Last week was the first light frost of autumn in my Zone 6 garden. While these photos were taken before the frost, most of the blooms actually held up well.
Although I already made mention of this in last month’s Bloom Day post, I really have to thank Nan Ondra of Hayefield for making her seeds available online. This Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia) is seriously my new favorite annual, with dozens of blooms on many branched stems reaching six feet tall and nearly as wide. I hadn’t thought of orange as a color I’d want more of in my borders, but this plant changed my mind bigtime.
I do like the color of the Nasturtiums, above, even against the washed-out late-season color of the Japanese maple they’re supposed to be coordinating with. I’m not sure if the round leaves are doing it for me, though — I may look for some other similarly colored flower with long, grassy leaves for next year.
The Wall Germander I planted along the garage a few years back is really filling in nicely. I’ve been trimming it into a contiguous shrub and cutting off the spent flowers, but that’s all the attention it needs.
David Austin Heritage English Rose. I love this rose. She blooms in flushes all summer and fall, and the color and form of her flowers is just perfection.
I only wish Heritage had more blooms at the moment to fill out this vignette of my front garden. Zinnia Zahara Coral Rose is blooming in front, and everything else is on the autumn path toward dormancy.
The maypop passion flower is showing off its fascinating blooms one last time before a proper frost comes and I pull up all the vines.
Below, the sedums I moved to these buckets years ago are still enjoying being container plants — more so than the coral bells I planted with them, which are barely hanging on and should really be moved into the ground.
My container style has historically been Set It And Forget It, but I’m seriously thinking about being more seasonal with these buckets.
Many of the plantings that were well-established before we moved into this house almost nine years ago happen to have some fantastic fall colors. The variegated Solomon’s Seal, above, is in the front of the house, and the panicle hydrangea, below, is in the back yard.
These roses were also established when we moved in, and both are stalwart, long-season bloomers. Above is a still-unidentified miniature rose that opens pink and matures to white; below is Dortmund, a climber identified by the members of the now-shuttered forums at rosarian Paul Zimmerman‘s website.
One of the bright sides of working from home during the pandemic is that I’m able to pop outside during the day for fifteen minutes of weeding, deadheading, or some other garden task that can be broken into a small chunk. I think that’s helped me not succumb to the typical late-summer gardening slump this year, and my beds and borders aren’t looking as unkempt as they sometimes do in the fall. I’m feeling positive about my plantings as we head into the colder months.
Thanks as always to Carol Michel for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day on the 15th of each month! As Elizabeth Lawrence said, “We can have flowers nearly every month of the year.”