Category Archives: rose

Summer Gardens in Auburn, PART One, Flowers

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So, since I have a little time for a break between the two novels I’ve been working on, I thought I’d do a new post.  This one celebrates the success in the gardens that Yang and I have had this year.  First, I’d like to share with you how lovely the flowers have been.
We had lots of beautiful flowers this year.  Toward the end of April, Yang kept up his tradition of putting in the Impatiens by the end of the driveway.  Boy did those guys thrive all summer long!  If you can believe it, they are still going strong now at the end of September!  We had put in some pansies on the level above them, but now the pansies have passed.  Happily, one of last year’s Mums has returned and I will soon find a companion to plant with it.
The Black-Eyed Susans were especially prolific this year.  They were here when we moved in, and every year they come back. We’ve added some variations to the standard version, so there are some nicely differing versions.  These are one of Yang’s favorites.  He even keeps an old driveway spot clear so they can proliferate there.

We even have our share of roses.  Years ago, my mother-in-law gave me two roses, one yellow and one pale peach.  The yellow one is still going!  sometimes I get two flowers; this year only one, but it is a lovely one.  And it has such lovely associations for us.
 Last year we also rescued some mini-rose -shrubs from our cemetery Memorial Day decorations for family.  This year, the roses came back just lovely and the bushes, though still small are growing much bigger!

 

 

Our Morning Glories are quite a pleasure to see every day when we get up.  I did buy some more seeds this year; however, I always harvest seeds from the orchid and magenta colored ones.  There are so many deep purple ones (default color), I don’t need to save the seeds of those.  I especially love when we get a hybrid, the orchid one with a streak of deep purple or even half and half colors.  Later in the season, we also had white with pink centers and large blue or white with light blue streaks.

I also have flower boxes, which I love to arrange with complimentary colors and shapes of flowers.

 

 

 

 

We also had quite a crop of sunflowers.  These pictures were taken before everyone had attained his full height.  So, some are much bigger now.  They were very gallant, fending off the June bugs that usually devastate them in particular.  It didn’t hurt that I went out every afternoon before dark and sprayed a water and tabasco sauce mixture on them for a month.  I’ll try to post some more recent photos later, though their flowers  are now a bit droopy.  The birds are enjoying the seeds, anyway.
I’m not sure what kind of sunflower this one is.  I’ve seen the rusty colored sunflower as a single stalk and maybe one or two flowers.  I’ve seen the gigantic, multi-headed sunflower before in yellow.  I’ve never seen the shape and color combined like this before.  Well, maybe on The Outer Limits.  Anybody out there who can identify this one?

 

Well, anyway, let’s close with one of my favorites, a delicate wildflower.  The Asiatic Dayflower.  The shape is so delicate and the blue petals with the yellow stamens make a beautiful color combination.

 

 

 

 

Touring the Gardens and Meeting the Animals at Chez Yang

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So, summer is here and all the flora and fauna is out in full force at chez Yang.  We have plenty of avian visitors, as well as furry beasts.  The flowers are coming along nicely – or were until the insects and fungi started to stage their voracious assaults.  Anyway, lets take a tour!
Yang and I were joking that we have about 14 gardens spread around our property.  He set out to improve some of them this year.  We had a triangle of standing flox, dianthus, balloon flowers, and black caps, with a delphinium and two fox gloves returning from last year – all overrun with God knows what.  Yang cleared out what we didn’t want, and we added new delphinium and foxgloves, transplanted some more delphinium, and rounded things out with asters and ageratum.   Above is how the plot looked initially.
Now, the foxglove in the foreground is literally (and I know what the word actually means) taller than I am.  The delphinium from last year has also shot up.  The other foxglove from last year is also doing well, despite a slow start (left of big foxglove).  The black caps are ready for harvest – I’ve already had black cap and walnut scones and black caps with ice cream.  There are more to be plucked.  Sorry, I didn’t take the pictures earlier, so that you could see the flowers in full bloom.  Here’s a close up of the tip of the tallest foxglove, where the flowers remain.  The bees love this garden!
This is the peony garden on the other side of the house, named for – you guessed it! – pink peonies given us by Rosemary Adams years ago.  You’ll notice that there is chicken wire around this garden. Why?  That gets us to the fauna flourishing this year.   We’ve been sighting innumerable rabbits around our property and that of the neighbors on either side of us.  Apparently, they believe delphiniums are delicious!  Especially, the expensive ones you send away for in the mail.  Grrrr! Anyway, here you see one of the wonder bunnies taking a sun bath alongside a Flicker hunting for her dinner in my neighbor’s yard, right next to my fish pond.  Sociable little devil, isn’t s/he?  Some days, I look out in the backyard and see one of the rabbits, some birds, and a chipmunk or two amicably chomping away on clover and seeds or bouncing about under the bird feeder there.  It’s like living in a Disney movie.
 
Speaking of chipmunks, we’ve got quite a few digging holes and taunting my cats in the yard, especially when the girls are looking out the window.  Natasha is particularly in  Ahab mode, sitting patiently outside a hole or drain spout in the yard, waiting for the munk to make a fatal mistake.  She nabbed one once, but we managed to get it free of her.  Our reward will be more holes, devoured sunflower shoots, and gnawed planks on our porch.  Behold what Natasha calls Nemesis.

