Zinnia

Well it’s full-blown summer now for Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day and there is no difficulty in finding flowers in bloom.  I shared our wealth of lilies a few days ago so I think it’s only fair to look at some of the other flowers that are strutting their stuff right now.

As is our custom we have a couple of rows of annual flowers just for picking in the garden, including zinnias, marigolds, cosmos, nasturtium, and sunflowers as well as a bunch of gladiolus that carried over from year to year.

Annual Picking bed

The Cosmos and Zinnias are both so easy to grow from direct seeding in the garden and they provide so many pretty colors for arrangements.

Cosmos

The sunflowers provide a similarly long period of bloom and pickable flowers for the inside.

Sunflower ‘Ring of Fire’

Sunflower ‘Infrared mix’

Sunflower ‘Autumn Beauty mix’

Sunflower ‘Valentine’

The sunflowers also have tremendous interest for the birds and bees.  If you let them go to seed they become a magnet for goldfinches and indigo buntings.  And the zinnias and cosmos are frequented by butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds.  The hummingbirds can also be seen hovering near the gladiolus.  Two of my favorite glads are ‘Margaret Rose’ and ‘Jester’ which are mirror reversed colors.

Gladiolus ‘Margaret Rose’ detail

Gladiolus ‘Jester’ detail

The glads can be found all around the house right now.

Glads and sunflower

Other annual flowers that are brightening the garden right now are the Cleome and Celosia.

Cleome

Blue-winged wasp on Celosia

This is the Celosia ‘Flamingo Feather’ and it seems to have a particular appeal for a wide variety of insects.  For some reason it is twice as tall (at least 3 feet) as the nominally same plant that I grew last year.  It has totally outgrown its spot on the edge of the front garden (notice it behind the black-eyed susans).

Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) in the Front bed

Now it would not fair to the garden if I didn’t share some perennials too.  The Joe-Pye weed is getting taller every day.

Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) in bud

Don’t you wonder what they called this beauty before Joe Pye started dispensing it as a medicine?

The crocosmia are starting to fill in behind the lilies.  The biggest patch that we have is ‘Lucifer’ with as brilliant a red as you are going to find.

Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’

I suppose if you wanted to increase your Crocosmia, you could dig these in the fall and spread out the little corms, but even just left alone they seem to be multiplying just fine.  The only difficulty is keeping them upright as they have predilection for flopping.

In the front garden we’ve planted another Crocosmia, ‘Walcroy’, which has a brilliant orange/yellow color.

Crocosmia ‘Walcroy’

Think of the Crocosmia as miniature glads that are very hardy and productive.  I am enjoying them more every year.

Let me finish this posting with a brilliant red daylily.  I don’t know the variety, but I do know that year after year it continues to display the kind of red that most daylilies lust after and don’t achieve.

Red Daylily

I’m sure this came from the kids in Boston, the source of many good things…

I also want to encourage readers to visit May Dreams Gardens to see what other bloggers are growing and to follow Carol’s pilgrimage to Elizabeth Lawrence’s house in North Carolina.  Since in a very real sense that is the source of Garden Blogger’s Bloom Days, it’s worth reading about her quest for the root of it all.