Nature Friday – Spring Flowers

Hi everyone! It’s Millie & Walter here. Spring is a beautiful time in our yard so we wanted to show you a few of the things that are blooming.

Columbine – Aquilegia

Miss Kim Lilac

North east corner – Deutzia, Azalea, Rhododendron

Deutzia

Red Azalea

Pink Rhododendron

Double File Viburnum

Deciduous Azalea

We hope you enjoyed this stroll through our yard.

Join the Nature Friday Blog Hop

Today we are joining our friends Arty, Jakey and Rosy for their Nature Friday Blog Hop. You should pop over to their blog to see all the other posts.

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Flower Friday – See Beautiful

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Dory for Flower Friday.

Last week I showed you all the daylilies we had in bloom so this week I will show you what else is blooming. (Don’t forget you can always click on an image to see a bigger view)

First up is a look at a portion of the north side of the yard.

North planting with ragusa rose and hydrangea in bloom

Now let’s zoom in on the flowers in the above picture. First up is the ragusa rose that is putting on a great show for its second bloom of the summer.

Ragusa roses

The hydrangea are just buzzing with every kind of bee and butterfly you can think of.

Hydrangea flowers with a little pink

Next up is a favorite of our hummingbirds.

Red crocosmia

Yellow Crocosmia

The roseanne geranium are just starting to bloom.

Roseanne geranium

Here are some of the other flowers in the perennial garden.

Purple clematis flowers

Pink cone flowers

Joe-pye weed

I’m also joining Sugar’s {This Moment} See Beautiful blog hop.

I hope you enjoyed checking out what’s in bloom in the garden. Next week we will check out some of the critters that use the flowers.

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Flower Friday – Daylilies

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Dory for Flower Friday.

It’s been a long time since I did a Flower Friday post this year but it’s not for lack of flowers. So here are my excuses…the month of June was the wettest on record for our area so it was difficult to find a nice day to take pictures and the flowers faded fast because of the rain…then because of all the rain we were swarmed by mosquitoes in July! I don’t know about you but I don’t like walking around my yard when mosquitoes are buzzing in my ears and trying to fly up my nose, even though they never bite me. The past month has been dryer so the skeeter population has dropped to a tolerable level making it easier to spend time in the yard.

Enough with the excuses. Today I’m going to show you some of the daylilies we have in our yard. (Don’t forget you can always click on an image to see a bigger view)

I hope you enjoyed checking out our daylilies. Next week we will check out the other flowers in the yard.

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Flower Friday – Some New Additions

Hi everyone! Today we are joining Dory for Flower Friday.

Let’s start with some wide views of the yard. Then we will zoom in an get some close up views of the flowers.

Here is a quick video panning around the yard from the patio. A lot has changed since the last video like this I posted a month ago.

If you can’t see the video you can go here to view it.

Now let’s take a closer look. (Don’t forget you can always click on an image to see a bigger view)

North West Corner of Yard

In this corner of the yard we have a nice variety of green and red foliage. On the right are some viburnum blooming and in the middle is our Miss Kim Lilac.

Miss Kim Lilac

It’s too bad someone hasn’t invented smell-o-vision yet because the scent from the lilacs is divine.

The perennial garden is looking great!

Most of the plants in the perennial garden survived our harsh winter. Charlie has moved a few things around and added a couple of plants too.

Amsonia ‘Blue Ice’ (Common name: Blue Star)

This Amsonia is one of the new additions in the perennial garden. I love the delicate blue flowers.

North East Corner

The North East corner of the yard shows off the variety of foliage colors in our yard. Let’s move in a little close to see what is in bloom.

Azalea, Rhododendron, Viburnum, Roses and Weigela in bloom.
(from left to right)

I’ve shown you pictures of some of these flowers so lets zoom in on some we haven’t see yet this year.

Pink Rhododendron

One of the new additions in this area are a couple of Yellow Knock Out Roses.

Yellow Knock Out Rose

The roses start out the dark yellow and then fade to a pale yellow as seen above on the left. The weigela flowers are similar in that they start out as a darker pink and then fade to almost white with pink centers.

