Mableton

A walk around the MacDonald District of Santa Rosa is not complete without peering through the gates at the MacDonald Mansion, also known as Mableton as it was called by the San Francisco financier who built it in 1876 as a summer residence. It is built in the Stick style but also heavily reminiscent of southern homes built above the ground to withstand flooding and with deep porches and wide eaves to keep them cool. It is one of the largest houses of its style still remaining, and can be found on the National Register of Historic places.

John has been sprucing up our mound garden and having taken out a large spreading plant that was threatening to engulf not only the decorative rocks, the stone frog sitting on one of them, but the entire mound, we decided to go back to King's nursery for some less agressive things to plant in its place. We picked up Dana who has been redoing a lot of pots in her garden. I was chatting with a man who commented on my taking the picture in extras and commented that I seemed to have lost my husband. "Oh good", he replied. Once we had filled the car with flowers, we took Spike for a walk around the MacDonald neighborhood. The interesting thing about this place is that it is still owned by a single family. Every year they have a big Halloween party on the expansive grounds.

While John finished planting on the mounds i cut back a couple of things and cleared our a lot of leaves which becomes something of a zen experience because there are so many of them stuck in plants, and piled up in corners. It's a more or less endless task made worse by our strong wind gusts last week. If I think at the beginning about how much there is to do, I probably would never start, but if I live in the moment the job slowly gets done. Despite all the contortionist positions required by gardening, none of it bothers my knee, but my back is another story....

Today is Mothers' Day in the U.S. and we are, as usual,  going to Dana and Jim's where Jim is cooking dinner