Glad it is Friday. It’s been a bumpy week.

My delphiniums are blooming better.

We had huge windy storms roll through the other day and this stem was broken off, so it actually is in a vase inside right now.  I am definitely getting some of these for Radiance Manor.

The tippy pots:

It’s interesting how these wave petunias want to reach upwards instead of drape down.

My liatris is just starting to open up.  I love these plants. They seem to love this spot, too. I think I have had these for at least 5 years now.

Coneflowers are a poppin’ now as well!  The hot papaya is still stunted with no buds on it, but the razzmatazz is going strong:

My newest one I planted last year.  This is Tiki Torch:

Orange!

Classic White Swan:

The Milkshake:

Some of the asiatic lilies are open now.  This is a hardy Orienpet – Anastasia:

These smell absolutely heavenly!

The Astilbe Glow just keeps getting prettier and prettier, too.

I am probably going to go astilbe crazy at the new house, too!  That’s about it for now in the garden.

I was asked if Pixie is enjoying the new settee.

That would be a yes 😀

It’s a busy weekend around here.  I have a lot of work to do (ugh), my BIL is having a 50th birthday party, and have to fit some riding in there!  See you on the flip side of the weekend!

Happy Independence Day!

The storms yesterday hit the garden pretty hard.  Lots of plants knocked over and broken.  You can see the butterfly weed laying on the ground by my cone flower. This coneflower is the hot papaya and look at how small it is? The ones next to it are normal size and this one is all stunted. I am not sure why.

Close up of said butterfly weed (Asclepias)

Just to show how my garden isn’t perfect, I have had a huge problem with red lily beetles this year.

Since I am trying to attract butterflies and bees, I don’t spray insecticide. Organic or not – they don’t discriminate on which bugs die. So, I don’t spray. I pick them off and squish them when I see them, but they do damage.  Those lilies are ready to pop open, too. Yay!

My oldest coneflower friend – the razzmatazz. Again, this is one of the plants I brought with me from Illinois 8 years ago.  It’s an oldie and will be coming to our new house.

I also have delphiniums starting to bloom! I struggle with finding plants that like this strip of garden, and decided to try some delphiniums.

( I also desperately need to weed under my bird feeder LOL ). I wasn’t sure the delphinium would bloom this year, so maybe they like this spot.

Lots of tall daylilies in bloom now:

I actually think the shade garden looks better than the front garden this year!

The astilbes are blooming. The white ones have faded, but the Bressingham and Glow are still going. I mistakenly called Glow by the name Flame last week. CRS disease.

Glow:

A little slow in the garden now. It’s resting before all the coneflowers open up. 😀

Settee update – All the padding is in place and now it’s time for the fabric!

I moved the piece inside to work on now that it’s all clean and any cooties it might have had are off of it.  I will be putting on the final fabric while watching the Tour de France this weekend!

Here it is the last Friday of the month! One of my goals this month was to do some other gardening posts and *that* didn’t happen. Where the heck did the month go??

My tippy pot in the front along with some delphiniums that will be blooming soon. Eeeeee!

Firecracker plant.  I really think this plant is so cute!

On a hardscape note, John is redoing some of the sidewalk that he did last year. The first few that he did are not faring well. So, he took those up and is getting ready to pour new ones.

Yay for do overs 😀  More roses:

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These pink flowers are blooming everywhere.  I let these go to seed and they just come up all over the place. For the life of me I cannot recall the name and I am too lazy to go back through my blog and look it up.

My other astilbes are now blooming. I still have the white ones:

This is the Bressingham beauty:

And Flame:

These 2 are still pretty small as they are immature plants. It should be a great show next year for whomever owns this house.

My butterfly bush survived, but is pretty small. This normally will be 5 feet tall during the season, but I just don’t know if it will make it that high.

Tippy:

And one single daylily bloomed yesterday:

I am going to have quite the show of them this week!  Have a super weekend!

It’s Astilbe time around Casa Radiance this week!  The front garden is a little quiet on the big showy flowers now that the irises are done. Lots of rose blooms, though.

The scentimental:

My rose bush I planted last year. It’s filling in nicely.  Note the black sprite centaurea not doing so well next to it. Not sure what is up with that.

Little closer:

My new pink knockout I just planted a few weeks ago:

Happy gaillarda that freely seeded itself along the walk:

Sundrops. These are very short this year. I don’t think they cared much for the winter.

And the Astilbe! Now behind the white are 2 other colors, but they are smaller and not quite blooming yet. They actually will be nice and full next year. The white ones are nice mature astilbe.  This is one of those flowers that I love, but forget how much I love them until they are in bloom.

They love this spot. They get morning sun and evening sun and shade during the day.

So fluffy and pretty!

And now for my latest project.  I got this settee to reupholster. I won the bid at a local shop for $18!  What a steal.

It is going to look very, very different than this. Really different.  Just a tease, but this piece had a surprise in store for me.  😀

It was a rainy last half of the week. Really, the spring has been rainy and while it doesn’t help biking, it sure makes everything green!

Lots and lots of lawn clover 😀

My campanula are blooming. These are hugely tall this year, although you can see how knocked over they got from the rain yesterday.  Here they are standing up:

They have the very faintest blush of purple in them.

The 100-pound rose is in bloom:

And the scentimental rose:

I have forgotten the name of this rose that I planted last year. I need to go look that up.

