Hot and Dry with a Strong Chance of Balloons

The more I grow balloon flower (Platycodon grandiflorus), the more it impresses me.

We only had two days of rain all of September.

Temperatures were way above normal. (Or perhaps this is the 'new normal'?)

So it was hot, dry, sunny and I rarely watered.

Many plants would wilt or go dormant. Some would give up the ghost. But not balloon flower - it kept sailing through, pushing out more and more cheerful, cooling blue flowers.

These flowers are not exactly pollinator magnets, but they do attract some creatures.

Can you spot the tiny pollinator here?

In my experience, balloon flower has a very long blooming season, but it tends to slow down in midsummer. If you cut (or break) the stems way back, it will soon regrow and rebloom.

Individual plants seem to be long-lived. They don't spread through rhizomes, though clumps can get bigger over time. Balloon flower does self-sow. These volunteers are amenable to transplantation and they're not hard to pull if you find yourself with too many balloons!

Aliens in the Mist

Take us to your gardener!

They're here!

But don't be alarmed ...  They come in peas. (Sorry, awful gardener joke.)

You've gotta admit, these Love-in-a-Mist seedpods look awfully extraterrestrial.

These are all self-sown plants, by the way. Love-in-a-Mist (Nigella damascena) is an annual flower that self sows robustly. So far, I'm liking it a lot, though I may try cutting off some of the seedpods before they mature so that next year's crop doesn't get way further out of hand.

That said, I've found that seedlings are easy to pull. Last year, the seeds sprouted in the fall and the plants stayed green and healthy even when temperatures dropped to below zero degrees Fahrenheit with no insulating snow cover. It was nice to have something green to look at in the depths of winter when the landscape was mostly brown.

When temperatures warmed, Love-in-a-Mist took off - rocketing upwards into a ferny, wispy mass that's been topped over the past week or so with intricate complex flowers that start off nearly white and mature to a deep dark blue.

I feel like the flowers lasted long last year, but this year they seem to be blooming in fast-forward, racing through their color changes and then producing their wild E.T. seedpods which will decorate the plants for months to come.

Pretty blue flowers. Weird and wild seedpods. That's Love-in-a-Mist for ya.

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: