Echinacea purpurea ‘PowWow White’

I did take some more pictures of bees today but they are enough like yesterday’s picture that I won’t bore you with them. We happened to stop at the American Plant Food garden center on River Road today. While Cathy shopped, I took a few pictures, both of bees and of flowers (and sometimes both, obviously). This is a coneflower that, despite it’s specific name, is not purple. At the variety name indicates, it’s white. I do like coneflowers.

Their generic name, Echinacea comes from the Greek word meaning “sea urchin,” from the appearance of the center of the flower. What you might consider to be their petals are actually bracts surrounding the compound flower or inflorescence. The bracts tend to get chewed up a bit by insects so it’s sometimes hard to find particularly photogenic examples. This one, however, is quite nice and I very much like the pure white bracts.

Asclepias tuberosa

It was a rainy day today and I didn’t get out to take pictures. Also, I’m still trying to take things a bit easy. When I got home it was a little dark out but I took a few pictures of the Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed) flowers, which are just starting to open up. We have this orange variety and another that is pure yellow. I think the flowers are pretty cool and perhaps a little alien. I expect to be revisiting these again as they continue to open up. They are also a good place to get bee pictures.

Pink Hydrangea

We had a lovely time and Ralph and Tsai-Hong’s this afternoon, visiting with family, enjoying a beautiful, reasonably cool day, celebrating two family birthdays, and generally just relaxing. Their garden is in a bit of a lull after the amazing flush from the roses. The hydrangeas are just starting to come out and will be nice and pink soon. Right now they only have a touch of color and that’s sort of nice, as well.

Asiatic Lilies

I took a few more pictures of the Asiatic lilies this afternoon. We have them in containers as well as a few spots in our garden. Most of them and all the bright orange ones, came from my dad’s garden. They produce little bulbils or bulblets in the axils of the leaves. These bulbils can be planted and will grow into new plants identical to their parent. Cathy collected these from my dad’s lilies and put them in pots and now we have quite a few. I’m not sure you could have too many of them, they are so bright and cheerful.

Water on Asiatic Lily

Another View of The Lily

I already posted a photo for June 10 but Dorothy didn’t like the one I selected, saying I should post this one instead. I’ve decided to post both, so there. I know I’ve said before that I like water droplets on flowers and plant leaves. Well, that’s what we’ve got here, obviously.

This is a little Asiatic lily that has water droplets on it. Pretty much orange, too. I do like the intense colors.

Update: Apparently I posted the wrong picture.

Dorothy thanked me for posting the picture of the water droplets on the petals of the Asiatic lily but said that wasn’t the picture she liked the most. So, I’ve added the photo that she liked best. I’m ambivalent, sometimes liking one and sometimes the other, so I’ll leave it at that. They are both quite intense, in terms of the orange color. Feel free to like whichever one best.

Heuchera

These are tiny little flowers that you normally don’t look at individually. In general they are seen as a small amount of color above a mound of foliage. If there are a lot of Heuchera (coral bells) planted together then the flowers can create a sort of pink mist above the leaves, which is particularly nice.

I know a neighborhood entrance not too far from here where that’s been done and it’s quite lovely right now. This particular plant is by itself, so there are just a few stems of tiny pink flowers. Still, it’s nice.

This part of our garden has come a long way in not quite seven years. It was entirely filled with pachysandra and there’s still plenty of that, but there are a half dozen nice ferns of different sorts coming up through it, some lily of the valley, a few astilbe and spiderwort, and various other things that add up to significant variety. I think more ferns wouldn’t go amiss, but it’s nice to have a little color besides green, now and then.

Rose ‘New Dawn’

Most of our roses have finished their first big bloom of the year. There will be roses on many of them off and on throughout the summer but never anything to compare with this first flush of flowers. The exception is ‘New Dawn’, which is just coming into full bloom. It’s on the back fence behind a big rugosa (‘Roseraie de l’Hay’) and to the right of the pink flowering multiflora, which is done for the year. It’s also behind my vegetable garden, which only has sorrel and onions in it right now.