Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day July 2008

Wow what to pick for bloom day? There are too many things in bloom. In the veggie garden we have: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, beans, peas, giant red mustard (sadly), summer squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins. In the herb garden the following are blooming: thyme, oregano, feverfew, coriander, dill, parsley, sage, lemon balm, and chamomile.

A few days ago I posted about the mushrooms that had come up. The day after my ghost pipes finally showed up. They missed that page, but seem appropriate here. They aren't technically flowers, but boy they sure look like ghostly white flowers from some fairy's garden.

On to showy flowers as you probably expect from bloom day. I have lilies and several different daylilies. The one on the left is beautiful and I don't remember planting it at all. I think the fairies that planted my ghost pipes, planted these at the same time. It was really weird. I have Stella D'Oro in the front of them. When they bloomed I expected them to be more of the same. My first thought was that my Stella mutated, but of course that isn't it. I don't remember buying more daylilies. I usually just divide the ones I have. The one on the right is my favorite daylily, Hyperion. I love it best because of its scent. Anything with a wonderful scent is worth growing in my book.

I also have three varieties of coreopsis. I remember Moonbeam is the yellow one, but the two pink varieties, I don't remember at all. I really love the one in the photo. I planted it this year and I didn't expect it to be so tall and leggy. I wish I had known that it needed staking before it flopped all over the coreopsis in the front. One of the reasons I love this coreopsis so much, is not because of the beautiful flowers but because it attracts all sorts of bees. Bees love this plant. I've seen two different kinds of metallic green bees on it and all sorts of interesting wasps.

All my hostas are flowering too. Some of their flowers are frankly boring, but some are quite stunning.

Then to my echinachea. I've tried to grow this plant for years, without any luck. I tried to buy plants. I tried to grow them from seed. The plants would never flower and they would die before the year was through. I don't know why they are so hard here. They are supposed to be an easy plant. But I wanted them. They scream old New England farmhouse to me, because of course all the old farmhouses have them in their gardens. A couple of years ago I gave up. I plopped a dwarf iris where the plants were and decided to forget about them. Last year I noticed at the edge of the iris a plant that looked like an echinachea. I wasn't positive. It didn't flower, but I didn't pull it out either. This year I have two plants growing, one on either side of the iris. They are both blooming. Their blooms seem stunted and a little twisted, but there are blooms. Will they eventually be happy? Or are they fighting some terrible disease and that is why I can never grow them here? I've had the same trouble with rudbeckia, but they are finally going to bloom here too.

I certainly have other flowers, but really so much blooms in July the page would take forever to load if I put up photos of them all. I listed my veggie garden flowers already, so I'll just list some more bloomers here: snapdragons, cosmos, marigolds, mallow, balloonflower, ox-eyed daisy, forgetmenot, rose, and dalia.