My container plants are looking good.

I was a little uninspired for my other tippy pots and put in some coleus and allysum :

Hopefully that will fill in nicely.  My geraniums:

Don’t you love that ‘gray’ back porch?  We fell into the trap of buying a gray color that ended up looking way too blue once we painted and now we need to get a different one. We’ll just call that the primer 😀

Last gasp of the Tiger Honey:

I need to get in there and do more weeding. If only I could find a patch of good weather where I wasn’t working or biking LOL!

My orchid is still going with 2 blooms on it.  Yay!

The skies are supposed to be clear and I will be biking this weekend for sure!

First off, thanks for all the birthday wishes yesterday through various outlets!  I had a great day, despite working mostly a full day.  I would have liked to take the day off, but we are planning a mini trip this weekend and so I will take that instead 🙂  

That also meant I couldn’t do a 46 mile ride to celebrate the day, but we did get in 20 miles! 

For dinner, I chose Siam Thai Sushi.  Not for sushi, but the curry and other dishes!  I actually had a beverage with my meal, which is a rarity.  I had a Thai iced coffee:

Cheers!

We split some crab rangoons:

Then I had the Spicy Cashew with scallops:

John had the pineapple fried rice (which we both love).

Then it poured rain all night!  We had family cake the night before – I am one who likes to stretch out the birthdays!

Anyway, enough about *me* – time for my garden!  😀

My last iris has opened up. I have been waiting 3 years for this to bloom after moving it to different places.  This is Tiger Honey.

Such an ususual color, too.

Yay!

My Allium bulgaricum.  Alliums come in all shapes and sizes and this is a cool one.

One of my tippy pot sets with purple wave petunias.

My other centaurea – which is called Black Sprite:

These are fun flowers. I do like the amethyst-in-snow the best, though.

It’s almost time for the roses!

Have a great weekend! We are off for some much needed R&R.

It’s green, green, green around here!  I love it!

These are the lilacs on the neighbor’s bush. The house was vacant for all of last year, so I hacked down the bush because it was so overgrown.  It didn’t bloom much this year, but there were some.

One last tulip to show:

This is an Aleppo fringed tulip.  The only one that came up.

The burning bush. Good thing I bought the dwarf variety, right?

Needs a haircut this weekend.

The rest of the green, green shade garden:

Closer look at the bleeding hearts:

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Nature is just so cool!

Lily of the valley!

Every year I marvel at the awesomeness of this little flower.

Back to the sunny side.

I am pretty excited about my bearded iris this year – I am going to have so many blooms! I have another color that will be coming up as well. I have had the other iris for 3 years, but it hadn’t bloomed and so I moved it last fall and now I have a bloom that is coming!

I did lose a rose bush, though. Surprisingly, it was the knockout rose that is behind these irises. I thought it might make it, but it did not. That was the one plant I thought was tougher than all the rest.  I have to replace it, but I will just get one of those cheap $12 knockouts at Lowe’s.  I don’t want to put in a really nice rose and then want to take it with when we move.

This weekend is working on the tippy pots and the other containers.  Have a good Memorial Weekend!

We had a couple of really warm days this week and the garden just popped right up!  Some plants I thought were lost poked out of the ground and I was thrilled to see that.

More tulips came up the week – the late ones.  These are King’s Blood:

Purple passion:

Maureen and Queen of the Night:

One lone Shirley tulip:

Sadly, a squirrel or something nipped this one right off the day after I took this picture.

Christmas Marvel:

I don’t edit these for color at all. The colors just glow in cloudy weather and really is my favorite weather to take pictures in, either that or early morning.

My bleeding hearts are getting ready to bloom! Likely next week.  Love these plants 😀

If anyone wants tall old-fashioned daylilies, let me know – I have a ton here.

The is the amethyst-in-snow centaura:

These are my containers this year. I went all foliage with a sweet potato vine, sun tolerant coleus and persian shield – which I was so happy to find at the garden center.

This will look cool when it fills out (hopefully).  You can see the dirt that a squirrel dug out of the container.  This is why I can’t have nice things…

A really for real What’s Blooming post!  I can’t tell you how happy I am to see the blooms and the green lawns and the tiny, tiny buds on the trees.  The temps have just gotten to a level where now things are really starting to take off.

Tulips on parade!

I have hyacinths, which look strange this year. This patch of the garden had ice on it for longer than the rest and maybe that stunted them.

I was trying to figure out what looked so funny about the picture to me and I realized the Jim Shore kitty is turned around. That must have happened sometime over the winter underneath the snow.

Pink impression:

Golden parade:

Apricot Dreams. These are the longest lasting of my tulips. These are at least 5 years old.

They have an unsual purple tint underneath the apricot which only shows up on cloudy days:

You can see the butterfly bush in the background there. I thought for sure it was dead. It wakes late, but usually I see signs of life by this time of year. Yesterday I saw the tiniest of buds at the bottom, so maybe all is not lost. It doesn’t look great, but I really don’t want to have to replace that big bush. It’s too big a part of the garden to leave a hole, so I will just hope it grows strong enough.

My shade garden is finally starting to grow. I even cleaned it up!

All 9 Astilbes made it – yay!  I think I only lost a couple plants from this horrid winter, so I count myself lucky.

And on orchid watch:

Squeee!!  This thing is taking forever LOL!  I am so excited to see what color it is.