Flowers this week
Now begins the second high harvest time for flowers. The first is in spring, May, when the peonies and the fall-planted spring annuals are at peak. But now it’s all zinnias, celosias, gomphrena and late-season perennials. Yet to come are the dahlias and the tall grasses of the meadow.
August felt like a waning time when I was young—it meant summer break was ending, school was beginning. I would be stuck indoors more than I wanted. And, yes, the days are noticeably shorter. We are well past solstice. And this year I’m not going anywhere, no vacation. I dream about Maine, and we are having a spell of very cool weather, a kind of consolation prize (for us here, anyway; our pleasant weather comes from the storms that are making this already difficult season worse for the people of the southeastern coast lands).
I try to keep my head clear with the long, early morning walk by the river, our biggest water here. This is my time for working out ideas and solving problems, saying prayers, allowing myself to feel agonies. In a stand of tall bellflower in the woods I saw a female imperial moth, enormous and yellow, completely still on the small bloom.
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The palette of the garden this time of summer is fruity—shades of melon, peach, apricot. Zinnias are in full rolling boil, and I think my favorites are the ‘Queen Red Lime’ and ‘Queen Lime Orange’ and ‘Oklahoma Ivory’. The lime orange patch is throwing some surprisingly soft tones this season, and one of the ivory plants has a little blush tinge, and I’ve marked it so I can save its seeds and see what they do next year. The cool weather may have affected this, but it’s only one plant. The ‘Limelight’ hydrangea is still loaded, and the blooms are getting soft pink edges. I think I’ll use some in a special project this weekend that calls for pink.
Gomphrena, or globe amaranth, a favorite of mine since I first planted it when I was working as a city gardener in college, is in full bloom. The orange has become my pet variety, and I work a few stems of it into almost everything, but this year I planted Floret’s pale pink, and it has exceeded expectations in its color and the consistency of the color. It really is pale pink, not purple in the slightest.
Rudbeckia triloba is dominating the North Lawrence garden with its 6-foot plants loaded with sprays of dark-centered yellow daisy blooms; it’s a biennial that walks around from year to year, and I think I won’t plant it (or New England asters) at the farm for fear it would get into the meadows and ruin them. Most of the other perennials stay in place. The pink joe pye is just past peak but is sending out side shoots that I can use for small vases and sometimes flower crowns, and the lavender is done blooming and getting lush with foliage that I also love to use in crowns. And the cranberry viburnum foliage is still green and lovely.
Many of the native perennials have finished blooming, but the white wild indigo has fresh green pods; I used some this week. Within a couple of weeks, they’ll be blackened, and I’ll cut them and crush them and scatter the seeds over the meadow. The poke berries are green, and this green with their pink stems makes them a match for the ‘Queen Red Lime’ zinnias.
The gardens are full of winged life—swallowtails of all kinds, red-spotted purples, red admirals and painted ladies, bees and little wasps, wrens, indigo buntings and goldfinches. Any perennials I don’t cut, I let go to seed, and I’ll let the plants stand all winter for the birds that stay. But for the moment, we all continue to gather.