Thursday, June 10, 2010

It’s All About the Flowers!

This is the worst time of year to weave. How can I stay inside with so many flowers blooming?May diary 2

True, my tapestry diary for May was woven in all the sickly sweet flower colors! June-foxglovesdetail  So I’ve been out photographing my favorites.

I love foxgloves, but would not have them in my garden when my kids were little. They are quite poisonous, unless of course, you have a heart condition that requires digitalis, then perhaps they’d be  good for you?

At our last house, I found them in the garden and observed that there were some with pink flowers and some with white. June-foxglovespink

Since I like the white ones best I began to cut off all the pink blooms each year, so that only the white ones would set seed. (Foxgloves are biennials)

It worked, but you always get a few pink ones that come up anyway. So I have  pink in my driveway garden, and white far away in the front yard next to the stone wall. This year there was only one pink among the white. I cut it down right away, even though it was a very pretty pale pink.June-red-knockout

The roses are all in full bloom, but with all that hot weather we had  2 weeks ago (one day it got up to 99F!) the earliest ones bloomed like crazy all at once, and will go by very soon.

This red knockout is humungous, it has swallowed up the salvia and a bunch of daylilies.

If you have a large space to fill, this is your rose! June-red-knockout-detail

Sadly, no fragrance, but I guess you can’t have everything.

For fragrance, I love “Topaz Jewel,” the yellow Rosa Rugosa.

The flowers are gorgeous too, but talk about thorns! topaz jewel It’s covered in vicious thorns right up to the flowers. No picking these without leather gloves!

The buds are tinged with pink. This rose blooms early and then again in the fall.

When we moved here 5 years ago, the “Foundation” plants on  either side of the front door were overgrown and ugly, so I tore them all out (except for 2 giant, ancient white azaleas, which I radically pruned) and planted new. June-rosarugosa

My two Endless Summer hydrangeas, on either side of the front door are getting so big I can’t get to the faucet anymore. They are about 5 feet tall and wide.

Everything is so well established I guess I won’t have to water them anyway.

I love theJune-endless-2se when the flowers first come out and are just starting to turn blue. A week later, they are almost solid blue and getting nice and round.

These plants bloom on old wood, like other blue hydrangeas, and also on the new wood, so even if you have a brutally cold winter you have flowers. June-pink-knockout

If the buds make it through the winter, as they did this year, then it will live up to its name and bloom endlessly! Did you know that hydrangea means “water loving?” Perfect for our yard, which is very very wet.

Next to the hydrangea is a pink knockout rose, which is also getting a bit too big for its space. I’ll have to prune everything this fall. June-pink-knockout-buds3

I love the simple flowers, like wild beach roses, and the buds are absolutely adorable. In front of this rose are small Stella D’Oro daylilies. When they are all in bloom, it’s blue, pink and yellow. So pretty. The first daylilies just opened up a few days ago.

Despite all these modern, carefully bred and very well-behaved plants, one of my favorites is this wild daisy.

I rescued one of these from the lawn at our old house, and once it was in the garden, it flourished and reseeded. I have as many as I want now, and forever. june-wild-daisies

Another weedy plant that I love is feverfew, with its smaller daisy-like flowers. They pop up everywhere, and I enjoy seeing them bloom between the cracks in the driveway! I don’t mind plants like this as long as they are easy to pull out, which these are.

This weekend I hope to finish planting annuals in the few spaces left in the gardens, and in pots for the back porch. Sadly, I also have to eradicate hundreds of poison ivy plants that pop up every year. If only the neighbors would control the giant seed-producing vines growing up their trees….sigh. Between the poison ivy and the Lyme Disease-bearing deer ticks, I have to put on my hazmat gear every time I work in the yard.

Hopefully I’ll have time to do all this, AND watch the World Cup match between USA and England on Saturday.

6 comments:

K Spoering said...

Your flowers are glorious! On your calendar tapestry, is the top row from a week spent at the Cape? Did you take the tapestry along? I love how much this swatch of it looks like your garden photos!

Jan said...

Yes! I was at the Cape for Memorial Day weekend, Friday through Tuesday. The tapestry diary is on my biggest loom, so it has to stay home, but since I had this 5 day hole to fill, I thought it would be fun to describe where I'd been. This will come in handy with other upcoming trips. I love the tiny me in my tiny red kayak out in Cape Cod Bay.

Anonymous said...

I am a little slow catching up, but it was an absolute pleasure to see all your beautiful flowers! and your "flower colored" tapestry calendar looks very interesting and nice too too!

Jan said...

Thanks, Vera. The gardens I planted 5 years ago have really filled in! I don't have any spaces to fill with annuals anymore. I'm going to have to do a little pruning this fall!

Anonymous said...

Janet I love your work or should I say your enjoyment . I recently lost my partner of 20 years . We have a painting by Janet Austin that we have so much enjoyed. The painting is called Giggles ,by any chance are you the artist? I believe the painting was bought in or around Denver Colorado in 1986. Again we have so enjoyed this peice so much I just wanted to thank the artist personally .For the memories we have had together and that I will continue to have always over this great peice of inspiration . Thank you so much Thomas ( thomasBuckley64@msn.com )

Jan said...

Thomas, so sorry for your loss. Also sorry that I am NOT the artist who painted "Giggles." I don't remember doing any painting with that title or theme, and also, I was on the east coast in the 1980s and not selling any artwork in Colorado or anywhere else.