Flowers

At Their Best

73 Comments

My gardens are what I call June and July gardens, when there are a few other colors besides green to liven the yard. The slugs and snails have yet to chew the hostas to ribbons, and everything still looks fresh. In early summer, the gardens are at their best, and I never get tired of looking at them.

It is not easy to take pictures to get the sweep of the beds, but the following pictures will give you some idea of what the gardens look like right now.

Here is the front yard.  As I’m sure you can see, there’s still a lot of green. But look! There is also some yellow.

And if you look a little closer, you can see the purple of Jacob’s ladder, which seems to be thriving. I am particularly fond of yellow next to purple, and I will be planting more Jacob’s ladder next year.

The yellow repeats itself in the backyard. The evening primroses are one of the few flowers that actually thrive in these gardens on the edge of the woods. Wish the evening primroses lasted longer.

Like the evening primroses, summer, beautiful summer, is all too brief.

73 thoughts on “At Their Best”

  4. I agree — summer *is* all too brief! You’ve done a LOT of work to get these gardens in ship-shape. The blue, combined with the yellow, grabs one’s attention right away. Are these flowers annuals, or will they bloom and rebloom each yrst!

  8. Lovely. We have lots of ‘weeds’ at the moment which are all a pretty yellow and the insects love them so we leave them be.
    I can’t believe the solstice has already been and gone. Against all the odds I’m trying to think like a schoolgirl when the six weeks of the Summer holidays stretched ahead full of potential for excitement and leisure time and the start of the new term seemed so far away that it was almost unimaginable.
    *sigh*

  11. How beautiful, Laurie. I’m envious of your shade-giving trees, we could use a few more of those. I hope you get to spend a lot of time in your lovely garden while it is at its peak.
    Happy gardening,
    Tanja

  15. Lovely gardens! I totally agree the evening primroses are way too short lived, but beautiful. Seems like a good year for hostas for you. I don’t get slugs much down “south” here, which is lucky, because I have A Lot of hostas!

    1. Many thanks! You are lucky not to have slugs chew your hostas. Me, not so much, but fortunately the hostas come back fresh and vigorous every year.

  16. Lovely garden flowers – they do make the heart happy, don’t they? Your new JL seems to be quite happy there and I love the contrast with the Sundrops. I feel like I’m grasping at Time to slow down, but if anything, it seems to be speeding up! 😀

  17. I enjoyed looking at all your greenery, we seldom see such deep greens in the garden. I also love your blue pots, they really add to the garden.

  19. With such a lovely backdrop of trees a few pops of colour really lift it. Your garden looks lovely and the yellow really sings out. Finding plants that thrive with so much shade is a real challenge as I know!

    1. Many thanks! Sure is a challenge. I have lost so many plants that had colorful flowers but just didn’t like the shade. A few years ago, I gave in and pretty much just planted hostas in two of the shadiest beds. Best decision I ever made.

    1. Thanks, Derrick. I drool with envy when I see pictures of your glorious garden. But, the a house in the woods means gardens that do well in shade. Finally, I have accepted this. 😉

  21. After so many weeks of anticipation and work, it’s wonderful to see the results. I can be sort-of-impressed by huge public gardens, but smaller, equally beautiful gardens are more my style, and yours is lovely.

    I smiled at your comment about enjoying yellow and purple. When I was a kid, and those plastic easter eggs you could fill showed up, I often took them apart and combined their colors. Yellow and purple was one of my favorites, too.

    1. Thanks so much! I have come to appreciate the charms of a woodland garden, even though my heart years for a cottage garden. We always want what we don’t have.

  32. You might persuade the Jacob’s ladder to self seed – is that what you meant? It looks very happy there among the evening primroses.

    1. I would be delighted if they self-seeded, but my plan is to buy more plants next year. When I went back to the nursery, they were completely out of Jacob’s Ladder, and I don’t think there will be any until next year. Lots of shortages because of the pandemic.

      1. It’s well worth sprinkling seeds around later where you want them. Their leaves are easy to spot so you won’t end up weeding them by mistake. I used to take foxglove spikes after they’d gone to seed and just gently tap them where I wanted them and try to get them in the walls, etc. Probably not a good idea with digitalis as they are toxic but I managed to survive!

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