Shots in the July Garden - A Bevy of Blooms for Bees and Butterflies!

It's been a bit of a challenging year to garden so far.

We had a really dry spring (a 7 inch rainfall deficit at one point).

Then we made that up with torrential rains in July, but we've settled (like much of the country) into an uncomfortably hot and humid weather pattern.

So even though I don't want to toot my horn, I must say I'm rather pleased that the garden has been looking pretty good - - and with very little supplemental water (I think I've only watered with a hose about 4 times this year, plus other occasional spot waterings with a can.)

Without further ado, here are some scenes that caught my eye when I was in the garden on July 20th.

Lantana camara

Gaillardia x grandiflora and bumblebee

Gaillardia x grandiflora and a teeny-tiny bee (not its real name)

Hibiscus moscheutos, this is the straight species version of our native hibiscus. (I also have the 'Luna Pink Swirl' hybrid or cultivar of H. moscheutos.) This is my first year growing the straight species. It's in full sun on an unamended clay hillside and seems to be thriving, despite the fact that it would probably prefer wet-to-moist conditions.

Perovskia atriplificolia, Russian sage. I moved three Russian sages to more of a full sun location and generally they seem much happier and more floriferous in their new spot. That said, I've still seen some of the yellowing foliage and even wilting of entire branches that I've noticed when they were in partial shade. It's my opinion that they do not like our humidity (which has been especially high this summer) or the heavy clay soil. The Russian sage flowers seem highly attractive to pollinators, especially honeybees.

Coreopsis verticillata 'Zagreb', attracts lots of little pollinators

French marigold, Tagetes patula 

Hibiscus syriacus, rose of Sharon, 'Diana' cultivar

Cosmos bipinnatus and bee.

Agastache foeniculum (anise hyssop) and bee

'Red Rocks' penstemon and bee. I have three of these Red Rocks penstemons. I cut back two of them after the main bloom and left the third one (this one) uncut. They're all starting to rebloom a little now, which makes me think that it may not make any difference (at least in terms of stimulating more flowers) whether or not you cut them back. That said, I'll keep an eye on the plants over the next month or two to see whether there's any difference in terms of flower quantity or overall form between the penstemons that were pruned and those that were left au naturel.

Lagerstroeima indica 'Natchez' (crape myrtle). In bloom for about two months now. The flowers attract lots of pollinators. (Not every crape myrtle seems equally attractive to pollinators. I rarely see any pollinators on my pink-flowered crape, but these white-flowered Natchez crapes are often buzzing with bees all day.)

Cosmos bipinnatus with skipper butterfly. White-flowered 'Diana' rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) in the background.

Glandularia canadensis (rose verbena)

Large milkweed bug (Oncopeltus fasciatus) on rose milkweed (Asclepias incarnata)

More Cosmos bipinnatus with bumblebee

If you look very closely, you can see lots of pollinators crawling through the flower cluster on this Asclepias incarnata (rose milkweed). Oh and there's a large milkweed bug hanging out beneath a leaf in the lower part of the picture! 

Coreopsis lanceolata (lanceleaf coreopsis)

Coreopsis tinctoria (plains coreopsis) with pollinator

Heliopsis helianthoides (false sunflower) with bumblebee

Polanisia dodecandra (redwhisker clammyweed)

Helianthus annuus (sunflower) with bees

Ailanthus webworm moth on Agastache foeniculum (anise hyssop)

Aralia racemosa (American spikenard), those are the tiny greenish-white flowers -- not very showy, but they do seem to attract a lot of little pollinators. The plant itself is in morning sun and afternoon shade. It's hanging tough, but it doesn't seem all that happy. I plan to try to transplant it to a shadier spot this autumn.
 

Just a pretty, colorful tableau - sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima) in the front, 'Rozanne' cranesbill geranium behind it and a few blue balloon flowers (Platycodon grandiflorus) peeking into the upper left corner.

Hope you enjoyed this quick tour through the July garden.

What are some of your favorite summer flowers blooming in your garden right now? 

What a Difference Six Months Makes -- Lantana camara 'Miss Huff'

This is my first year growing Lantana camara, a flowering plant from the tropical regions of Central and South America.

