As the Garden Grows

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My garden’s beautiful this month

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At the beginning of this month I wasn’t sure how well my garden was going to do this summer.

You see, we had my neighbors putting in a new fence on one side, and the neighbors on the other side don’t take care of their yard at all so there’s always weeds creeping into our yard from their side, so the month started out in battle mode and it didn’t look good.

I’m quite happy to report that after several weeks of giving our garden some tender loving care – ie lots of compost, mulch, planting new plants in the bare spots, making up my special alfalfa tea to fertilize the garden beds and so on … the plants are looking quite happy.

I’ve actually been out in the garden taking quite a few pictures in the last week, maybe an extra 200 pictures! You see we just got a new cellphone. It’s a Nokia N8 and it has a 12 mpg camera inside it and it takes fabulous pictures and video! I was going to post an HD video that I took with the phone in this post but for some reason I’m having trouble posting it to Youtube. Youtube keeps saying it’s going to take about five hours to upload a 7 minute video. Crazy! So for now … I’ll just post a few pictures and I’ll try to find a way to get my garden tour video in another post soon.

Here are some lovely White Petunias. I always put a few Petunias in hanging baskets near my bird feeders. They help attract more birds, even hummingbirds if I plant red or pink ones.

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Another flower that’s blooming like crazy right now is this Octavia Hill Rose, isn’t it pretty?

Octavia Hill Rose

My Lavender plants are just beginning to bloom. I believe I have 7 or 8 Lavender plants scattered throughout my garden beds. The ones in the sunniest spots are flowering the most right now, but the others will catch up quickly I’m sure.

Lavender

I also have several Clematis vines in both my front and back yard garden beds. This lovely pink/red clematis flower is one that grows on a trellis at the front of my house. The plant climbs along the trellis about 12 feet up the wall. It’s beautiful when it’s in bloom.

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What’s blooming in your garden this month? Is your garden just gorgeous right now? I know I’m loving mine at this time because I have so many roses in bloom that whenever I walk outside all I smell is lovely old rose fragrance. It’s beautiful.






I wish Peonies bloomed all summer long!

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I wish Peonies bloomed all summer long. They are so lovely, so delicate and oh so short lived!

My peonies are long gone … they finished blooming in late June, but I just realized that I never posted a photo of my Peonies.

I only took pictures of my Peony Pecher Peonies this year. My Karl Rosenfield Peonies bloomed, but we were going through a very rainy period when they bloomed and then right after that it finally warmed up here in Toronto at the end of June and the blooms faded fast … too fast for me to capture them while they still looked beautiful!

Anyway … here’s a picture of my lovely Peony Peacher bloom.

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This peony has a beautiful scent. In fact, after a huge rain storm in June, back when we discovered one of trellises had broken and snapped some rose branches, I gathered some lovely scented Baron Prevost roses, one peony and a few hosta leaves for accent and made a bouquet to bring indoors to enjoy. The rose and peony scent filled the house for two or three days! Once the rose scent faded, the peony scent took over for another day or so. Simply lovely to have such scented flowers indoors!

Do you grow Peonies? Do you bring a cut flower or two indoors so you can enjoy their loveliness and beautiful scent? What other flowers do you enjoy bringing indoors?

For a weed rose Dr. Huey sure is pretty

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Dr. Huey is a rose that is commonly used as a root graft on Hybrid Tea Roses to make them stronger and possibly hardier.

If you grow roses, particularly ones that have grafted roots, you probably know that sometimes the root graft can grow it’s own shoots creating an odd looking rose bush with different colored flowers or that sometimes the graft root ends up taking over.

In my case the former owners of our home dug up their single Hybrid tea rose when they moved and I guess they left some of the graft root behind. Much to my surprise the following spring I noticed rose branches coming up out of the ground and realized that it must have been from their old rose. Of course it took me another year to realize that it was the graft root Dr. Huey.

I decided to keep the rose. After all, by accident, it was the first rose in my garden!

Dr. Huey seems to only bloom here once a year and it blooms on old wood so whether it blooms at all depend upon how harsh the last winter was. As a result my Dr. Huey weed rose only seems to bloom about every second year, but when it blooms it’s spectacular.

I don’t mind it’s red blooms one bit.

My Dr. Huey seems to bloom in late June. It’s blooms are long gone now, but not the memory of them.

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