My New Sculpture Garden

Work crews have been tearing up our street for the past month, and lookie what they left for us this weekend! Modern art! There it sits, right in the middle of my former wildflower garden. Fortunately, we had just finished killing off the entire garden to prepare it for a new look. Looks like that isn't going to be happening anytime soon!

My curbs are gone, and chunks of clay, cement and stones are strewn throughout the grass. I guess that area will not be mowed for some time.

The major thoroughfare at the end of the block is being widened, and all adjacent streets are being torn up and used as staging areas. They are closing off our street permanently and making us a dead end. I guess we'll get a lovely new Dead End sign for our corner very soon!

These I-beams were on the lawn all last week.

So were these bags of cement and some long tube things.

I hope this means we'll be getting sewers at our end of the block... as you can see, we really need them! We are the lowest spot in the area, and our back yard and garage floods during heavy rains. The ground is almost solid clay. I guess this is what our street may have looked like back in 1873 when the house was built. I have to drive through this to get out of our driveway.

I peeked out the window one evening and saw this guy with a metal detector looking for treasures in the middle of the street. Hope he found something good!

Let's go around back, away from all the construction, to see what's going on in the garden...

The Wonder of Staffa asters are really pretty this time of year.

The bees are all over the mints and the hyssop.

The Butterfly Weed still looks pretty.

And the hydrangeas have faded to their soft, muted tones.

We now have Hummingbird Moths in our yard! I first saw them last year in downtown Chicago's Millennium Park. They are moths that, at first glance, look like hummingbirds because of the way they fly around the flowers, drinking nectar. I switched my camera over to the video mode and got a quick clip of the moth and a swallowtail butterfly on my butterfly bush! It's only a few seconds, but you can view it here:

All this week, I took advantage of the cooler weather by taking some walks around downtown Chicago on my lunch breaks. Here are some of the sights I enjoyed most:

Lurie Garden, Millennium Park, Chicago

Trump Tower and the Wrigley Building: Old & New

View along the Chicago River

Navy Pier

Now this is the kind of sculpture I wouldn't mind on my lawn!

Happy pigeons

One of the many cruise ships on the Chicago River & Lake Michigan

What have you been up to all summer?