Purple-Orchid

Orange-Canna-Lily

Orange-Canna-Lily

This Canna was brightening up the urban environment down in Manhattan. I know a lot of people don’t like orange flowers but ones like this that rejoice in their orangeness are hard to not like. Orange flowers for me are okay and it took me a long time to learn to appreciate them.

We only grew a few Cannas in containers this year after swearing off them for a couple of seasons. They did great and still look nice. None of that nasty brown on the leaves. They are a very structural plant that I like mainly for the foliage. The flowers are just a nice bonus when they come along. The newer varieties seem to be self cleaning so the old flowers don’t make a mess of the plants. I think that next year a few more Cannas are warranted by the performance of this years small crop. We are already trying to plan the garden for next spring. I might try and change the small rose garden in front of the house into an annual/perennial more seasonal type of planting. The roses are nice when they are on but look bad for a good part of the year.

Korean-Sun-Pear

Korean-Sun-Pear

The naming of this plant is a little confusing. For this post this is what it said on the plant tag but after looking it up I realized it seemed to have several names. This particular tree was bought this spring as a small 10 gallon pot sized specimen to replace a Bradford Pear that had completely fallen apart last winter. It really had a lot of flowers for a young tree and the foliage was a nice glossy green with just a tinge of red. It has already grown a little this spring. We are looking forward to a good show in the fall as most Pear trees provide great fall color.

The genus name comes from the ancient name for Pear and the species is named after L'Abbé Urbain Jean Faurie. A well known 19th century botanist from Japan and Korea.

Peach Drift_Rose

Rose 'Peach Drift'

 Recently when the weekly email from a local wholesale nursery arrived in my inbox it featured ‘Peach Drift’ roses. Since I was still looking for some replacement roses it made up my mind to try a few of these since the color and habit looked so nice. There was no disconnect between the picture and when I actually saw the rose. Both were beautiful. As I have said here before the owner of the rose garden and I decided to try a few untraditional types of replacement roses this year and ‘Peach Drift’ seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

The color pretty much melted me but I was happy to read that the flowers can be used as cut flowers and has some fragrance. It is also touted as being very disease resistant. One of the more important aspects of the selection process this year was hardiness and ‘Peach Drift’ is a winner on that front also being rated for USDA Zone 5b. Growing only to about 18 inches tall I selected a prominent position in the front of the border of roses for the two plants. I am interested to see what happens. It has been about 2 weeks so far and it is still loaded with flowers and buds. Hope it can continue through the season.

Clematis

Clematis

Vagabond ivy geranium

Vagabond ivy geranium

Lavender-Blizzard

Lavender-Blizzard

Royal Dark Red

Royal Dark Red

Picasso ivy geranium

Picasso ivy geranium

Henry-Japanese-Anemone

’

Seeing this plant at the nursery led me to do something I hardly ever do, which is make an impulse buy. Most of my plant purchases are well researched in advance for both culture and price. The Japanese Anemones have done so well this year and in the perennial border we only have the light pink and white ones (which isn’t bad but a little drab). I thought ‘Prince Henry’ would brighten up the patch and it did. It grows a lot shorter than the species and other cultivars so it looked nice in the front of the border.

In general Japanese Anemone is a nice perennial that really gives a blast of color in the late season garden. They are easy to grow and seem to be very hardy. It must be the year because the Anemones seemed to bloom earlier than ever this season.

Pink "Hawaiian" Daisy

Pink Hawaiian Daisy

Daylily "Role Model"

Hemerocallis

Since finding a couple of cards with Daylily photos from the summer with a lot of good pictures on them here, at the risk of being a little insipid, are a few more. The first two pictures are a nice kind of pinkish cultivar named ‘Role Model’. You can see from the group shot that it has large flowers and is a heavy bloomer.


The second flower is a macro of a cultivar that I didn’t get the name of. Since I have heard there are over 50,000 Daylily varieties forget trying to figure it out. If it is not a common one than you really have to try some research.



This is the last Today’s Flowers of the decade. I would like to wish all the participants a Happy New Year and a great decade coming up. Your visits and comments here have always been appreciated and I am looking forward to seeing your flowers this week and in the future.

Apricot-Foxglove

Foxglove

This is the first year we tried ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ in the garden and it did well. The color was a nice addition to the regular Foxglove and the Strawberry ones that we planted. I treat all Foxglove as annuals although the Strawberry Foxglove (Digitalis x mertonensis) looks like it may have lasted as it was still alive when the snow came. The Apricot type is much taller and straighter than the Strawberry ones. I dutifully let them go to seed and even scraped the mulch up underneath so the seeds would hit soil and not the mulch. We will see what happens and if any come back.


