Blooming Things

Here's another roundup of what's blooming in the garden. I like to make these posts because they help me keep track of what blooms when, and what flowers are successful from year to year. Believe it or not I do sometimes wonder, for example, "When does that inula start blooming?"

And the answer is: July, because that's it above, and it's been going for a couple of weeks now. As you can see, the bees and hoverflies love it.

The big canna lily is finally sending out some flowers. It's not as big or vigorous as last year, for some reason -- maybe because the weather's been cool -- but it's holding its own. The small canna still looks tiny and terrible.

The cardoon has had a very successful year -- it's about eight feet tall and has at least six artichoke-like flower heads. The insects are all over them.

Our orange crocosmia is flowering...

...as is our thalictrum, which we just planted last year. We've never seen it bloom before, and were happy to see it survived the winter!

This is a pink geranium that lives in the side flower bed, where I have to periodically clear away all the invasive ivy to keep it and a few other flowers from getting buried. 

And this is a tiny hydrangea that lives in the middle flower bed. Dave keeps threatening to pull this plant out because it's spindly and never looks very healthy, but it still gives us flowers so I make him keep it. I suppose we should try to shape it more.

And finally, the Japanese anemones are blooming -- which we always take as our sign that it's time to go back to school. They appear every August like clockwork. This one looks a bit like "My Favorite Martian" with antennae sticking out of its head.

There are more flowers out there -- the phlox, the beach asters, the lavender, the loosestrife, the agapanthus. I could make another whole post like this! And yet the garden is on the downslope. We have a couple more months of greenery, but pretty much everything that's going to bloom this year has done so by now -- except the sunflowers. They're still growing.

I have not seen the stokesia or the penstemon. I think they are kaput.

By the way, you'll see that I have once again flip-flopped on capitalizing and/or italicizing the Latin names of plants. I'm giving up on that, unless I give the whole Latin name. It's too complicated.