Do any of you email garden photos to your family? Do they send garden photos back to you? I'd like to share some photos from our garden and some taken by family members in other states.
My part of town had just over one inch of rain Sunday night to Monday morning and the rain lilies have responded. The pink ones are Zephyranthes 'Labuffarosea'
The native white rainlilies are called Cooperia pedunculata by the Wildflower Center - but there seems to be some disagreement on the name. 
Let's just call them Cooper's lilies - here they are with Pink Skullcap/Scutellaria suffrutescens.
A month ago these peonies bloomed at middle sister Josie's house in IL - bet her daylilies are unfolding now
On Thursday, someone in Washington State enjoyed a radish sandwich
While rereading Eric Grissell's A Journal in Thyme I discovered that garden blogging can change how you read a book. This paragraph about making labels for small starts of rock garden plants made little impression on me during previous readings:
"I checked the names in the various books and catalogs at my disposal. One name, in particular, gave me trouble: Paxistima or Pachistima. This is a native American dwarf evergreen that looks like a prostrate boxwood (at least from a few feet away.) I've seen it spelled both ways, but I spelled it yet a third - Paxistema- another nomenclatural hybrid. Fortunately, I caught the mistake after writing only half of the labels."
But when I read it a few days ago the word Pachistima jumped off the page - Kate/Smudges made me recognize the botanical name for Kate's Ratstripper!
Jake's peaches looked great a couple of weeks ago- I sure hope there will be another photo when they're ripe.
This year's heat and drought did something weird to the 'Best of Friends' daylily from Pam/Digging. Last June it looked like this
but last week the solitary bloom looked like a small, pale shadow of the formerly robust friend. I'll do my best to help this Passalong daylily recover and bloom again, but right now am just glad it's still alive. 
In June the rose 'Sheila's Perfume' bloomed with pansies for our son and dear daughter-in-law in lllinois.
Their pansies have faded in the last couple of weeks so they sent another picture when the marigolds and zinnias took the stage. Can you see the lily in bud at right? Although Oriental lilies are sometimes called "expensive annuals", this lily has bloomed for our son and his wife for nearly 10 years. 
Back in Austin this unnamed oriental lily has fewer blooms in this hot, dry year but it looked good on Thursday and was amazingly fragrant in the dappled shade of the back border
The birds planted a tall annual sunflower like this a few years ago. Now each spring we look for seedlings, and if they're growing in a good spot, we let one or two grow tall again. This year's sunflower is at the NE corner of the tomato frame.
Although it looks a little ratty, Philo and I are really glad we let it grow. We've been watching a pair of small birds hang on it - at first we thought they were American Goldfinches but the photos didn't quite seem right. They didn't look like photos of the Lesser Goldfinches either. Instead of a black cap - the male has a black head and back. After viewing many pictures and reading descriptions, we think they are Arkansas Goldfinches, a Western species that wasn't named for the state of Arkansas but because they were found on the Arkansas River in Colorado. Our young GrandDog Penny lives on the left coast with her two avid gardener-owners
Is it any wonder that she's already learned to help out in the garden? 
For the first time in a decade we've managed to grow a few big tomatoes - the kind of four-inch fruit that fills a slice of bread. We've planted many varieties in the last 10 years and kept records but our records can't help us this year. We'd like to find this variety again we bought the plant at Shoal Creek Nursery and the flat wasn't tagged. No one was able to come up with a name... just saying it was "definitely an heirloom variety."
It's wonderful! If anyone out there recognizes it we'd love to know the name of this delicious tomato.
Tomato sandwiches, acrobatic goldfinches and an amazing local firework display have enlivened our three day weekend - I hope yours has been fun, too!The photos used in this post, "Notes from Near and Far", belong to the family of Annie in Austin.
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