The Apricot color does kind of liven up a shady area and if you like the pastel types colors this plant would be perfect for your garden.

We got the last big push here before Christmas. I still have some shopping to do but mainly I am waiting on the UPS guy as I ordered almost everything on the internet.

White-Bat-Flower

White-Bat-Flower

This is the strangest flower I have seen blooming in quite a while. It was flowering in the Wave Hill Conservatory last week. These pictures were taken with the Nikon Coolpix P6000. The close up was taken with in the macro mode, which allows for extreme close focusing (less than an inch, 0.8 cm).

There wasn’t a whole lot of information on the internet about this flower. It does seem to grow from seed as there were several sites offering seeds. Apparently this white form is a little more rare that the black Bat Flower (Tacca chantrieri).

Japanese-Camellia

Japanese Camellia

This dainty little Camellia was blooming in the Conservatory at Wave Hill. The colors were striking and the very shiny green leaves were helping showcase the flowers. Someone burning charcoal in the woods discovered this wild hybrid, named after the historical fishing village in Japan. It is easy to root and also hybridizes easily.

We can’t grow Camellias outside in Connecticut. Even the so called ‘winter hardy’ ones don’t make it. They do well in pots and containers but are prone to insect infestations when grown inside. That doesn’t stop us from keeping a few around. It is always a welcome sign that spring is around the corner when they start to bloom.

Since it is Sunday and that means Today’s Flowers here is an Orchid that was blooming at work.

Taking pictures inside the greenhouse is always a challenge.

Two-Roses

Large-Flowered Climbing Rose

 Here are two roses introduced in the 1990’s. ‘Fourth of July’ is a good producer with a nice scent. It’s coloring makes it a bit of a novelty but the fact that each flower is different is interesting. My “Fourth of July’ seems to be growing more like a bush than a climbing rose. Maybe this year I will let it grow out a bit more and see if it will climb up the fence around the rose garden.

‘Easy Going’ is a floribunda rose that was introduced in 1998. It was discovered as a sport of ‘Livin Easy’. It has been featured on this blog once before. It is an easy to grow rose that seems resistant to black spot.


Tuesday was the last day of the gardening season. I hope to have some notes on the past year coming up soon. Yesterday I had to go to the dentist for a multiple extraction. What a way to start the off-season.

Poison-Arrow-Vine

Poison Arrow Vine

Today’s Flower is a native of the tropical part of West Africa. It doesn’t tolerate cold temperatures (doesn’t survive below 40 deg.F) but can be grown as a houseplant in colder zones. Preuss' Strophanthus is kind of a shrubby vine that can reach 10 feet tall under the right conditions. The flowers have a light and pleasant scent. I am including the second picture not because it is a good picture but for you to see the interesting tentacles or hair that the flower develops. The common name comes from the use of the sap on arrow tips in its native realm.


As a bonus here is probably the nicest Daylily I saw all year. Part of the Woodside Nursery stable of beautiful Daylilies this flower knocked me out when I saw it.

NYBG Water Garden

NYBG Water Garden

I went down to the New York Botanical Garden today. I saw some unusual flowers and learned a couple of new plants. It was a quick tour with my main goal of hitting the Rose Garden. These are a couple of shots of the Water Garden that is outside the Conservatory. It was in bloom with a good collection of Lotus and Water Lilies. Lighting wasn’t optimal and it felt like it was going to rain at any minute.



I will probably be living on the photos I took today for a while. My upcoming week doesn’t really have a lot of flowers forecast. I wanted to get my ‘E’ picture for ABC Wednesday. I have a couple to choose from now. I kept my eye out for plants that start with the letter e. That was kind of fun.

I probably won’t be providing a lot of commentary with the pictures that I post for a spell. I have revived a project that I was working on a few years back. I wrote a book on the history of the Premier Gold Mine, which was along the Alaskan/BC Border. A couple of my cousins worked there. I had a deal to publish it but it didn’t work out. I have recently been researching self-publishing the book on the internet. It still needs a bit of work (bit of an understatement) and I have literally hundreds of historical photographs to wade through, again. This blog has always been mostly about the pictures so It probably won’t be a bad thing.

From Long Island

Twin Butterflies

Twin Butterflies

This picture is of two butterflies on the same patch of Coneflower. I thought they lined up kind of nice. Has any else had a lot of butterflies this year? I distinctly remember saying last year that we had “hardly any butterflies” and this year there have been clouds of them. Go figure. I am almost finished with the overgrown garden I pruned out. Quite a bit of the granite terrace around the pool had sunk so I have been relaying that, then some planting and mulch and its time to move on.