With all these evil fur balls waiting to decimate everything we’ve planted, Yang created a larger central vegetable garden, fortified by a wire fence and chicken wire.  We’ve got pumpkins, peppers, eggplants, bachelor buttons and delphinium growing in here – yes, we know we can’t eat the last two.  We even have some volunteer tomatoes growing from last year.  This fence is DEFINITELY necessary.  Several times, I looked out to see a rabit sitting outside the fence and staring in.  Another time, I found a big pile of rabbit scat directly outside the gate (which is tight to the fence and flush to the ground).  I know wascally wabbits when I see them.  I’ll keep an eye out for heavy equipment deliveries from ACME.

The birds are less destructive visitors, and they enjoy the gardens – especially the ones with feeders.  Here is an oriole feasting on orange halves.  I haven’t seen any in a few weeks or even heard any in the woods.  Perhaps they have moved on to their next migratory stop.  The catbird loves our suet feeder, and loves to hang out on various perches around
the gardens.  We caught him in is ablutions.  You can enjoy a commentary from me and Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover.
We also have window boxes filled with lovely color combinations of flowers. Some flowers have passed now, but the pots and window boxes, on the whole, most are still a pleasure to see.

 

 

 

Our roses have done nicely as well.  Years ago, I bought about four sea-rose bushes and now they have spread to create a slope of beautiful scent and sight behind our house.

 

 

 

One of my favorites is a single yellow rose given us by my mother-in-law about twenty years ago.  Every year we get at least one bloom. Lately, it has only been the single bloom.  However, this year, that single bloom was the biggest I’ve ever seen on the bush.  Beautiful, isn’t it?

 

Happy Gardening!

Summer Flowers

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Though some of these summer flowers have passed, like the roses, we still have some beautiful flowers going strong in our yard.  The sea roses bloomed gorgeously and gave us a lovely scent for about a month.  Here you can see the pink ones coming into flower.  Years ago we started with three bushes, then they propagated across the back slope of our yard so they now look lovely, as well as ensuring that Yang has far less space to mow on the slope.  My mother-in-law also gave us a beautiful yellow rose bush that flowers with one bud, once a year.  It’s a lovely, delicate yellow!

 

Nearby, we have a small statue of St. Theresa, the Little Flower.  Before her is a lush flock of Moondrops, gifts from our friend Rosemary Adams many years ago.  She also gave us the Coreopsis in our front yard perennial garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Peonies also did nicely.  They surround a birdbath and are complimented by purple ageratum; pink or light purple asters; pink or white dahlias, and blue, pink, and purple delphiniums.  Friend Ruth Haber gave us another batch of peonies for that garden that are a lovely dark pink with yellow centers.  Let’s hope they bloom next spring!  If you look closely, you can see the birdbath has a base shaped like seahorses!
Near the peony garden is our fishpond.  There’s a mound next to it filled with all kinds of flowers surrounding a fountain in the form of a lady pouring from a jar into the filtering urn of lava rocks.  You can see one side of the mound is planted with orange and yellow flowers.  The other side has pinks and purples.  We used to get a huge crop of cosmos every year for almost twenty years, then this year:  nothing!  I had to go out and buy more plants.  Yang pointed out that the Goldfinches and Chickadees ate up all the seeds last fall!  The little devils!  At least the fish still enjoy the scenery, especially at feeding time!
We have lots of neat statuary accompanying our flowers.  Here a fairy mingling with the impatiens.  I love it when you pull up the driveway around sunset and the orange beams of the sinking sun flare out the red colors of these flowers.  We also have a dragon who loves to consort with the fairy and flowers.  Right now there are even some purple Canterbury Bells that sprang up as volunteers next to the dragon. Foxes, turkeys, deer, and hawks have also come strolling in and out of those woods behind our house.

 

 

Continuing the Asian touch we have with the dragon, we have a Buddha sitting next to and enjoying what we call the square garden.  We have pansies, petunias, ageratum, snapdragons, and even a lovely yellow Columbine in there. Don’t the flowers on the columbine look like dragon heads?  The green bushy thing in the back is a bunch of Bleeding Hearts that volunteered in there.  They’re beautiful in the early spring.
On the back porch, we have two Chinese lions, male (globe under his paw) and female (cub under her paw).  We thought we’d make this one a patriotic Chinese American lion.  I love to mix the pinks, yellows, and blues in the urns to surround the lions.

 

 

 

For these window boxes, I tried to combine flowers of colors that complemented each other and they repaid me by bursting forth in lush blossoms in June and July.  Now that we’ve moved into August, the blossoms are tuckering out and being assailed by evil caterpillars – which I assiduously TRY to pick off, the little stinkers!  However,  the flower boxes are still mighty nice to look at when I get up each morning.  Here they are in full glory.

 

 

So, some of these flowery glories have passed, but now we have more beauties, with the Rose of Sharon trees in full swing and the lilies blooming later than usual, but adding necessary color to the yard.  I’ll have to post more pictures later.