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No photos today but summer arrived with a bang.

After weeks of temperatures mostly under 20c today it hit 37c. Better than last year which was a record breaking 42c.

What is summer for you - in addition to hot?

Here everything has been in flower quite a while, or many already over their best flowering. Only the lime trees just started this week, a wonderful smell, the best of all!
Late-summer flora or re-flowering of some earlier ones is still to come some time in August of course, with wonderful roadsides if you are so lucky as to find smaller roads on poorish soils.
Swedish Road authority had a project and a competition for most beautiful natural roadsides some years ago.

Alice.. summer came with a big bang here too. All our roses bloomed at once and after two days were in full bloom and now we are waiting (3 weeks later)for them to bloom again...we hope.
The weather is fierce here too..37° today and red alert for tomorrow.. I hate it. I bless the days I don't have to go out.
Liis,
The commune next door has been seeding the roadsides for about 5 yrs now. Its beautiful. We sowed some in the garden but nothing spectacular happened yet. Its a bit sparse so far. (the bees like those flowers that have come up.. blue ? cornflowers,maybe.)

It's 31C in Saint-Petersburg. Unusual for our city. Too bad I can't leave for the country-side, it is very hard to breathe here.

I suppose in the summer I am happiest that I don't live in a city.

The Willamette Valley has a special smell in summer -- I really don't know what it is green - grass, but I love it. When I was away in the summer I missed it. As we have become more urban I don't notice it quite as much as when I was young.

(The valley is a big grass seed producer- golf courses all over the world benefit and still a pretty big mint producer)

By now most of the flowers are past, although my star jasmine is blooming beautifully and it has a wonderful smell. And there is a strange medicinal herb, whose name escapes me, but which is European and which has a very strong medicinal smell on a hot afternoon walk. That is a summer thing.

I guess for me summer is scents and hot dry days. We get about 1/2 centimeter of rain or less, in three summer months. So irrigation is a part of farming here.

Yellow bedstraw, Galium verum, was in full flower today, absurdly twined round a bicycle stand, only asphalt around. There must be some miniature crack for its roots and probably the asphalt protects, and keeps what moisture there might be (Stockholm is HOT - I met a black cat today, and its fur was almost too hot to stroke!)

Macdoum - they have tried wildflower seeding on roadsides here too, but the flowers we love most are usually from dry and poor soil floras. "Normal" roadsides have become far too lush with grass for them to survive. I think it may have to do with the catalytic converters in cars: save us from acidification, true, but turn out various nitrogen compounds instead that sooner or later work as fertilizers.

Alice - that European medicinal herb - do yo think you could find out what it is?

Liis, I knew I would remember the name if I smelled it, but since I did not make it out to the wildlife refuge I had to ask my dad.

The herb is penny-royal and since mint does very well here -- it does pretty well.

Alice I looked it up in Wiki.... and also found it in my book "Secrets and virtues of medicinal plants" (if you want to know more.. ....)

Thanks, Alice!
Not in Sweden, hardly grown even in gardens. It was one of the plants that I was wildly curious about long, long ago when I read English garden literature, there was no Internet trade and far fewer plants were on sale.
What a curious occurrence pattern in America - Pennsylvania and then only on the west coast straight across the continent. Didn't they spill any seeds in between?

I need to find the penny royal picture. I found some growing in the street next to the curb down the block from my parents house.

I can no more capture a squirrel with my camera than I can stand on my head -- but I can occasionally capture a bug or a bee.

This bee is working on the flowers of some kind of herb.




And I have been finding these all over -- they seem to be green crickets.

And then my neighbour told me we have (or they have) possums living in their fire pit, which obviously they don't use. Then he pointed one out to me -- a wee youngster. Then a couple days later one of my knitting students said hey you have a possum on your porch. Of course the little thing ran away. It is so tiny, I think it should be hanging out with its mama, but I have only seen it on its own.



It was scared of me and so it hid under the water spigot amidst the sage.

Alice,a possum..! Is it considered a pest or a friendly garden creature ?

Most Americans hate them! (But I cannot help it I think they are cute and this little one is currently about 100-200 grams, very cute.) They are not very tidy, they eat like little pigs, but I do not see that they do much damage
AND
to some extent I think they occupy the same niche as rats, except they are easy to keep outdoors, so I want possums and no rats. And they seem to eat slugs and grubs in my yard so I think that is helpful and I have never noticed more than a little apple, strawberry or grape damage. And they seem to totally ignore the tomatoes and zucchini.

My parents carted away -- live trapped -- all their possums and now have terrible rat troubles. I live between two busy streets so my possums, squirrels (also disliked by at least some Americans) and raccoons do not fare very well.

Alice I would call that a grasshopper. seen around all ? of europe in the summer in the fields. I used to have to go and capture those for a monkey I knew. and I hate beasties..!

I looked cricket and grasshopper up and I still don't know much. (Crickets are more closely related to cicada than to grasshoppers.) I think of grasshoppers as being less gracile (a word firefox does not accept), but I think that the fact that it has such long antenna really does suggest that it is a cricket. When these land on me, and most are much smaller than this I look at them, when grasshoppers (or the things I think of as grasshoppers) land on me I go ugh, squeak and brush them off quickly!
Yep I am very rational.

I lied about those beastly little possums they are NOT so easy to keep out of the house. They don't run very fast, so they are easy to catch in a paper bag and put back out side but I do not want them in the house.

Eventually they will be too big for a paper bag and then what? They should be too afraid to come in but they are not and the cats pretty much ignore them.

Then you will have to use.. a bucket.

How is Small ?

I dunno possums are pretty big when fully grown. I do have some empty kitty litter buckets, with lids that might work.

Today's possum caught himself -- in an empty cat food bag I had placed in the garage for later use as a garbage bag. He just walked in, so all I had to do was pick up the bag, take the photo and carry him out.



Here is one of yesterday's possums hiding under the chest of drawers and making me expose the dust and cat food scraps for which I blame this little guy -- at least in part. And a spider web



Look, their ears seem to be different enough one should be able to tell them apart if one actually saw them well.

Summer Apples
I made a pie.


This is Ms Small climbing down out of that apple tree about one week ago. She climbed way up in it, higher than I had ever seen her climb, but my camera would not even try to flash and click until she came down closer.



And here she is below the tree on a piece of wood I had pulled out to split.



You can see her eye is not right, but she still has some fun so ;-)