Welcome to the lush green that is the Northeast right now with all the wet weather! Lots of plants are very happy with all the rain.

Some plants got a little battered, like my peonies:

You can see the cage peeking through the plant. The whole thing would have flopped to the ground if I didn’t have the cage in there.

Foxgloves. Candy Mountain

The snapdragons are proliferating like crazy. I’ve said in the past that I buy snapdragons once and then I have them forever because I deadhead them right into the garden. I will toss some seed heads all around, too.

These are all from the plants I bought back in 2015.

I may actually have to thin some out. They are one of my favorite flowers.

This is the Calycanthus bush, Aphrodite:

When you get a baby plant, the saying is the first year they sleep, the second year they creep and the third year they leap. Here was 2015 when this was just a baby plant:

Look how dark all that mulch is, too.  The Caly will grow all summer and I will be pruning it more than I did last year to keep it under control.  The blooms are fragrant and kind of smell like apples.

The roses are all starting to show off now.  I have 2 David Austin roses. One is Othello, which I bought last year. The blooms are very short lived. Here is a bloom open:

Two days later:

They still look pretty, though.

Also Fair Bianca, my white beauty:

I *love* this rose. It has 2 dozen buds on it right now, so you will see a lot more of it.

This is my climbing rose, Zephirine drouhin:

There is another one on the other side and they really aren’t climbing all that much. Maybe this year they will grow more? They are supposed to tolerate some shade, but this spot might have a bit too much maybe.

The Othello lives in the bed we created last year, which is starting to fill in pretty well.

In the back is the other section that has been tough to grow stuff. It’s dry shade with morning sun. I have a baby hydrangea back there and 2 Diervilla, which are native plants that are supposed to tolerate that condition. I just put those in this spring and they haven’t died yet LOL!

The tall white flower is Campanula alba. It has a low mounding habit, but sends up tall flower spikes.

This is one that I brought from our old house and for 2 years it did nothing but sit there and this year went crazy.

In the back bed is the rose that makes me break out in song – Enchanted Evening:

The color is just fabulous on this one.

Here is a long shot of the back bed, which was an overgrown nightmare when we moved in. I’ll have to find pictures of that.

It’s actually beginning to fill in quite nicely. Now it gets even more sun since the fence was taken down. I wish this were closer to the house, but it gives me an excuse to walk out back every day.

Lupines:

It keeps getting more blooms – yay!

I do have some potted plants on the patio and this year I got something different. This is heliotrope:

It’s gorgeous and smells like vanilla.

One last survivor. Remember how I thought my 100-pound rose was dead? Check it out!

It didn’t even send a sprout up until a couple weeks ago. You can see all that woody dead cane at the bottom. I had plans to dig it up and then I hurt my shoulder. That weekend I asked John to dig it up for me. He put the shovel in the ground and started lifting when I noticed a baby sprout on it! So, we pushed it back into the ground and now here it is. Better late than never!