Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

I started doing a "Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day" post every month last spring, but after the summer and fall, I ran out of blooms to post photos of.  This may happen again this year, but, even if it is only vegetables, I hope to be able to post pics for the whole year - actually I just thought about this, and a lot of winter

vegetables are leafy greens, so maybe I won't be able to.  I'll cross that bridge when I come to it - here are the past months blooms.

I've had trouble with this lantana for the last few years.  It might need more water or more shade.  It's in what I used to refer to as the "desert garden", which gets full sun and drains pretty quickly.  It's doing better this spring, probably due to the fact that we have had so much rain.

You don't always think about certain plants blooming, especially when there are more interesting aspects.  Some carnivorous plant enthusiasts recommend cutting off the stem before it flowers, so it doesn't take energy away from producing more and larger traps, but I don't agree.  These are beautiful, right?

Every year these old garden roses bloom very close
to Mother's Day, early May.  We had a cold spring that just would not warm up.  It finally did and everything started blooming - late - including these roses.

I think I like the blooms of plants that you don't expect to bloom.  Some are just unusual, like these elephant ears.  They got huge last year, and they have recovered well after a mild winter.  I would like to transplant them to a more visible area - right now they are behind the chicken coop - but they are growing through some giant roots, and any attempt to  dig them up would mean their destruction.

This is one of my least favorite plants.  There are probably better varieties of Nandina that have a nicer form, or are sterile, but this one is a pain.  Amongst the switch cane that I was trying to kill by smothering it, was a number of these volunteer plants.  Birds eat the seeds and then sit in a tree and drop them, from one end or the other, and they sprout.  With the help of carpet and chickens I was able to eradicate the bamboo/switch cane, but the nandina would not die, and the chickens won't eat it.

First daylily of the year.  I got this at a plant swap last year, so I didn't know what it would look like until it bloomed.  Apparently its name is "Grape Magic".  I had all my daylilies labeled until recently when I transplanted them to another bed.  So I'm excited to see which is which when they bloom this year.

I love it when I catch a pollen-covered bee in one of my flowers.  They always look like they're in heaven.  In this case, it's one of my many squash flowers.  They're blooming like crazy right now.

This is some Rudbeckia, I think, that I grew from seed last year.  I had a number of these plants, as well as Echinacea, and I didn't know which was which until they all started blooming this year.  I also kept getting bees in the pictures of a lot of the flowers, as you can see.  No problem with pollinators in my yard!

The irises around the pond bloomed a couple of months ago, but this pickerel weed is just starting to bloom.  It has multiple tiny flowers on this plant, and it will bloom continuously for the whole summer.  I want to make a few changes to the back yard, which would mean this pond would go, but I would still have room for marginals, like this plant.

This is one that I used to see on occasion, but now I have one in my yard - Stokes' Aster.  It's beautiful and it's native to the southeastern United States, which even better!

First cactus bloom of the year.  After they are pollinated, prickly pear cactuses will produce fruit that turns a deep red in the winter.  It actually tastes pretty good, if there weren't so many seeds in it.

There are recipes for making jams and sauces and even daiquiri mix with it.  There are to many seeds in these fruit and it can be a little hard to handle because the juice stains very badly.

About the only thing I know about this plant is that it's called hidden ginger.  It produces these blooms on a short stem near the ground, while other leafy stems grow taller.  The main flower is pink, and there are smaller yellow blooms below it.

I've been trying for weeks to get a good picture of my hydrangea - thi is probably the best that it will get for now.  This is in the shade garden, and it didn't do well last year.  A few years ago, I moved it from the back yard (where it was blue) to the front yard (where it is pink).  Very interesting.

I just saw something growing out of the top of this Golden Barrel cactus the other day.  I assumed that it might bloom eventually, but not so soon!  Everything was status quo this morning, but when I left home in the evening it was blooming, and I had no idea it would happen so fast.

Speaking of the pond, this loom popped up recently.  It's a water hyacinth and it's an invasive species, if it ever escaped to another body of water.  But here in my pond it is contained.  There are too many in here right now that you can't even see the water.  They need to be thinned.

Friends dropped off a butterfly bush at my house recently.  I wasn't sure where to plant it, so it's been sitting in the driveway.  In the meantime, it put out its first bloom.  Thanks, guys!

Every day something else blooms, but this is going to have to do it for this month.  I'll get to work on next month's post as soon as this posts.  Enjoy!

Colorful Hydrangeas

I read a "Garden Q&A" item in the New York Times earlier this summer. It was about what affects the colors of hydrangea blooms.  I've always heard about blooms changing colors from red to blue, or the other way a round.  the article referred to the availability of aluminum in the soil.  I thought it was interesting, but not very relevant to me.

Fast forward a few weeks and I started noticing our hydrangea about to bloom again - and the blooms are pink.  It's been a while, but I could have sworn they blue earlier in the year.    We transplanted from the back yard just before it bloomed this spring.  I found the first photo of the hydrangea when it was still in the back yard.  It's definitely blue, but there is a hint of pink in there.

Now look at the plant - the flowers are definitely pink.  I have heard about people changing the pH of the soil, just to change the color of the flowers, but I have never seen it before.  Very interesting!

Shade Garden

I planted a shade garden a few weeks ago. I hope it will be shady enough - the last place I planted one ended up getting full afternoon sun in the summer. That's not a good thing - it burned the heck out of the hydrangea. The new garden is definitely shadier, but it still gets a few hours of sun in the late morning, possible early afternoon. There are still almost six weeks until the longest day of the year - that will be the true test.

Why did I do this? For starters, my old one was a bust and I knew I had to move the hydrangea before it suffered another summer. I was working to create a shady area on the northwest side of the house, but I hadn't gotten very far with that. I think the real push came when I found what amounted to a heaping wheelbarrow full of hardy ferns. I had to do it. I started looking around the yard for other plants that would do well in the shade. I definitely wanted to move the hydrangea and the hosta would look good in there as well. That was all I had in there at first. I got two different types of bromeliads last fall that I never knew what to do with. They're not hardy as far as I know so I potted them and sunk them in the ground and mulched around them. I'll have to pull them out before it freezes, but that's a small price to pay for a little color in the garden. The other plant I have that's going in the shade garden is a root beer plant. We got a few of these from friends last fall. They died back during the winter, but returned again this year. I looked them up recently and they do well in shade, so that's where they're going.

I've been looking into native orchids to put in there but most of what I've found don't seem that interesting. That's disappointing, because I'm really curious about them, but don't think I have the skill or growing enviroment for the exotic orchids. I have future plans for this garden, not including orchids. I plan to get a few different types of ferns to go in there and maybe a perennial or two that likes the shade and has some color. Any suggestions?