Last year when the Monarchs migrated by my house one day in late September. I had over four bakers dozen of them on my clumps of New asters. The next day they were gone. It was a beautiful sight. I have seen one or two butterflies lately, but my asters aren’t blooming yet this year. I hope they remember to stop by again.
Nasturtiums are another great never fail annual. Plant the seeds directly outside in spring and you’ll have great color all summer. This snap shot of the "Garden" ill-logically shows 2 varieties, you can see one is darker red, the other variety is the orange and yellow. The first year it was an accident that I planted the orange nasturtiums near the purple salvia. I’m not sure exactly what that plant is, the previous owner of my property had planted it. And it bloomed in the spring, I assumed that was it, but if you cut back the dead flower stalks, you get more… and more…. and more….all summer. So the orange and purple were blooming at the same time, and I liked the combination. Now I plant the nasturtiums there every year. And you can see a couple brussel sprouts plants. They didn’t do very well in this location, I don’t think it gets enough sun.
I love the hot, bright colors in all in August and the aura that they emanate with August!. I think pastels are pretty in spring, but when the weather gets hot you need some vibrant color in the garden. The pathwayof this idiotic bulimia of mine,now,has some orange profusion zinnias, which I grew from seed, very easy to do, and some purple wave petunias, also grown from seed. Even though the color is magenta, you have to buy the purple wave. To get purple petunias, you have to buy the blue wave. Then in the background I did buy some yellow celosia plants to fill in a hole, and I bought a “Proven Winner” blue lobelia because I saw on a gardening show that they have perfected the lobelia so it doesn’t die out in the summer. And they were right, this one is still going strong in mid-August. It did stop blooming, so I sheared it off, and about a week and a half later it was blue again. The little black eyed susan flowers are called creeping zinnia, they self seed every year, although you need to transplant about 3 of them together to get a bushy effect.
There's something that I’ve been realizing recently,just recently. I have actually started paying attention to my very own life-garden's leaf size. I had realized something else the last summer-that I had too many plants with fussy leaves. So I tried to add some large leaved plants this spring. I bought a little lily, a taci-taciturn and a wavy-witchrose. All of which are growing and growing big!.
Then, for some reason,when i did inspect the garden a few weeks ago,I found that I hadn’t got a flower and the leaves wern’t as big as I thought they’d be.
It was then that i realized that "Connection of the dots from behind is a logic, and correction of them from ahead is illogic".
