Flowers on an Old Fence

....with one new board .
I liked these bright pink flowers against an old  wooden fence. It reminded me of the one we had in our Berkeley back garden which separated our property from the one next door. It was covered with an ancient ivy vine which consisted mainly of hairy brown stems about 3" in diameter with a fringe of ivy at the top. The people we bought the house from were clearly not gardeners and they had painted the stems green. We took the ivy out and in the process discovered that the old wooden fence was actually the side of the neighbor's garage.

If the houses on our street, many built around the turn of the 20th century, had a garage at all, it was maybe big enough for a Model T Ford. When our neighbors decided to build a proper garage, we asked if they could leave the old wooden fence. It turns out that if one wanted to build a structure on the property line, at least one existing wall had to remain standing, so we got to keep our fence and they got their new garage. They never parked a car in it, the driveway was too narrow, they used it for bike storage.

We planted a lot of different things against that fence, but I think my favorite was an espaliered apple tree. We got it for a bargain because the wrong branch (it was actually the main trunk) was trained to grow sideways, but this suited our needs very well because it kept the size down.

It's amazing what will trigger a long forgotten memory. In this case it was a weathered old fence made of cheap lumber full of knotholes with flowers  of unknown prrovenance growing on it.

Ruta's quilt has been delivered to the quilter. It took some doing to find her house in Windsor since I have never mastered the GPS sat nav in my car and was relying on Siri and a teeny map on my phone. She won't get to it until July, but it has to be delivered to her to establish its place in the queue. She told me she had nine quilts made by one man.

I have now been to the homes of four quilters. Two of them had their long arm machine in the living room (they are very large) and the other two in a repurposed garage. We never had a garage that was usable as anything but a sort of leaky storage shed full of spider webs, so when we moved here we were thrilled to have a garage, and we used it for our cars. Now we are down to one car, and it is something of a battle to keep the empty slot free of accumulated stuff. I have noticed, however, how many people don't use their garages for cars. 

This quilter had her quilting machine in her living room and was clearly losing the battle with stuff.