Midsummer can slip past you before you know it. So it helps to have a camera to capture some of the garden flowers before they go by. I’ll confess that my gardening skills are modest, with some things succeeding admirably but others sinking out of sight like the Titanic. The garden phlox is coming but is still in bud. Ground phlox has come and gone but put on a nice show. For some reason I forgot to take pictures so will have to wait until next year.
Echinacea does well. I have two types, a medium pink shade and a second which is much paler. The medium pink is in full bloom while the light pink (which is in a more shady spot) is still in the bud stage.
The patch of daylilies beside the foundation put on a decent performance but the plants really need to be thinned out. The trick will be to find a spot to plant them, most likely along the bank in front of my home.
I have several different beebalms.
The red variety seems eager to escape the garden for some reason. This one is sited in a weedy spot; several others insist the front lawn is the place to be. I mow around them, as I want to dig them up later on and place them back in the garden.
There’s also a lemon-scented beebalm, which is a delicate lavender color, though to be honest, I cannot detect any lemon scent from the leaves. The bees find the blossoms very attractive so that compensates for any lack of scent.
Potted plants are doing well. A mix of petunias as well as a colorful geranium bring a nice splash of flowers.
Here’s another pot of petunias. The black-eyed Susans are in the foreground rather than the pots.
Here are some purple bee-balms (similar to the red) which are behaving themselves by staying in the garden where they belong. If you look carefully, there is a bumblebee on the second blossom from the left.
There’s still all of August to go, so stayed tuned. Be well, all.
Here in northern New Hampshire, spring was late coming and grudging as it spread across the landscape. Rain was a big feature with April and May. It was cloudy most of the time with the sun making occasional appearances teasing us into thinking finally some decent weather, then disappearing behind clouds which pelted us with raw chilly rain. Over the past decade or two, weather was often abnormally warm and dry, enough so it seemed like the new normal. Hard to say if this spring will be the next ‘normal’. We’ll just have to wait and see.
One benefit of the heavy rains is a very lush growth of greenery. There are the usual wildflowers such as bunchberry, forget-me-nots, star-flowers and so forth. But garden flowers come popping up one at a time as well: snow-drops, crocuses, daffodils, iris and lily-of-the-valley.
Many years ago I bought a small seed packet containing a handful of seed from a variety called Russian Comfrey. I don’t know which cultivar it was but it has since prospered. It has never been necessary to fertilize it as this plant can put down roots as deep as six or more feet and suck up its own nutrients.
It can be used as a cover plant and will (at least for me) grow to Brobdingnagian proportions providing plenty of greenery to add to the compost pile. The ones pictured above are over five feet tall. Bumblebees love the tiny flowers and will squeeze themselves into one to get at the nectar, buzzing cheerfully all the while. Comfrey will reseed itself though it has not really been invasive. Some studies seem to suggest the leaves may contain carcinogenic compounds but if they do, the deer and woodchucks obviously don’t read the literature as they happily chow down on the leaves. One time I watched a woodchuck nip off an enormous leaf bigger than a dinner plate and placidly sit down to eat it all at one sitting.
Rhubarb also is doing well this year. The above plant is the last survivor of a small patch managed by my late father who had it tucked in a shady corner of the garden. It never grew that big for him but he would gather the leaf stalks to cook up and eat. I found the smell of cooking rhubarb revolting and would rapidly flee the vicinity of the kitchen. After he passed away, the patch went neglected, dwindling until only one scrawny plant was left. Finally taking pity on it, I moved it to a more sunny part of the old garden. This clearly did the trick and now it is growing more than triple the size it did for my father. This year it produced a flower stalk. The stalk towers over me and had a huge cluster of seeds on it. I have no idea if the seeds are fertile but will plant them to see what happens.
Sometimes when I have left over flower
seeds and no room to put them, I will toss what is left on the bank
out in front of the house. If they grow, fine; if not also fine.
Apparently some of the seed I tossed was Sweet William and I was
pleasantly surprised to see some dark pink blossoms peeking through
the weeds on the bank the other day.
Swallow-tail butterflies, bumblebees,
and even a few honey bees have been making their appearance visiting
the different flowers. Mindful of the recent reports of drops in the
number of insects, particularly pollinating ones, I avoid the use of
insecticides except for naturally derived ones such as neem oil for
spot use use on lily beetles. Interestingly enough I have not seen
any Japanese beetles for a number of years especially after using a
beneficial nematode in the front lawn to chow down on beetle larvae.
It must have effective as the beetles disappeared in subsequent
years. I don’t use the beetle traps hawked in various gardening
catalogs as these are really beetle magnets and will draw in every
beetle in the neighborhood. Your neighbors may like this but not you.
Since summer has only just gotten underway, it will be interesting to see what else pops up.
