My Flower Garden in August
We’re expecting scattered clouds and possibly more rain today in the Northeast, but my flower cutting garden continues to produce beautiful blooms.
Fortunately, there are many flowering plants that blossom this time of year, including rudbeckias, phlox and shasta daisies - and my garden, located just behind my main greenhouse, is filled with them. My goal for this garden was to always highlight unusual flowers from different parts of the world using seeds from trusted sources and seeds I find during my travels. I'm so happy with how it has developed 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.
Here are some photos - enjoy.
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- My flower cutting garden delights all who visit. It’s filled with so many colorful blooms – pinks, yellows, blues. I hope your garden is also doing wonderfully this season.
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- Phlox ‘Robert Poore’ is magenta in color with superb heat and mildew resistance. This is a tall and upright grower that’s great for the back of the border, or even planted at the edge of the garden among the shrubs.
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- Phlox also comes in a range of colors from pure white to lavender to even red, and grows happily in most parts of the country. If properly planted and sited, phlox is largely pest and disease free too – a perfect perennial.
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- Angelica gigas, also called Korean angelica, giant Angelica, purple parsnip, and dangquai, is a monocarpic biennial or short lived perennial plant from China, Japan and Korea. This showstopper produces conspicuous, red-purple leaf sheaths with dense, purple domed flowerheads, and is highly attractive to bees.
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- And here is one of many kinds of lilies that bloom in my flower garden. I also have lilies along my winding pergola, outside my Winter House kitchen and in the sunken garden behind my Summer House. My collection of lilies is a combination of Oriental, Asiatic, trumpet, and Orienpet lilies.
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- Lilies come in a variety of colors with multiple blooms per stem. Tiger lilies bloom in mid to late summer, are easy to grow, and come back year after year.
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- These are the showy flower heads of rudbeckia. Rudbeckia’s bright, summer-blooming flowers give the best effect when planted in masses in a border or wildflower meadow.
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- In general, rudbeckias are relatively drought-tolerant and disease-resistant. Flower colors include yellow and gold, and the plants grow two to six feet tall, depending on the variety.
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- Echinacea purpurea, or purple coneflower, is a hardy perennial. Echinacea is a genus, or group of herbaceous flowering plants in the daisy family.
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- Echinacea purpurea has a large center cone, surrounded by pink-purple petals that brighten the garden in mid-summer. Look closely, and you will see a happy bee on one of the flower centers.
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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. It is also called tobacco flower, or flowering tobacco – and yes, Nicotiana has high concentrations of nicotine.
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- Euphorbia marginata is a small annual in the spurge family. It is commonly called snow-on-the-mountain, and is a warm-weather annual native to prairies from Minnesota and the Dakotas to Colorado and Texas.
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- The foliage is so pretty. Snow-on-the-mountain is great to use in borders, meadows and cutting gardens.
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- Calendula has daisy-like bright orange or yellow flowers, and pale green leaves. Commonly called the pot marigold, Calendula officinalis, the calendula flower is historically used for medicinal and culinary purposes.
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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.
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- This is a balloon flower, Platycodon grandiflorus. Balloon flowers get their name from the unopened buds, which swell up prior to opening and resemble little hot-air balloons.
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- And the opened flowers resemble those of bellflowers, and while most often deep blue or purple, white and pink varieties are also available.
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- Hard not to love these dainty violets. Violets are a genus of spring flowering plants in the family Violaceae. There are about 400 to 500 species of violets in the genus. Violets are native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere and are also distributed in Hawaii, Australia, and the Andes in South America. Violets typically have heart-shaped leaves, and asymmetrical flowers. Flower colors vary from shades of blue, yellow, white and cream.
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- Viola tricolor, also known as Johnny Jump up, heart’s delight, tickle-my-fancy, Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me, come-and-cuddle-me, three faces in a hood, or love-in-idleness, is a popular European viola variety. Their small, dainty blooms are quite eye-catching in any garden.
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- This metallic colored heuchera has the most attractive marbled and veined leaves. The colors and shades of mahogany, bronze, aluminum and silver are most distinctive on young spring foliage. Slender stems hold sprays of tiny pink to white bells during spring which make lovely cut flowers.
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- And this is Coleus scutellarioides ‘Gay’s Delight’. It has wide chartreuse leaves with thin, nearly black veining that’s so striking. It is a relatively low maintenance plant and deer don’t particularly care for it, which is always a good thing. What’s blooming in your garden?
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