It's my understanding that L. camara grows into a large shrub in its home range or other tropical environments, but here on the border of USDA zones 6 and 7, it's only marginally hardy. It's my understanding that it will die to the ground this winter and (hopefully!) resprout in the spring. Even if it does act as a perennial here, I doubt it would get bigger than it did this year (about 2-3 feet tall and wide).

I chose the 'Miss Huff' cultivar because it is reportedly the most cold hardy L. camara available.

My wife was skeptical at first, which is understandable because the two plants we purchased looked like this when we first brought them home in April and stayed about the same size into May:

Lantana camara in spring 2015, first year in the garden

Today, they look like this:

Lantana camara in October 2015, still first year in the garden! These flowers have bloomed non-stop for months.

It took the butterflies a little while to discover the plants, but especially in late summer and into early autumn (August, September and October), the two L. camara plants have been aflutter with butterflies throughout the day.

Not only are the flowers pretty to people, but clearly they are the cat's meow to butterflies.

Hopefully, 'Miss Huff' will survive the winter and come back next year (I'll let you know!), but regardless these plants offer so much beauty throughout the summer and autumn that I'm planning to add a few more to the garden next spring. Even if they only behave as annuals, I think they'd still be worth having in your garden.

Lantana camara does seem to prefer a good bit of sun. The plant that was in a mostly sun setting flowered and grew a bit better than the one that received afternoon shade from a Vitex agnus-castus (chaste tree).

With just a bit of supplemental water early in the summer to help them get established, both plants proved extremely heat and drought tolerant. The flowers are self-cleaning (i.e., there's no need to deadhead) and the plants bloom profusely and cheerfully for months and months.

I do believe that L. camara is invasive in various tropical or subtropical parts of the world, including in parts of the U.S., especially along the Gulf Coast. In Texas, the problem seems to be limited so far to Austin and points south. In Florida, it is considered a Category I invasive as it displaces or hybridizes with native plants.

As far as I know, it is not considered at all invasive here in Tennessee. As I said, I think it's only marginally hardy here to start.

If you live in a warmer zone and feel you must have Lantana camara to feed butterflies, please look for a cultivar that is considered sterile or seedless.

Actually, per Clemson, I see that 'Miss Huff' is supposed to be sterile! Hooray!! This makes me feel even better about growing this cultivar. I also suppose it explain why I haven't seen any fruit on Miss Huff despite lots of pollinating action going on. Good deal.

In Full Swing - Clematis, Penstemon, Sumac, Sage, False Indigo and More!

Things are in full swing in the garden - bees are buzzing, flowers are blooming, leaves are expanding, plants are growing, everything there is life (except where there is death).

I apologize for the lull in posting photos. My camera is currently traveling overseas (along with my wife), but my kindly neighbor Christian generously lent me his camera so that I could capture some scenes from the early May garden.

(There are a lot of photos, so I'll split them into two posts. This post will focus on the back garden, the next one on the front and side gardens.)

Abelia x grandiflora, dwarf cultivar. I'd thought it was 'Rose Creek', but I think it was mislabeled, so I'm not sure of the cultivar. Whatever it is, it seems to be settling in nicely during its first year in the garden. I don't usually like bright yellow plants, but I like the contrast here against surrounding greenery.

My favorite plant in the garden these days is Baptisia australis (blue wild indigo). In its third full year in the garden, it has sent up multiple stalks of pretty blue flowers that (as you can see here) attract bees!

The Burkii eastern red cedars (Juniperus virginiana) are loaded with berries/cones. The branches were coated with rust fungus earlier during our wet spring, but that issue seems to have abated (at least for now) as the weather has turned drier and warmer.

Clematis 'Crystal Fountain'. We had this clematis tied up into the crape myrtle tree with biodegradable twine. The twine degraded in some rain storms this spring and the vine fell to the ground, but it doesn't seem too much worse for the wear and actually makes a rather nice groundcover. Make lemonade from lemons and all that...

Nothing too exciting here - Forsythia x intermedia 'Lynwood Gold'. But I must admit that the shrub looks very healthy. The foliage was a lovely shade of green earlier in the spring. I'm not over-the-moon on Forsythia. It's totally overplanted and the flowers seem relatively useless in terms of supporting wildlife, but I have to give it props for toughness.

