Hello sweet friends and Happy Tuesday! For the past two days it has hit 100 degrees and today promises the same. Add breezes, and no rain for a few weeks, and gardening is challenging right now in our Appalachian Foothills!!
“Yours is the day, yours also the night; you have established the heavenly lights and the sun. You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.”
Psalm 74:16-17 (ESV)
Ordinarily, I would invite you to lace up your shoes and take a walk with me in the garden. However, pour yourself a tall glass of iced tea or lemonade and stay inside with the air conditioner!
Zinnias are blooming in three of our different garden spaces! Zinnias are one of our favorites, but unfortunately the Japanese beetles are loving them too! Another challenge!
Their colorful blooms bring a smile as they greet me. Coming next month, I will devote an entire blog post to highlight their beauty!
In the past, I attempted to grow dahlias and had little success. Every year Dahlia Avignon, with its snowy white petals, purplish stripes and speckles, offers a few blooms for my enjoyment! I keep saying to my ‘Head Gardener’ that we should dig it up, but when I see the blooms, I change my mind!
I love the old-fashioned gladioli. This year RM (aka Butch) built a wood structure to give support, as they are over five feet tall. EM’s favorite color is hot pink, making these glads her favorite!
Their blooms open from bottom to top. I love the way they look in the June garden and rarely cut them. I just enjoy their beauty from my kitchen window!
This is a view down the right side of the garden. The concrete bench was moved from the old historic home site a few years ago and is a great place for a potted plant. Beyond the fence is one of our patches of sunflowers that are in full bloom. A sunflower post will be coming soon!
I had to sneak this photo into my post. This beauty is called ‘Desert Sun’ and the ‘Bloodgood’ Japanese maple (seen in the background ) highlights its gorgeous coloring!
Daylilies are one of my favorite garden flowers. They are easy to grow, almost maintenance free, survive drought, and virtually disease and pest free! They can range in color from sunny yellows and blushing pinks to deep purples and electric greens. ‘Endless Beauty’ is a prolific bloomer…
…and is a dark rose color with a lemon ruffled edge and a large green throat. The blooms average 7.5 inches in diameter!
‘Echoes of Mercy’ daylily is a lavender rose with a purple eye above a green throat, with blooms that are five inches in diameter.
‘Bold Awakening’ is always my first daylily to bloom, usually mid-May, It is a cream yellow with purple eye above a green throat. Its blooms measure six and a half inches.
‘Lake Norman Sunset’ was a wonderful surprise gift a few years ago from my Tea on Tuesdays and Monday Morning Blooms friend, Mary @ Home Is Where the Boat Is. It is a lovely shade of pink with white midribs and bright green throat!
We have had a few unusual garden happenings this season. This scene of the back of our garden looks quite different from years past. Notice closely the two small sunshine ligustrums on either side of a smaller limelight hydrangea. Two original large ligustrums were replaced with new plants, and two other originals were removed completely as they were crowding out other plants. The two limelights are also new plantings. Also note the apricot drift roses which were removed, but insisted on returning from left behind roots.
This photo is from last year and you can see the size of the sunshine ligustrums.
Hibiscus Moscheutos, ‘Luna Red’ (hardy hibiscus) is a compact and well branched perennial. It is known for its huge, deep burgundy red flowers, six to eight inches across!
A very strange blooming time for our ‘Autumn Fire Sedum’ has us baffled. I googled and could not find anything on why a sedum would bloom 2 1/2 months early. I sought an answer from several expert gardeners and everyone was puzzled.
The sedum is very pretty with the chaste tree in the background, but this should be happening in September! Maybe some of you have an idea? Maybe the emergence of the cicadas confused everything, HA! Contrary to what some experts claimed, cicadas did cause damage…just another challenge, but they are now gone!
I made a bold statement that I would not plant cosmos again! Guess what, I did! I should say that the ‘Head Gardener’ planted them. When I saw the ‘Double Click Bicolor Pink’, in the seed catalogue, I had a change of heart…
…and ordered seeds for these three inch, fully double and semi-double bicolor flowers in a range of pink to white! I like that these are on a strong stem for cutting!
“The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.”
~Gertrude Jekyll
Thank you for your visit and gracious comments. For those enduring the oppressive heat, stay cool and hydrated. Wishing you a joy-filled day!
Linking with: Pieced Pastimes, Between Naps on the Porch, Katherines Corner, Follow The Yellow Brick Home,
Life and Linda