This green beauty has a name, but I just can't remember it. I've always kept pretty good track of my garden plants, mostly because I'm curious and like to read about them--and you can't read about a plant you can't name. I saw it at Beth Chatto's gravel garden in Colchester, UK, about 10 years ago, and liked it so much I made a special effort to find it in a US catalog. (You see, I did know its name, once.)
Name or no name, it's been growing happily ever since, in the gravel garden beside the drive, along with yucca, prickly pear, lantana, and pampas grass. You can see something of the plant's succulent structure in the photo: thick, trailing stems (about 18" long) with stiff, alternate, pointed, gray-green leaves, and these bract-like green flowers growing at the ends of the stems. Easy care, and beautiful. All these details are usually noted down in my garden notebook. But for some reason, I left this plant out, and now I haven't a clue. If you recognize it, write and tell me.
I've set the writing aside this week to get ready for the book tour. I made a couple of changes yesterday--Bill and I reluctantly decided not to go to Malice Domestic, which happens to fall in the middle of the tour and presented several planning challenges. So Malice is out, which means that I have a couple of empty slots in the tour schedule. I've been filling them, doing telephone and email interviews, and finishing up the last of my maps. I'm expecting the copy-edit of Book of Days on Friday, and the page proofs for Cuckoo Brow on Monday. And if I run out of desk-work, there's the garden, and the laundry. Oh, and socks.
Yes, of course. Socks. 
These are KnitPicks Sock Garden geranium, a merino that is a joy to knit. The cuff pattern is a four-stitch baby cable rib, from Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks, and the heel is knitted with a slip stitch. You can probably see in the photo that the rib twists just enough to require blocking. Do please notice, though, that I have actually finished the gusset of the second sock (to clarify: that is Sock Number Two), and am on my way to the second toe. Two socks. A pair. A knitting miracle.
Reading Note, from At Knit's End, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (our very own Yarn Harlot):
I know knitters who feel guilty for sitting and knitting when they should be "working." What, I ask you, about knitting does not qualify as work? It is productive, it is thrifty, it is creating useful items for fellow humans, and it is a thoughtful and enlightening use of the intellect. True, it's not as exciting as doing the laundry, but really, what is?