This is becoming a trend: me taking Bloom Day photos on the 15th, then not posting them until later in the month.
I’ve decided (as I mentioned previously) that zinnias are my new favorite annual. They deal well with my benign neglect (i.e. I don’t water anything that’s not my veggie garden) and they give a welcome pop of color from July through September.
I moved these lilies last year in an effort to let one of my borders grass over as much as possible. I knew they were lilies, just from the leaves, but I’d never seen them bloom. I adore this burgundy-rust scheme they’ve got happening, and I see that I managed to miss a few of them in their old home — and those are blooming, too.
There are also a few of these along the front fence, and a few more orange-peachy ones now blooming in different spots on the front fence. I marked the ones that are in unfortunate places (or maybe not so unfortunate, since the deer can’t get to them) and will dig them up and concentrate them someplace more appropriate after they’re done blooming.
Gooseneck loosestrife is kind of a thug, but I love it, anyway. It wants to spread like mad crazy, and I have to keep it in check every year. Even so, it doesn’t care about polar vortexes (vortices?) or wet springs or hot summers, and it always puts forth dozens of these cascading blooms. I won’t be transplanting it to any other borders anytime soon, but I do like it where it is.
This is the hostas’ time to shine! And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
Dortmund deserves better than I’m giving him right now, and even so, he’s blooming like a fiend. He’s currently well-established in the one border I’m trying to eliminate and allow to grass over, and I haven’t weeded very well or mulched at all, so I’m pleasantly surprised that he’s chock-full of blooms.
I think I’ll move him to the back fence this fall. There’s some chicken wire on the split-rail fence to keep the neighbor’s dogs in her yard, and I’ll bet he’d love to climb all over that.
Rose of Sharon… I have several, and they love to reseed, so I have more than I want, honestly. I just can’t bring myself to kill a perfectly good shrub, and I don’t have many places to put them. I may see if our friends with the five-acre lot would like some.
A few plants are missing from this July’s Bloom Day post, for one reason or another.
The mophead hydrangeas have been a bit slow to bloom, and weren’t ready for Prime Time on the 15th, but they are today.
Even the panicle hydrangea isn’t quite ready to bloom, and she’s been pretty consistent year after year.
The blazing star in the front garden is a little late to bloom, too, but it’s close (and close to needing divided this Fall).
The yarrow I moved to the front garden is conspicuously missing, and I suspect the crabapple tree has shaded it out this summer, which makes me sad.
I’m not sure if the chipmunks destroyed its roots, or if the wet spring rotted it somehow, but the butterfly bush that used to bring all the swallowtails and hummingbirds to my kitchen window died. I’m as distraught about that as I am about the lawn guys nuking my poppies several years ago — maybe even more so, since I don’t know what happened to the butterfly bush, and can’t blame it on anything or anybody. The loss of that bush really changes the profile of the “Early Spring Border” as it looks in summer.
The milkweed blooms are droopy and not exactly worthy of a photo op right now, but holy mare did they spread. I pulled several from the front garden — and rescued a caterpillar from one leaf I was about to pitch in the garbage. “Fred” is now pupating in a clear food container in my kitchen, after a few weeks of dining indoors on fresh milkweed leaves.
But that’s another story.