So many blooms now! Yay!  The other evening I was out taking pictures of the front gardens. I was crouched down in the bed for macro shots and I saw a woman walking a stroller coming up the street. I said Hi as she went by and she just looked away really fast and kept walking  – and maybe a bit faster LOL! Yes, I’m creeping at my own house 😀

Here is a shot of the newest garden bed and its tiny plantings:

I finally got some mulch down. That should help with the weeding.  There are 3 baby hyrdrangeas in this bed and then foxgloves and cardinal flower. This will look really different in a couple years, but all garden beds start somewhere.

Here is the foxglove up close:

I love these flowers so much!

The cardinal flower:

These are only just starting to bloom.  They attract hummingbirds and sphinx moths.

Also up front are the cosmos.   I must have picked up a different kind this year because these are really tall. Much taller than the ones I had last year. This one is next to my tippy pots:

These coneflowers are right next to the above cosmos.

Lots and lots of blooms from my seedling snapdragons.  A lot of them are white and yellow. I don’t think the parent plants were all yellow.

When they freely seed themselves, the baby plants can be really cool colors, like this one:

Very cool.

Around back, the sphinx moths are back on the bee balm. There was a pair of them and they will be around the rest of the summer on the nectar plants that will be coming up.

This shot you can see the moth’s long tongue starting to unfurl:

They are very cute, actually. And not afraid. I was 3 or 4 inches away taking pictures. It’s just super hard to focus since they move around so much!

More foxgloves out back.

I’m finally getting the hang of editing my pictures to look better. I still use the free version of pic monkey, but it does a decent job, I think.

I’m loving the Heuchera still. The plants are bigger this year and the foliage is starting to really look nice.

This is called Spellbound.  I think the purple leaf ones are my favorite, but maybe that’s because they are the biggest right now 😀

This is gooseneck loosestrife (Lysimachia).

These actually were in the back bed when we moved in (where our water feature is now), so I moved these to another spot. I think they can be aggressive, so I will need to keep an eye on them.

I had my telephoto lens on one day hoping for bird pictures, but I decided to take flower pictures anyway. These are in my neighbor’s yard:

The zoom lens can create some interesting backdrops.  Look at how this picture came out:

It almost looks like a watercolor background. It’s a mash of my garden and the neighbors. I don’t know what about the zoom made it do that. Wish I did because I would like to recreate that.