Purgatory Blooms

The trick for any gardener is to always have something, lots of somethings, in bloom. I’d say late fall is #1 for trouble in that regard, and August is #2. August? It’s hot. It’s dry. 50% of your perennials are done for 2012. Purgatory. (Of course, maybe the true #1 goal is to create interest without blooms–structure, texture, foliage, sculpture, hardscape, scarecrows, machine gun nests for squirrels.)

Some of my newly favorite plants are going strong right now. Butterfly bush, joe pye weed, culver’s root, and some liatris are the obvious workhorses, but here are some blooms (and some not) that keep on giving. I should have an image of white nodding onion, but I don’t–it’s also doing fantastic.

Wild Senna — Cassia hebecarpa, saying “come hither bumblebee” for a month.

The microscopic blooms of bushclover — Lespideza capitata.

This is an 8′ sunflower. Ladders are good.

Sunflowers are just as interesting before petal time.

I know, invasive thistle thug. But butterflies love it. I deadhead before it seeds.

Why can’t swallowtail caterpillars be blooms?

For three days last week it was 104. Around those days it was 102, 100, etc. Now, it’s 94 and it feels comfortable (keep in mind anything above 75 makes me melt like a Greenland ice cap). No rain in almost 6 weeks–0.33″ the whole month of July–but the garden isn’t complaining as much as the trees and shrubs. Maybe with everything having bloomed 2-6 weeks early this year, the most vulnerable time is over. Insects are slowly returning, having been a bust year for them. Yesterday, I saw both a monarch and a black swallowtail after two months of no butterflies (in spring we had 5 billion). All I know is I’m slowly returning to the garden just in time for the fall school year to pull me away, and the life that makes my garden worth having is also returning–like a long sigh after the first crocus bloomed in March. I hope fall, my favorite season, is a long Spring Part Two: The Butterflies Strike Back.

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