What I planned for my opening paragraph — the lovely foggy morning on Tuesday — was derailed by my return trip from Aquinnah that afternoon. To say that we had a rainfall of biblical amounts may not be an exaggeration. Hopefully, it didn’t all run off and was of use to garden and woodlands.

A cloudy and/or foggy day really highlights the various whites along roadways and in landscapes. A personal favorite is the kousa dogwood. Unlike the stand dogwood (Cornus Florida), which is a native of North American, the kousa is native to Asia (Korea). Many folks have incorporated them into their plantings and we all are the better for it. By the way, the berry that is produced after flowering is edible. Good to know!

Also happily blooming are the multifloral roses. In my opinion, their beauty is short-lived and after they are a total nuisance. I can’t even imagine trying to removed them without a backhoe.

There is an enormous pink rhododendron at the house on the corner of State and Vineyard Haven-Edgartown Roads. It is easily as big as a house. It reminds me of a giant mountain laurel at my childhood home in Rew, Pa. The mountain laurel, Kalmia Latifola, is the state flower of Pennsylvania. I remember it growing wild on the edges of towns. After my parents’ deaths, the new owners of the house removed it. Such is life!

I finally got beans planted. As well as the regular green bean, I planted several varieties of dried ones — black turtle, Jacob’s cattle and tiger’s eye. There are a bush type. I still have to seed the pole varieties. I’ll throw them in along the fence after the pea harvest. I have really good luck with this type of bean. They can be eaten shelled and still green or dried for winter storage. They look so pretty in glass jars as each variety has distinct markings.

I’ve been using Neptune’s Harvest fish and seaweed liquid fertilizer instead of Bobbex this year. It tends to be unpleasant to rabbits and deer and has the added benefit of being a foliar feed. I dilute it in a sprayer.

I’m amazed by the amount of reseeded camomile in the vegetable beds and paths. Hopefully, I’ll cut some for tea.

In the spring, I bragged that I was writing down seeding dates and when they germinated. As all bragging does, it didn’t last. The last entry was mid-April. I found the book under a bench in the greenhouse. I did enter a little map of some plantings as all the labels were beginning to fade. There used to be a Sharpie pen called Rub-a-Dub. It didn’t come off even in the garden. As with everything I like, it is no longer available.

In May of 1970, as a result Richard Nixon escalating the War in Vietnam, there was a huge protest on the Kent State campus in Ohio. He had given the go-ahead for U.S. troops to enter and begin bombing Cambodia. The anti-war protests had been gaining strength since the LBJ administration. The tide had turned against LBJ, even after his ground breaking part in advancing Civil Rights. The fateful protest at Kent State resulted in the deaths of four students at the hands of the Ohio National Guard.

I was doing my part in Washington getting tear gassed and chased by police on horseback. The war eventually ended (badly), as well as the draft.

Trump federalizing the California National Guard and deploying the U.S. Marines takes the situation in Los Angeles to a whole new level. God have mercy.