Late Summer Blooms in My Flower Garden
My flower cutting garden continues to produce beautiful blooms during these last few weeks of summer.
Fortunately, there are many flowering plants that blossom this time of year, including rudbeckias, snapdragons and hollyhocks - and my garden, located just behind my main greenhouse, is filled with them. This cutting garden has developed so well over the last couple of seasons. I really enjoy comparing its progress from year to year, and seeing where I need to add more plants to improve the display. There is always something new to see every time I walk through this space - here are some recent photos.
But first, I wanted to share a few images I captured of an early morning fog that covered my Bedford, New York farm - so serene and so beautiful. Enjoy.
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- On this day, I awoke to a dense fog covering the farm. I took these photos just after 6am as the sun was rising.
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- Fog is made up of millions of tiny droplets of water floating in the air. It forms when the surface air is cooler than the air passing above. This happens often when the earth radiates heat at night or in the early morning. Since I live near the Cross River Reservoir, where there is additional moisture, when the air is cooled, and the vapor starts to condense, patches of fog emerge.
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- Fog typically dissipates as the morning progresses. Here, I captured the sun’s rays beating down through the fog – so beautiful.
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- My flower cutting garden continues to delight all who visit. Here is a late summer mix of Queen Anne’s lace, rudbeckia, and verbena.
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- Daucus carota, also known as Queen Anne’s lace or wild carrot, is a flowering plant in the family Apiaceae. It has attractive, fern-like foliage and tall, hairy stems that hold flattened clusters of tiny flowers.
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- Rudbeckias are easy-to-grow perennials featuring golden, daisylike flowers with black or purple centers. This is Rudbeckia triloba – sometimes grown in gardens, but often seen in old fields or along roadsides.
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- Rudbeckia hirta, commonly called black-eyed-Susan, is a North American flowering plant in the sunflower family, native to Eastern and Central North America. It has alternate, mostly basal leaves 10 to 18 centimeters long, covered by coarse hair, with stout branching stems and daisy-like, composite flower heads appearing in late summer and early autumn.
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- Here is a clump of Echinacea purpurea, or purple coneflower – a hardy perennial. It makes a lovely choice for borders, native-grass lawns and gardens.
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- These purple coneflowers are easy to care for, and relatively drought-tolerant. Coneflowers are daisy-like with raised centers. The seeds found in the dried flower head also attract songbirds.
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- Gladiolus is a genus of perennial flowering plants in the iris family. It is sometimes called the ‘sword lily’, but is usually called by its generic plural name, gladioli.
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- Ageratum houstonianum, a native of Mexico, is among the most commonly planted ageratum variety. Ageratums have soft, round, fluffy flowers in various shades of blue, pink or white – with blue being most common.
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- This is called Euphorbia marginata, or snow on the mountain. Grown as much for its foliage as for its flowers, its small but showy leaves may be light green, variegated or entirely white. They clasp erect, many-branched stems which grow one to three feet tall.
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- Snow on the mountain is a warm-weather annual that is native to prairies from Minnesota and the Dakotas to Colorado and Texas. It’s great to use in borders, meadows and cutting gardens.
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- I have long loved snapdragons, Antirrhinum majus, and have many in the garden. Snapdragons are available in most colors except blue and coordinate well with other garden bloomers. Snapdragons are known for wispy jaw-like upper and lower petals. A single stem averages 10 to 15 of these unique blooms, grouped closely together.
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- Achillea millefolium, commonly known as yarrow, is a flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. It is a hardy perennial with fernlike leaves and colorful blooms. The large, flat-topped flower clusters are perfect for cutting and drying. Yarrow is remarkably durable, tolerating dry spells and low soil fertility. Yarrows bloom from midsummer into fall in an array of colors including pink, salmon, yellow, and white.
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- Heliotrope is a plant of the borage family, cultivated for its fragrant purple or blue flowers, which are used in perfume.
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- This is Alcea rosea, also known as hollyhock. The crisp white of its petals work nicely with the pink and yellow center. These plants can reach five to eight-feet tall and up to about four-feet across.
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- Hollyhocks need full sun and moist, rich, well drained soil. The mistake some hollyhock growers make is to plant this flower in soil that is too dry.
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- This plant is called salvia apiana, also known as white sage, bee sage, or sacred sage. It is an evergreen perennial shrub that is native to the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.
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- From a few feet away, the white flowers sometimes appear to have a purplish tint. White sage is strongly aromatic, with a powerful and slightly sharp sage smell.
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- Shasta daisy flowers provide perky summer blooms, offering the look of the traditional daisy along with evergreen foliage. They are low maintenance and great for filling in bare spots in the landscape.
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- Nicotiana is a genus of herbaceous plants and shrubs of the family Solanaceae, that is indigenous to the Americas, Australia, southwest Africa and the South Pacific.
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- It is also called tobacco flower, or flowering tobacco – and yes, Nicotiana has high concentrations of nicotine.
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- My large flower cutting garden, which measures 150-feet by 90-feet, is growing more and more lush each year, and every bed is planted with a variety of specimens, making it colorful and interesting.
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