Morning Glori--ous!

The sun was out and the skies were clear blue. It's a little chilly but the morning glories are blooming.

It was so glorious that a bee decided to visit as I took the photograph!

There was other life in the garden today.

A cabbage white.  One spot means it is a male. Females have two spots.

I found a great web site for identifying butterflies by shape and color and size.

First of Fall, Part Two

Here are some photos from yesterday:

Leggy mums, a few vibrant buddleia blooms, a new hydrangea looking more upright among the artemisia, and the Adriondack chair half-hidden.  It is all symbolic of the end of summer--and an unusual one at that? We had a blizzard with record snowfall in the winter, an earthquake in the summer and a hurricane at the end of the growing season.  During the month of September we have had six more inches of rain than normal; we are 20 inches over for the year. I rolled up the soaker hose for the season!

The lavender looks better than it did early this season.  It should bloom in July, not September! I thought it liked dry feet and hot, sunny days, but it is now thriving in the planter in the landscape bed.

The False Indigo or Baptisia australis finally formed its black seed pods.  It is drought and heat tolerant, so it, too, was confused by the excessive water and lack of extreme heat this season.

The Montauk daisies were pinched back too hard and too late by some confused gardener, but the asters are doing fine.  They, too, hard a hard pruning late in the season but recovered.

And the sedum 'Everlasting' by the garage door looks good also.  It was very leggy so I pinched it too. I didn't know if it would recover, but it was going to be very limp with full bloom if I didn't do something.  The plants can be forgiving if other factors play into their success.  As a gardener, you just wonder sometimes what the success factor is...

First of Fall 2011

September was not a good time in the garden. The plants did not do well after the hurricane. Leaves were stripped by the wind. The weather was humid and wet for several weeks. It wasn't officially fall but somehow it looked like fall and felt like August with the humidity and bugs. Suddenly, last week everything perked up. I had planted mums and gerber daisies in the planter boxes on the deck--and they finally looked good.

I took out 15 divisions of daisies, hostas, rudbeckias, and artemesias for the garden club fall sale in late September. They looked good after being in their plastic containers for two weeks under the deck with wet conditions, but the sale was on another rainy, humid Saturday.

Today I put composted manure around all the plants and transplanted a few plants to better locations. I took out a huge pile of dead stems, leaves and spent blossoms. With cultivating the manure into the soil and redistributing the mulch around the beds, the garden shows some energy again. The peony hasn't turned its beautiful copper color. The butterfly bush continues to bloom, although it's still propped up with twine and a metal post after the hurrican uprooted it. The mums are blooming, but I didn't get them snipped again before the end of July and, as a result, they are leggy. The roses are blooming well now in cooler temperatures of the past few days. The daisies have a second bloom, but they're sparse.

Here are some photos from a week ago:

A sun "shadow" breaks the shade in late afternoon.

The 'Walker's Low' Nepeta or Catmint blooms among

the Chrysanthemum 'Golden Helga'.

Up the side landscape bed, the 'Stella De Oro' daylilies are still blooming with the asters (I don't know the name) and the Montauk daisies and the sedum 'Autumn Joy". The Montauk daisies are sparse because I pruned them too late. The sedum recovered from a late pruning and is standing erect and full of bloom. Sometimes the garden recovers from the gardener's mistakes--and sometimes not.

The bees were busy in the asters on the first clear day in weeks with some late afternoon sunshine. I had pruned the asters severely twice during the summer, but they looked all the better for it!