Saturday, July 04, 2009

Garden Plants in June

I don't know what this plant is, but its seed heads are very photogenic. I think it arrived in my garden from the bird feeder. I have seen finches feeding on it. It pops up everywhere in my garden and if I am not careful it becomes a big problem. The plants have a tap root that can be hard to get out in my clay soil. It is a tall plant with thin blue/green leaves and very nice blue flowers that only last a day or two. I can't seem to get it to seed itself over in the deer pasture across the road from me where both the finches and I can enjoy it with less labor on my part. I think its an annual.
This is the Chameleon Plant - houttuynia cordata "vaiegata". I have it marked as invasive in my plant list and it really is quite invasive. It was said to be a 'bog' plant, so I thought I could control its wandering ways by planting it in a non-bog area. Well, it only needs regular watering to start its march over and under everything. It has a fragrance almost like oranges when its broken, so its a bit of a treat when keeping this one in bounds.
This is a tiny plant that has been seeding itself around my rock paths and anywhere I let it grow. It is not difficult to remove and is kinda pretty. When it finishes blooming it dies down and turns an inoffensive brown color. As you can see on this photo, some of the pea gravel stones are bigger than the delicate little flowers.
A gorgeous water iris that is blooming prolifically now, in the pond and in the deck tub. It is easy to propogate by dividing. This photo was edited in my new Paintshop Pro program. I spent quite a bit of enjoyable time playing with this last nite. Tonite I looked up the opticverve site to see if I could add the black and white filters that Stezzer on Flickr told me about. I have them on my Jasc copy of PSP, but I could not easily find the download of this plug in for my Corel PSP. Cyrus gave me a link to a site for zillions of plug ins for Photoshop. It was overwhelming. I am not sure I want to mess with my Adobe, either. Not right now, anyway. I have always found the Paintshop programs to be far more user friendly and know I can fix them if I mess something up with a plug in.
This is a look at the smoke bush leaves against the silver sedum.

A few of our antique cars were invited to the Uplands Golf Course to be on display for their special tournament on the 87th anniversary of the club. We were greeted and treated very pleasantly and served a barbeque lunch. Was a lovely day and a beautiful setting for lunch and a couple of hours of visiting. Thank you, Wayne, for the invitation.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Paint Shop Pro 12:
Effects (Alt+t): Photo Effects: Black and White film.
This has every conceivable color-to-black & white conversion. Play around and have fun! ;-)))

Maggie said...

Oh great! thanks. I was looking in the wrong place for that filter!