The garden today

A fluffy daisy opening up.

A patch of yellow foxglove.

Butterfly milkweed.  Milkweed is such a cool flower in the details.

This is regular milkweed.

And a shot of one of the shady gardens.

Missing July

I'm going to be missing most of July in my garden, and I find that very difficult.  Mostly I'll be missing all the lilies --my back garden has lots of lilies that bloom, along with bee balm.  It's always very cheerful.  We're going on a rather long vacation this year, something we don't normally do.  We'll also be missing the best pool weather, but at least we can still enjoy the pool in August.  I'm thinking I'll be coming home in late July to a lot of dead-heading.

However, I did plant several new lily bulbs last fall, and two of them have started blooming, so I've been able to see how they look.  I don't remember their names --I'm not very good at keeping names to plants.  But they've turned out very pretty. (That's the tip of my daughter's shoe in the upper right of the first picture --I missed that and couldn't really crop it out.)

New flowers

On Thursday, after picking Emma up from her class, we stopped by a nursery and went nuts.  I wanted to get a few perennials for the other side of the stone steps out front, so we did, plus another heuchera, and a rose.  A fairly big rose.  Luckily Rob was around later to dig the hole for that one.  We got good and dirty planting all of it, and the front is now looking very colorful.  I also did some transplanting --I'd gotten some heuchera that produced tiny green blossoms, so I moved them to one of the shade gardens.  I moved two dianthus and another heuchera with pretty pink flowers (the classic "coral bell") to a more sunny spot, hoping to get more blossoms from them.

In addition to my red Asian lilies, the Kiss-me-Kate lilies have started to open as well.  These are some of my favorite lilies --they just glow the first day they open, then fade a bit after that.

June Bloom Day

Happy June Bloom Day!  I think I should have more blooming, but we had a storm that took out the peonies right after they opened, and now we've had some rather cool days and nights.  Here are some things that are blooming:

This is a far shot of the birch bed,  and the ragged peonies are still showing color in the far back.

In the birch bed I have penstemon and two colors of spiderwort blooming.

 

My first Asian lilies are blooming.  This red lily was given to me by a good friend, and it's very strong.  It might eventually take over the bed.  :-)

In addition to those flowers, I also got my tomatoes caged, and they are blooming too:

 

And finally, that weed vine, that I'm still so curious about.  It's going strong, and you can see that it does vine, much like a pea plant, as a younger stem vines around an older one in this photo:

 

And here is either flowers, or the fruit already started --I'm not sure which.

 

Here's a shot of the growing tip with flowers/fruits:

I'll probably pull the vine pretty soon, just to be on the safe side.  :-)

Help with another weed?

We have a bed of species daylilies against a shed, and each year a very pretty vine grows up at the back of the bed.  It's a perennial weed, with several vines coming up; I usually just pull, and they break off below the level of the lily leaves.  One year I let it grow, thinking it might flower.  I suppose it did flower, but it wasn't anything I noticed --however, really large seed pods formed.  They were kind of green and lumpy, somewhat spherical.  I was worried about it spreading, so I yanked the vines at that point.

It's back again, and I took a couple of pictures of it.  I'm wondering if anyone can tell what it is from these photos?  This first one is closer, showing the shape of the leaves.  The second photo shows a growing tip.  It has quite a thick stem, and those pretty little curly things.  Does it look familiar to anyone?

Help with an Oakleaf Hydrangea, and what is that weed?

It is hot and humid out again today, so I watered the veggies and pots on the west side this morning, while they were still in shade.  Hopefully they'll be able to enjoy the drink before the sun bakes them again this afternoon.

This is a bed of iris and spiderwort that we kept trying to get rid of, but we've given up now.  The spiderwort is a spreading kind, rather than a clumping kind, and it has filled in nicely.  There are orange asian lilies in here too, that bloom later.

The poppy plant has bloomed:  two blooms this year.  It had one last year; maybe next year I'll get three?

I planted this spiderwort last year.  It has a very yellow-green leaf, with a deep blue/purple flower.

This is my last hybrid columbine bloom; the species are still full of blossoms, and the hummingbirds are visiting them pretty regularly.

Emma took this shot, of the daisy in her garden.

Dianthus

Finally, this is the plant that Sissy thought might be Star of Bethlehem.  The flowers look more dandelion-ish than lily-like.  The strange thing is that I've never seen this anywhere else on our property.

I'm also having a problem with the oakleaf hydrangea (below) I planted last year.  It did beautifully through the fall, but this spring was incredibly slow to bud and leaf out.  (Scilla came up around it, and is the yellowing leave in the bed).  Now it has tiny leaves, but it's like it's just stopped growing.  It's in a raised bed, so root rot shouldn't be a problem.  It's not showing any wilting, and I have fertilized it.  I don't know if it's going to make it, and I don't know if there is anything I should do for it.  Any suggestions would be much appreciated!