What happened here!? 'Lemon Queen' perennial sunflower is not looking her best.  I need to investigate further, but my initial suspicion is some sort of fungal rot. It's not a pretty picture, but I believe gardening blogs should honestly show the good, the bad and the ugly.

Lantana camara 'Miss Huff', first year in the garden, first blooms.

Panicum virgatum (switchgrass) 'Northwind' -- This is my second year with switchgrass in the garden. I cut back the old stems myself in March. It seems to me that in a normal-to-harsh winter here, I could easily wait until the end of March or even the beginning of April to make such a cutback. The old stems look good all winter and into spring, so the cutback is only needed to make way for new growth. But that new growth doesn't start in earnest until mid-April. Cut back your grasses too early, and you have relatively unattractive stubble mocking you for a month.

Penstemon x mexicali 'Red Rocks', first year in the garden

Acer rubrum (red maple), not sure which cultivar, but whatever the name, it's turning into quite a nice little tree. As long as the deer don't try ripping up the bark again (like they did a couple of winters back), I hope it will be OK.

Fuzzy berries forming on fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica) 'Gro-Low'. The small yellow flowers that preceded the berries seemed to be a big hit with all sorts of small pollinators (probably a motley crew of bees, wasps and flies).

Salvia greggii (autumn sage), not sure whether this is 'Flame' or 'Rose Pink', but in either case both survived the winter (I was holding my breath since they're rated marginally hardy in Mid-Tennessee) and have started blooming. Last year, the autumn sage flowers attracted hummingbirds.

As with the azaleas I inherited at the front and side of the house, I feel like this ornamental sage ('May Night'?) looks good for a couple of weeks and then looks like Death warmed over the rest of the year. Still those brief bursts of beauty - especially in the Spring - have won it a place in the garden for now. The lamb's ear 'Helene von Stein' in the background looks good most of the year, including now.

Looks like there should be lots of crabapples this year on the 'Sugar Tyme' crab.

This is not too impressive, but I'm just happy that my wax myrtles (Morella cerifera) survived the winter. Although evergreen further South, they pretty much defoliated here. Then again, I probably shouldn't have planted marginally hardy plants in November. Both plants almost made it through the winter intact, but one got chomped by a deer (I presume) right before Spring arrived. This is the one that didn't get chomped. (The other is still alive, but only barely.)

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) wilting in early May. Not a good sign of drought tolerance when we're still 5-6 weeks away from the official start of summer.

As with the 'Lemon Queen' sunflower, I'm not sure what happened here, but a portion of the Hyssopus officinalis (hyssop) seems to have wilted out practically overnight. Hyssop is a fast grower, so I'll try just trimming out the damaged section and hoping for a recovery.

Stay tuned, more photos coming soon from the front garden!

Travel Report - Berlin Streetscapes with Lantana and Pyracantha!

I was walking down the street on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany, when I spotted these street trees with colorful flowers blooming on a grey September day. As you can see, the trees are not installed in the ground, but rather are grown in large planter boxes. Anyway, I decided to take a closer look, so I moved in and found that the trees actually appear to be...

...Lantana camara! That's right, Lantana, which I've never grown (though I have plans to add it to the garden next spring), but which I think of as a dieback perennial in zone 6/7. I was under the impression that Lantana only grew to tree size in tropical climates. So perhaps Berlin takes these tree boxes into a greenhouse in the winter? Or can Lantana survive and grow into a street tree even in temperate settings? The mind boggles.

The streets of Berlin were also chock-a-block full of this pretty, but dangerous flowering shrub. If I'm not mistaken, this is Pyracantha coccinea, known colloquially as Firethorn for its painful sharp thorns. It's used sometimes in the States -- I've seen it at the Nashville Zoo to keep visitors out of certain aras -- but I've never seen it on a streetscape. It's undeniably attractive and presumably the berries will help feed Berlin's birds in the winter (although truth be told I didn't see many birds in the German urban landscape). And most of the pyracanthas I saw seemed to be thriving, even in challenging urban settings with lots of air pollution, so it's clearly one tough cookie. I was seriously tempted to add some to my garden, but I'll probably chicken out due to those forbidding thorns.