Mid-Summer Garden Ho-hums

Hydrangeas in the east garden.

 

My garden was sadly neglected during my absence while I was at the Red House in June. It was very dry and so hot that despite Herb's tender ministrations, the weather and creatures have taken their toll on many plants this summer. The deer ate just about everything in sight: my roses, daylilies, the shrub Clematis, the Calendula seedlings. Even plants they'd not bothered with previously were chomped down, like my Rudbeckias and even the black cotton growing in pots on the front walk!

Hydrangea 'Tiny Tough Stuff' and gladiolus

Fortunately, deer don't eat hydrangeas or they would have gone after these too. This year my hydrangeas have bloomed better than ever before, despite the drought. I've been watering them whenever they showed signs of wilting, but I attribute the blooms to not cutting back the stems in early spring. I learned that both the lace cap and the Macrophylla types bloom on old wood, so I didn't prune them at all this spring. Not having any late frosts also helped, I'm sure. In any case, this is the first year that the lacecap hydrangea has produced more than one or two flowers. The flowers of both of the formerly blue hydrangeas are pink, indicating the soil is still alkaline, despite yearly treatments of soil acidifier. The new hydrangea 'Tiny Tought Stuff' is proving to be very floriferous.

Lacecap hydrangea.

The Asian lilies have finished blooming, and the daylilies' buds were eaten so quickly I didn't get a chance to see many flowers this year. Right now the Little Indians bed has very little in the way of color--a scattering of phlox flowers and towards the back, the white hibiscus and the butterfly bush.

The Little Indians bed.

Hibiscus and butterfly bush in the Little Indians bed.

 

Herb's bed has a little bit of color, and hopefully will have more as we get closer to fall. At the moment only the red Crocosmia 'Lucifer' are accented by the blue Centaureas. The perennial red salvia I planted this spring (on the right) finally produced its first spike of blossoms, and more should follow.

Herb's bed.

The cone flowers in the back bed continue to multiply; they blossomed well this year, although the flowers are now a bit past it. The goldfinches are starting to come around to check out the flower heads--I expect to see them gorging on the seeds in a week or two. I've been looking for some good companion plantings for this bed--I think it needs more variety and texture. 

I put in a plant of a red bee balm and one of a baby's breath, but thus far neither has prospered much (the deer ate back the bee balm). The dry soil here may be one problem, but deer are the biggest one. I must find some truly deer-resistant plants for this spot that is so prone to their depredations. So many of the plants advertised as being deer-resistant are anything but--there's nothing else but to try out some new plants here and see how they perform.

Coneflowers.

The current star of the garden is the bed of zinnias I planted this spring. The zinnias haven't filled out completely yet, but there's a nice variety of colors in the Benary's Giant mix I purchased. The deer don't seem to go for zinnias at all, so they've been spared, while the four o'clocks right next to them have been so badly chewed back I don't know if I'll get any blossoms out of them before the first frost comes this fall..

Benary's Giant zinnias

Pink zinnias

Orange zinnias

I'd forgotten how lovely these zinnias are, how easy and fun to grow. The bright colors of  these flowers are hard to beat!

Dog Days Coming Around Again

Great Blue Lobelia (Lobelia syphillitica)

Great Blue Lobelias

The dog days of August are coming around again, as they do every summer. After July's record high temperatures, they don't seem so awful, thus far.  My Great Blue Lobelias have put forth more flower spikes than ever this year, and they are gorgeous. The crabgrass and weeds are lush, too--I went out yesterday morning to weed around my veggie bed and try to tackle the worst of it in the back yard beds. Two hours later I was drenched in sweat, had one large plastic bag full of weeds, and feeling that I'd barely made a dent. It will take many more sessions to get the weeds under control, in as much as that is at all possible.

Black or Levant cotton (Gossypium herbaceum ' Nigrum')

My three black cotton plants grown from Lili's seeds are producing lots of flowers and bolls. The seeds were collected from the U.S. Botanic Gardens a number of years ago (I've seen this exotic annual selling for amazingly high prices in catalogs), and thanks to my daughter-in-law's green thumb, we've managed to keep this line going.

Black cotton flower bud.

The following spring the collected seeds went in my garden beds, and I shared some with my daughter-in-law. But with soil as poor as mine, only a few blooms and bolls with seeds developed.  Lili had better luck in her garden, and managed to get enough seeds to return the favor last year. The flowers are so lovely! Their beauty is hard to appreciate fully because they tend to hide under the foliage.

Black cotton flower

I've done paintings of both the Great Blue Lobelia and the black cotton--my Great Blue Lobelia painting sold last year, but I still have the watercolor of black cotton that I painted as Artist in Residence at the U.S. Botanic Garden in 2018. The specimen I worked from didn't have any flowers present so I introduced some from my photos taken of the ones I'd grown. Unfortunately, my photos didn't show the exact way the flower stem grows out from the middle of the leaf petiole, so I didn't get this detail quite right. I'm tempted to try another painting to correct my previous misunderstanding.

The back yard from the Badlands.

I took this photo of the back yard from the rearmost bed, the one we call "The Badlands" because the soil there was the worst imaginable. I remember well how little grew here and all along the perimeter of our lot at the edge of the woods. My idea for landscaping this area was to create a transition zone for the huge trees at the edge of the woods with a series of smaller understory trees. These three trees were the first I planted in the back yard: a dogwood, which revealed itself to be a C. kousa (Asian) type only this spring, when it finally produced its first blooms, a redbud (Cercis canadense), and behind that, a Seven Son Flower tree (Heptacodium miconoides) which is a native of China.

Seven Son Flower tree (Heptacodium miconoides)

Flowering clusters of the Seven Son Flower tree

The common name for this small tree comes from the observation that the number of flowers in each cluster is usually seven. I bought this Heptacodium as a sapling on sale for the amazing price of $6--the selling point for me wasn't just the price, but that the tree blossoms in August, at a time when little else in the garden is in bloom, the blossoms are fragrant, and it grows fast.  After planting it I've had time to appreciate its other attractive features--in autumn, after the flowers fade, the sepals turn pink, giving the appearance of a second flowering, and the bark peels in layers of different colors that make a wonderful display in winter.

Basket of begonia.

I didn't find any fuschias for the hanging baskets on the porch this year, so I bought this beautiful red Begonia instead. Calibrachoas in several colors went in the two other baskets, with the addition of some creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia 'Aurea') hanging over the edges. 

Hanging baskets of Calibrachoas on the porch.

The recent rains have brought out some new flowers: Crocosmia 'Lucifer's red flowers make a nice contrast against the fluffy blue Ageratum, with orange marigolds. The yellow Chrysanthemums are already starting to bloom, despite earlier de-budding. I'm curious to see how the 'Autumn Joy' sedum will look in the fall when the pink Muhly grass puts out some of its plumes--the deer have really chewed up the sedums!

Herb's bed.