Before and After - Echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower

The goldfinches were here...

(PS - That's Aralia racemosa - American spikenard - in the artfully out-of-focus background...) :)

Goldfinches Love Mexican Hats!

Photo by Maria de las Mercedes

No, not those Mexican hats...

These Mexican hats (Ratibida columnifera)!

My apologies if these photos are a little hazy - they were all taken through a windowpane.

How many goldfinches can you spy in this patch of Mexican hats? I think I see at least five (four males and one female). At various times, I spied up to 8 or 10 goldfinches feeding in this patch, but this was the most I could get in a single photo.

OK, this goldfinch is not feeding on Mexican hat seeds, but he is waiting on the branch of a chaste tree (Vitex agnus-castus) before swooping down into the patch of Mexican hats growing below.

Mexican hats are annual flowers, but they self-sow (somewhat vigorously) from year to year. I have many more Mexican hats in my garden this year than I did last year. And with more flowers, comes more bees. With more bees, comes more seeds. With more seeds, comes more birds.

And that's what makes the world go 'round.

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Zinnias and Butterflies

Why plant zinnias?

1. You can plant them from seed. For a couple of dollars, you can have flowers all year

2. They're pretty tough. Most of my zinnias survived drought and 100+ degree weather.

3. They attract butterflies!! Lots and lots of butterflies.

4. They also attract goldfinches eager to eat the seed.

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Playing Favorites #1: Cosmos bipinnatus and the American Goldfinch

Parents may be obligated to say that they love all their children equally, but gardeners are allowed to play favorites.

So I'm starting what I hope will become a semi-regular series of posts about some of my favorite plants. Today's featured plant is Cosmos bipinnatus. This self-sowing annual thrives amid heat, drought and poor clay soil. The finely-cut leaves seem untroubled by pests or diseases.

In my garden, cosmos is one of the bees' favorite flowers. Sometimes, at the end of the day or first thing in the morning, I'll even find a tuckered out bee asleep in a cosmos flower.

When the seeds mature, the bright and beautiful American Goldfinches come flying to enjoy the feast.

Sow cosmos seeds in full sun and enjoy non-stop flowers right through the summer and fall up until frost. The blooms make nice cut flowers and the more you snip, the more the plant produces.

Here are some scenes of Cosmos on a June evening in Tennessee: