Garden Blogger's Bloom Day July (a day late but not a dollar short)

I have the perfect alibi for why this entry into GBBD is a day late.  Anyone who is interested can read yesterday’s post, and the one from the day before.   We were awfully busy.   Excuses offered, and I hope accepted, here is my entry for Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day for July.

First of all, I think I must win the award for the most certifiably insane shrub this side of the Mississippi.   I was absolutely flabbergasted as I walked by my forsythia bush today as I was in search of things to photograph for this post.  The silly thing has decided to bloom.  In July.   Not as heavily as it does in the spring, but there are blossoms scattered all through it.  Maybe that freeze in the spring was more confusing than we thought!

The day lilies are on their last blooms, they will be completely finished in a couple of days.   Perhaps some of the re-bloomers will grace us with their presence later.   This picture shows that my autumn sedum has decided to join Carol’s, and bud out just a tad early.

What is done or almost done:  daylilies, hostas,  gladiolas, lance leaf coreopsis, mexican hat, sweet cicely, fleabane, rugosa roses.

Coming into bud: autumn sedum, prairie coneflower, sun flowers of all sorts, corn, asters, goldenrod, roman wormwood

In full bloom:   Everything else?   Oh, you want a list.   Butterfly bush, bush roses, hardy hibsicus, Queen Anne’s lace, tansy, thyme, oregano, blackberry lily, echinacea, garden phlox, black eyed susan, cleome, squash, peppers  are what pop to mind.  

And now the tour.   This is the front yard, sporting garden phlox and black eyed susans.  Right in the middle you can see perovskia blooming. There is echinacea and thyme  hiding in this garden, as well.

Out in back, the root cellar is looking splendid.   On the right the hardy hibiscus are blooming like crazy.   In front of them is the fig bush, which is starting to put on figs like it means it.    The left side is wearing lavendar, butterfly bush, roses, garden phlox and the wild cleomes we collected seeds of is in the background.

I felt like a couple of the gals deserved close-up portraits.   I know I did this one a couple of days ago, but the blackberry lily is such a stunning plant I felt it deserved to be featured once again.

And the rose out on the root cellar is being a stunning debutante right now.

There are several volunteers in the yard.   One is the catnip plant that seeded itself in front of the sauna.   Mike and Smokey like to go out and lie on the deck and do some inhalation therapy.

In one of my permanent “annual” pots that adorn the bird feeder, I had red salvia last year.   Imagine my surprise when I noticed it had reseeded itself.   Now it is blooming too.

Another plant that startled me by wintering over is this dahlia.   This is its fourth season blooming in the front yard.   I originally planted it with the intention of it being annual color, because I was certainly way too busy to dig it up and store it come fall.   It has tickseed coreopsis blooming in front of it.

We have two kinds of cleomes growing in this yard.   One is the normal domesticated one.  I have an amusing story about that particular plant.  I had a 75 year old grandmother  coyly inform me that she knew that that plant was marijuana because the sherriff’s deputy and told her so.   I didn’t quite die laughing.  As far as I know, cannabis sativa does not have huge pink flowers:

The other cleome was one that was blooming one summer as we were travelling through Eastern Wyoming or Colorado, coming down off the plateau into Nebraska.   We kept seeing clumps of pink flowers blooming out in the sand between the sage brush, and so we stopped to see what they were.   This is one of the things I love about travelling with Jim.  He doesn’t think it the least bit odd to stop to identify a flower that is growing along side the road.   Or to pick up a nifty rock.   Or to just stop and look at the stars.   Anyway, it took some doing, because we were travelling just as it was in full bloom and it didn’t have a lot of seed heads ripe, but I managed to find seeds to collect and established this in my yard.   Definitely a cleome, but definitely a different sort than the domesticated one.

Last, but certainly not least, is this tomato which we are going to eat for our lunch today.  The variety is an heirloom open pollinated sort called “Mortgage lifter.”  Jim picked it immediately before I took this picture.  It weighs 2 pounds 8.3 ounces (1.14 kilos for you people on the metric system).

Gotta go!  Lunch is ready.