Blooms and blooms and blooms!  I woke up today to a temperature in the upper 50s, can you believe that? In July!  That is not so unusual for later in August, but wow.   It felt so refreshing!

Let’s start with a shot of the whole shebang.  The lawn is neatly mowed and edged here.

 The grass is nice and green. Too bad it is mostly clover and crabgrass LOL, but it looks green, so I don’t care.  John also did a lot of touch-up paint this spring, so thank you John!!

The last of the old-fashioned daylilies this year.

The orientpet is also just about done.

I have a terrible case of red lily beetles this year, although it is not just me.  This area is being hit hard by them.  One of the garden club members said the beetles stripped her lilies to the stems with just a blossom on the top!  Guess I am lucky they just are chewing them.  I don’t spray, so this is the result.

Tiger lily heirloom:

I love these so much.  I feel like you could put one of these on a present as a bow!

Those little black balls on the stem are part of the plant. I don’t know what purpose they serve, but they were there last year and this year and are attached to the plant.

These are quite tall, too>

My butterfly bush has a bloom on it now.  This is very stunted this year, probably 3.5 feet tall instead of the usual 5+.  The bloom is huge, though!  I have never seen one this long.

Maybe some butterflies will come now.  There haven’t been many this year. 🙁

My sweet potato vine took over the pot this year.

It’s only July and I wonder how long that will get LOL!  Gonna strangle the mail carrier.

Surprise black-eyed Susan in the armeria.

Those blue dots are petals that fell from the delphinium, FYI.

Razzmatazz.  This plant is coming with to the new house.  I don’t care if I have to dig it up in the dead of winter LOL!

I just can’t express how happy this garden makes me.  Even when parts of it frustrate me, I love the challenge and I also love how stuff pops up where it feels comfortable.  Like this snapdragon:

I haven’t actually planted snapdragons in years.  They are all volunteers. All I do is deadhead and let the seeds go where they will.  I never know where they are going to pop up.

My first experience with a spike plant has been a success.  This is a traditional pairing, but I have never done it before.

.

Have a great weekend everybody!

What’s blooming? Lots of coneflowers!  😀   I took time last night and got in the garden. With the craziness of work, some things slipped down the list of being able to do and getting out in the garden was one of them, unfortunately.  Last night I needed a good meditational period of weeding.  Join me for a seat?

I finally found the name of this flower – Armeria.  It’s an annual, but reseeds like crazy.  Every year for the last 3 years I have been getting these popping up wherever.

I bought 3 delphiniums and turns out one is a different color. 

Here is where I weeded out about a lawn’s worth of seedlings from my birdseed:

.

The liatris is in full bloom and there were bees on it. Bees!  Definitely much less than in other years, but I was happy to see any bees.

The milkshake coneflower.  I do love this one.

More tiki torch have opened up.

The little yellow bits in the background are sundrops.  They were very short this year for whatever reason.

Shortly will come my oriental lilies that I love so much.

.

Gaillardas.

The old fashioned daylilies are just about done.

The traveling blue water can gets set in different places in the garden 😀

The garden still feels so fresh since we have had a lot of rain.  Please ignore the birdbath of shame. It needs a good scrubbing.

I spent over an hour in the garden last night and it felt great to get it ship shape and try to forget about work.

The weather looks amazing for this weekend. There will be biking and going to the movies!  We are going to see the new Planet of the Apes movie 😀

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:

.

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:

.

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!