Stolen Pictures

My title does not refer to art heists, like the one at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. It refers instead to the following image, which I have stolen from the wonderful blog "A Long Island Summer in Pictures". It was taken at the sanctuary last year. You can see a lot of other excellent photos at the blog (look for the december 5 2012 post to see more taken at the sanctuary. The blog is written by an excellent artist - you can see a lot more of her work here. The hummer is feeding at Salvia involucrata, and the blues flowers are S. uliginosa.

I post this stolen image (thanks, Judi, and apologies) because I seem not to have seen the sun here for weeks - it has been very wet, as you know, and the few sunny days we mostly spent in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (where we got to visit the private Cushing Island, in Casco Bay).
The next picture is anticlimactic,  but was taken this year at the sanctuary. It shows the female hummer who is occasionally visiting.

Today I went to Homeside Florist (on Route 25 just east of Riverhead) and purchased a couple of nice shrimp plants and a firespike (Odontonema stricta). I have a second firespike that survived the winter inside at our Stony Brook house. Firespike was a great success with the hummers last year. Homeside did have numerous blue porterweeds, Stachytarpheta indica, but this is much less good than the purple and pink porterweeds S. franzii and mutabilis, which I could not find at the Peconic River Herb Farm either.