We briefly interrupt our retrospective of summer to view a things blooming now, October 12th...
....with delight I discovered these rain lilies in bloom behind a daylily....
.....I thought maybe they'd been washed away in some of the erosion issues I battle...or that nasty varmint that is tunneling everywhere and lifting virtually every bulb out of the ground had displaced them. No sign of any other color...
Sometimes there is just nothing like a red rose. Such color!
Too bad there's no fragrance...but, since I placed it where it would be hard to smell it anyway...no matter.
Yes, I know...mums...
... I happen to really like this color of mums....they've been here for quite a while.... usually blooming in July or whenever....this year, for grins, I actually did that pinching back stuff in July (a few blooms got by me...)...I have to say....it seems to work because here they are blooming in October. They've also spread themselves around quite a bit. There are some on the other side of this bed, too...I clearly didn't pinch them back quite as well...
Let's see...there are roses blooming now also...not quite as exuberantly as in spring, but we take what we can get. There are four o'clocks (grrrr) blooming that I cannot seem to get rid of. I swear they make seed faster than just about anything and they have perfected that thing where if you try to yank them out of the ground, they just break off leaving roots growing to China or somewhere.
The marigolds are still going in spots around where the tomatoes used to be. I've been changing my mind about sedums, so some of them are blooming. Garlic chives are not blooming as I de-headed them to keep them just where they are (and not everywhere else). Japanese anemones are blooming. If I were planting them now, the Japanese anemones, I would plant them much like how I saw some verbena bonariensis blooming in a tour garden in Georgia (one day I will actually get to those pictures...)...meaning surround them with other plantings to keep them in place (especially good for the verbena bonariensis which takes itself everywhere...and is blooming now, too, by the way). The verbena bonariensis was stunning (not something you'd usually say about it)....I think the Japanese anemones would benefit from the support and not flop themselves around....which some of mine do.
Self seeded nicotiana is blooming and smothering things...sigh...still, I kinda like it. Some annual portulaca, random daylilies (a few), some echinacea, hmmm....can't think of anything else right now.
One sorta sad note....I may have to give up on the epimedium collecting....It looks like I've lost all the newer ones...due to combination of things...mostly, too much sun from an aggressive tree pruning (done with good intentions...however, those shady things under it struggled this year...) and the final factor, the tunneling varmint mentioned above. It uprooted the newer stuff...guess the older stuff has longer roots and didn't find themselves heaved out of the ground.
....back to summer...
