At night this San Francisco garden dazzles, with the red-leaf maple, in the center, the star. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.
By Stephanie Cavanaugh
I’M WEARING socks.
I’m also wearing a cashmere sweater and yoga pants.
San Francisco is having a heat wave. It’s 60 degrees outside.
We’re here visiting friends, the Prince and I. Next week we’ll be in LA, visiting more friends, and family.
Then we’ll be home again, in DC, relieving Anouk, our beloved neighbor, who volunteered to take care of our garden while we’re away. Oh, poor Anouk.
I read in the Washington Post that there’s a heat advisory for tomorrow, which would be Tuesday, meaning two days ago. STAY INSIDE in front of the air conditioner if you can. If not, you can climb into one of the cooling buses parked in convenient locations around the city. Take a long book. Something by Stephen King should do it.
Our friends Stuart and Joyce, both architects, live atop a hill and around the corner from the guy who writes the Lemony Snicket books. Gavin Newsom used to live a few doors away. Splendid digs.
The entire glass back wall of the house glides away so there’s no division between in and out. There are no screens. They don’t have mosquitos here. No mosquitos. Fancy that.
There’s a deck outside that steps down to the garden. A center square of grass surrounded by plants I have no names for. My handy plant finder tells me that the orange flowers are painted Indian mallow, the scribble of white drifting over the retaining wall is small-leaf spiderwort, the one with luminescent purple flowers is a Tibouchina urvilleana, or princess flower. I recognize the bougainvillea, sigh. Theirs is hot pink. We can’t grow any of these without a greenhouse, just saying.
Stuart says, If we didn’t have an automatic soaker/sprinkler set up this would all be dead.
Why, I say to myself, don’t we have such a thing? An automatic sprinkler, fancy that. If we did, Anouk wouldn’t be moving the sprinkler from front yard to rear, as I hope she’s doing, fidgeting and fidgeting to make sure the water goes to the plants, not the walkways. This is a challenge, as the borders are fairly narrow.
She could, instead, turn on the hose and be done—well, almost, there are still the window boxes and plants on the porches to fusspot about with—but much of the labor would be handled.
How modern!
One automatic thing we do offer is that when the window boxes go dry, the sweet-potato vines will go alarmingly limp, as if saying . . .
Anouk! Feed me NOW.
Oh, poor Anouk.
I need a hot shower: My feet are freezing.
Poor Anouk a thousand times! I can barely summon the energy (in DC) to go on my balcony and water half a dozen plants. As for your trip to SF and LA I’d say I’m as green as the leaves on my plants with envy if they weren’t dying of sunstroke.
Delicious ♥️