Gardening in Summer

The last tulip of the season.  Photo from May 19 -- inside the tulip

The whole tulip

Some tulip petal art

Perennial bachelor button.  This spreads around the garden a bit, but is easy to take out.  It gets floppy and quite messy when finished blooming, so I usually just cut them down.  They regrow and bloom again.

I let the perennial bachelor buttons grow amount the greenery of the heathers and the clipped spruce.

This plant, I think, arrived with the bird seed.  I don't know what it is.  It gets fluffy seed heads that the finches seem to love.  These seeds fly around the garden and are quite hard to pull out if I let them get big.  Right now I have lots of them growing along the strip between our driveways.  They are growing quite thickly and are quite tall.  The flowers only last a day and the seed heads not much longer.  They never seem to catch on across the road. 

a red rock rose..  A low growing plant.  I have finally got these plants to survive. I believe they can grow into a mounding small woody perennial that will need trimming.  Right now this plant is sprawling and might get a good pruning when finished blooming.

The pink rock rose.  Very delicate in appearance.  I will search the nurseries for another color so that I have 3 of these plants in the area by the cement vase in front of the magnolia tree.
All these photos from May 19th.  The rock roses are in bloom, the bachelor buttons have been cut down and the heather trimmed.  The tulip, of course, is hardened off and leaves cut back. 

I watered with the sprinkler and the other shooting sprinkler at the back  today.  The woodland looks really good... somewhat overgrown, but I like it.    The pond looks good, the Japanese area needs weeding, the potatoes are the only thing that is doing ok in the vegetable garden.  The spinach has bolted.  We had a few strawberries for our dinner tonight.  Full of flavor.   It was a lovely 21 degree day.