If each month were assigned an official color, August’s would be yellow. This is when yellow daisies of all sorts come to dominate, at least in our garden. Some cranky botanists refer to the ubiquitous yellow daisies as DYCs, or Damn Yellow Composites.
My favorite butterfly on my favorite annual flower.
That’s all.
About 10 days ago the Washington Post had an article about a fight over one couple’s right to maintain a meadow on their property, which sits within a subdivision consisting of large homes on very large lots. This is in Loudon County, Virginia, which happens to be the wealthiest county in the nation.
So my friend and coworker Joanna was telling me about how excited she was to be finding Monarch butterfly eggs on what she called a “milkweed vine” in her backyard. That’s great, I told her authoritatively, but if it’s a milkweed it can’t be a vine.
So let’s take a look at the Back Garden in mid-August. Summer is a quiet time in a shade garden, but there are still a few things worth noting.
This has been a pretty good summer, if not a great one, for our flowering containers in the sunny front garden. I feel like we’ve developed a style and a palette of plants we can keep going back to. At the same time, there are always lessons to learn – particularly those taught by stretches of very hot, dry weather.
So we have more wren babies in one of our birdhouses, this time the blue one near the west hedge of the Back Garden. Earlier today Judy was watching and taking pictures as the parents frantically tried to keep the nestlings fed.
“I’m WAITING …”
Aside from the Jolly Yellow Giants, there are a few other goings on in the Front Garden.
Some say that Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum), or any perennial that can top 10 feet in height, is unsuitable for a small suburban garden. I disagree.
There was a lot of buzzing in the garden the other day, buzzing and fluttering. So I decided I would do a little pollinator post. Judy was out of town, though, so these pics are not be up to her usual quality.
gardeninacity 