In advance of Mother’s Day this year, I was unusually busy in the yard.

One of my neighbors had recently planted a Lantana in the area around her mail box, and each morning and each afternoon as my dog Clooney and I would walk past it, I experienced a twinge that could best be described as “Lantana envy.”

I am particularly fond of Lantana.

Each July when my parents and I would make our annual trek to my grandmother’s house so that I could summer in Fresno, we would pull into her driveway — her rose garden on the left and a row of six Lantana on the right.

I like Lantana for two reasons. One, it brings back many fond memories of my grandmother and the time I spent with her, and two, it is an incredibly hardy plant that even a disaster of a gardener such as myself can keep alive.

So before I got serious about working on my crochet projects, I cleared out the area around my mailbox and planted not one:

but two Lantana:

Having gotten my own Lantana planted, I was ready to once again turn my attention to crochet.

I started by adding one row of flowers to the second shawl for a total of 18 rows. Here is how that shawl looked:

and here it is in a photo with the first shawl:

With both shawls well underway, I decided to take a crochet detour and resume work on a pet mat for my neighbor’s dog, Oreo.

I had made substantial progress on one of the two cookies that will comprise the pet mat, but had (as of yesterday) not gotten started on the second cookie. I remedied that, and by sunset today, I had gotten this far:

There is still work to be done. I want to space the increases so that the cookies retain a circular shape and do not simply look like large, hexagons worked in single crochet stitches.. Sometimes I get the increase for any given round right the first time, and sometimes it takes several attempts before I get a satisfactory result,

But as with life, we can’t learn from our mistakes until we make a few of them.

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