Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day–the Ides of July

May Dreams Gardens hosts a monthly blogger’s party called–you may have guessed it–Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day

(Oh and btw my keyboard has had a little too much spilled tea so the period and comma aren’t working)

I don’t know if one has to be invited to join the party but if so i’ll probably find out when I tag this post

In the meantime here’s a picture-rich text-poor (because of no periods and no commas) tour of my garden today

Starting with the dragonfly (four-spot skimmer–Libellula quadrimaculata) who just loves this one spent flower stalk among the Iris:

Moving right along: (CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO ENLARGE)

This is one of the most difficult colours to accurately capture–it’s a little more magenta–

This small crocosmia is a lovely fountain of orange and green

This Scotch moss–Sagina subulata–is about 1” high the flowers about 1mm

I seldom like the look of hosta flowers and occasionally cut them off–these are pretty however

On the other hand this ‘Elegans’ is less than optimal in every way: doesn’t keep its blue; leaves burn with the least sun despite a lot of moisture and truly ugly flower stalks

But I love the idea of collecting the seeds so I’ll leave it

And now for this year’s selection of my own hybridized daylily keepers (as opposed to the dozens I’ve shovel-pruned):

Enough of daylilies now on to the rest of the garden

None or my hydrangeas do really well; Invicibelle Spirit has beautiful blooms but the canes are very floppy

A Hydrangea expert from Heritage Hydrangeas spoke at my garden club this week and described how he stakes his Annabelle Hydrangea (same species and series as ‘Invincibelle Spiri’t and ‘Incredibelle’)

I guess it’s not just my plant care at issue here

I may move it into more sun in the fall

And finally

So that’s the garden tour for mid-July–now the 16th because it took me that long to compose it

As I’ve said many times this isn’t a “designed” garden–just one that meets my needs of having as many fun interesting wildlife attracting plants as possible

Having said that I try to incorporate design principles as I go along and as I change things around

Next post will be on plant combinations

Stay tuned