This beautiful Clematis grows in Doug and Brenda's yard. It's just one of the many that are blooming at the moment and many will continue to do so until fall.
I've bought myself one while at BiMart the other day. It's becoming a dangerous store to go to, I always end up with more than I go in for!

Talking about plants, we went to the McMinnville Garden Tour & Faire last weekend.
Due to the nasty weather, windy, rainy and cool, we almost didn't but we really needed to 'get out of the house' for a bit, so we went anyway ..

 

We first strolled for a while through the 'faire', which featured more than 60 garden-themed vendors with lots of plants to buy including some fun garden art.

How about this huge hanging basket?

We than picked up a folder for the location and description of the 4 gardens on the Garden Tour and drove to the first one.
I liked the house almost better than the yard which was described as 'whimsical'.

I'd expected a little more from that but at least the large terraced back yard was lush and green and housed some interesting plants, besides a few gnome and fairy houses .. hence the whimsical, me thinks ..

       

The second garden housed an art studio called the Lily Pond and was a gorgeous cottage garden:

It had a peaceful lily pond in the back garden, complete with some pretty Koi ..

And I was happy to see (well, not really but you know what I mean), that their vegetable garden wasn't doing much better than mine ..

                                            

The third house was in a new neighborhood and the garden was only a year or two old:

They must have planted some rather big plants to begin with because everything looked already well established.

And although I'm not a fan of 'fake' grass, they used it here as a walkway in the shady side yard and it looked really good!
The last garden (and house as well) was my favorite:



Large robust plants like Rhododendrons and azaleas, lots of massive rose-bushes and many of my other favorites like Foxgloves, lavender, daisies and delphiniums.

And the shady, woodsy backyard sloped down all the way to the Yamhill river ..

That's the (brown, muddy) river there in the middle of the picture ..

All gardens showed signs of rain damage, lots of roses and rhodies had brown and mushy blossoms. No small wonder with the weather we've been having, but despite that there were still lots of flowers to be seen:

All in all we had a very nice afternoon, especially since the rain had stopped pretty much as soon as we arrived in town!

We treated ourselves to dinner at Just Pho You, a Vietnamese restaurant we discovered only last week:

 

Pretty good for a simple little place, nice people and lots of very tasty food

Dessert we had at home, where I'd baked these little tarts and filled them with strawberry-rhubarb and blueberry filling made with (last year's) fruit from our own yard!

OK, that'll probably do it for this week I think.
I've got some pics of my own 'yard'/vegetable beds, but they're so pathetic that I don't even want to show them after all the beautiful gardens we just saw ..

O, one more thing, we had our second booster shots:

Other than a little sore injection-side for 2 days we didn't suffer any side-effects, just ike the previous ones, so we're good to go for a while again.
Also, since Sunday last week the US has lifted the need for a negative Covid test for coming into the country. Hurray for getting back to (almost) 'normal'!

Here's one more shot, just for fun. I thought these gnomes on someones pergola were the cutest: