beds are no longer quite the same. Because the pool is about 70 percent bigger, we added a central bed. We edged the beds with bricks and made the central bed an oval shape. It amuses me to think of the result as a tiny Getty Center garden.

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