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.