Variegated Weigela Flowers

To finish today’s tour around the yard we have a Japanese Maple surrounded by two different viburnum.

Japanese Maple with Viburnum on either side

Well I hope you enjoyed this walk around our garden today.

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Foliage Friday

As the flowers of summer begin to fade I thought I would take you all on a walk around the garden to look at the wide variety of foliage we have. I’m not talking about the colors of autumn but rather the use of colored foliage (other than green) within your garden to create interest.

North side of yard

Here is a look at the north side of our yard. Every few shrubs is one with red foliage. From left to right you will see the red foliage of the ninebark, columnar barberry, smoke bush, standard barberry and on the far right is a columnar red birch.

Closer view showing columnar barberry, smoke bush and barberry

In the closer view (and below) you can also see the smaller shrubs. A yellow variegated foliage dwarf weigela and the red foliage weigela.

Dwarf red weigela and dwarf yellow variegated weigela
Spilled Wine® Weigela florida ‘Bokraspiwi’ and My Monet® Sunset Weigela florida ‘Sunset’

As you can see the foliage can be red or yellow.

Japanese maple surrounded by yellow barberry

This is one of my favorite parts of our garden. I just love the contrast of the red leaves of the maple and yellow barberry. It also helps to draw your eye to the weeping structure of the Alaska Cedar evergreen (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis ‘Pendula’) behind them.

Another red barberry adding a pop of color

Moving around the yard we see more pops of the red foliage.

Dwarf variegated weigela
My Monet® Weigela florida

The variegated foliage of this dwarf weigela has it all from red to green to white.

Japanese maple with yellow rug juniper and yellow barberry

This corner of the yard shows that some of the shrubs can be ground hugging too. The weep of the Japanese maple coming down to the yellow juniper (Juniperus horizontalis “Mother Lode”) is a wonderful contrast.

Dwarf variegated weigela with red heuchera

Not all the contrasting foliage is found in the shrub border. We also have some in the perennial garden. Here a My Monet® weigela is contrasted against the red foliage of a heuchera.

I hope you enjoyed this tour of our garden to see the variety of foliage we have used to enhance the look. Maybe on another post I can show you some of the different textures we have in our garden?

As always we have to thank Charlie for his excellent care of our gardens.

Even though this was mostly a foliage post we are joining Dory for Flower Friday.

On another note I want to apologize for being absent from the blog for a while. As the membership secretary for a large (350 members) quilting club I have had a lot of work to do to prepare for our upcoming first meeting of the year. I’ve also been working on a few crafty projects and all of it has kept me away from blogging. We have been keeping up with reading all of your blogs but our commenting may not be as much as we usually do. Thanks for your understanding. We hope to get back to blogging more soon.

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Flower Friday – Variety

Last week was all about day lilies. Today is all about everything else that is in bloom right now.

First up a look at our beautiful containers.

Containers on our patio wall

I purchased these as hanging pots and we transferred them to larger containers. There are just three types of flowers and the container that gets the most sun has grown to over 3 feet across. It hangs down so far that you can’t see the pot under it any more.

South East view of perennial garden

In addition to the day lilies (many of which are still blooming) there are many other flowers in bloom.

Pink cone flower

Black eyed Susan

Close up of Black eyed Susan

Here is a lovely trio of flowers.

White gayfeather, Joe Pye Weed, and Loosestrife
(Front to Back)

There are also some visitors enjoying our flowers.

Eastern tiger swallowtail feasting on loosetrife

Around the patio are some more flowering shrubs and perennials.

Yellow Potentilla

Crocosmia

Crocosmia are one of my favorite flowers. Our hummingbirds enjoy them a lot too but so far I haven’t  been able to catch any pictures of them on it.

Crocosmia close up

As always we have to thank Charlie for his excellent care of our gardens.

We are joining Dory with this Flower Friday post.

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Flower Friday – Day Lily Edition

Hi everyone it’s Cindy here. This weeks edition of Flower Friday is all about day lilies. We have a wide variety of day lilies all around our yard. So sit back and enjoy the show.

As always we have to thank Charlie for his excellent care of our gardens.

We are joining Dory with this Flower Friday post.

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