These are from Pike Place Market in Seattle, where they are just starting to be available. I love peonies. Their scent transports me. I have some in my garden, and for the first time they are covered in buds, because I finally realized that they like alkaline, not acid, soil. I can’t wait until my own bloom, but here are these until then.

Visit Ruby Tuesday and Color Carnival to see more wonderful photos with a theme (in the blogging world, that’s a meme). And after wandering through tags and categories and archives around here, click on Sara’s Fave Photos above to get back to the latest post.

When I was a kid in New York City, we called them fireplugs. I think that now they are fire hydrants? In any case, I loved the bright colors seen while driving by on a wet, fall day in Portland.

Today is Thursday Challenge, and the theme this week is “Red.” This photo is also a good entry for Color Carnival.

So many dahlias in these last brilliant days of summer. Here’s a pink one for your delectation, just for Pink Saturday.

This is from a neighborhood yard. Such a lovely specimen of a Japanese Maple. I love this photo and hope you don’t mind me counting raindrops as water for Watery Wednesday.

I love roses. I grow them, smell them, photograph them, as much as I can. This one was in a Federal Way garden. The owner said it’s a David Austin rose, and that’s all I know. The big old bush was loaded with them, but this one was perfect.

Visit Pink Saturday for more pink perfection.

It wasn’t much rain, but it was enough to glisten up this exquisite daylily I found on my walk the other day. It has a ruby throat and so can post for Ruby Tuesday, and the water droplets will have to qualify for Watery Wednesday. I apologize for all the flowers I’ve been posting lately, but they are blooming everywhere, so what can I do?

Visit the new site of Think Green Thursday. I know that posts do not have to be green color, but photos of green are some of my faves, so that is what I am submitting.

These are hostas and the leaves are several inches big, actually not in my garden, but I wish they were. Slugs love hostas, but slugs also love beer in a tunafish can even more, and crawl in and drown a happy death. Thus we can have hostas, irises, and other slug attracting plants. The slugs seem to prefer Trader Joe’s very cheap import beers, quite good for people also.

I took this photo at the Steidhardt Garden tour in Mt. Kisco, NY on my visit recently. This incredible place is 55 acres of exquisite plants AND animals, open to the public two days a year. It was drizzly, but hailing from Seattle these days, I’m used to it. This low-growing plant is grown for just how pretty it looks in the rain.

For more photos of water in all its many manifestations, click HERE.