What's in bloom.

Well, blogging has apparently become a two day event. Yesterday I got the pictures put on and it took so long that I had to wait until today to write the crazy thing. Well, I guess that is better than most of last week when the website wouldn't let me on! Anyway, here's what's in bloom around my yard.

Slightly blurry (slightly? What're you talking about? It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting! Slightly blurry, yeah, someone might buy that....{Shut up, I'm blogging here!}) Where was I? Oh yeah, slightly blurry and really confused, this is my pink weigelia. Usually it blooms in late April, this year it bloomed in March and now I'm getting sporadic little blooms here and there. Hummers love these shrubs.

This is a caladium in a hanging basket. Kathy and I bought a box of about 50 caladium bulbs at Sam's and I thought that these were the only ones coming up, but I have found a few coming up in the four-o'clocks. I guess I was just getting impatient. I was getting a little miffed at Sam's I'll admit. But apparently all is well. And yes I know that this isn't a bloom, but if you've ever seen caladium flowers you understand why they're grown for the foliage.

This is just one of our stands of liatris. The cool thing about liatris is that they are a beautiful shade of purple (they also come in pinks and whites) and that they are one of the few (maybe the only) spike type flower that opens from the top down instead of the bottom up. Just a little liatris trivia, try that for your next bar bet. The uncool thing about liatris is that, yes, this is only one of our stands of liatris. We bought a box of bulbs (yes from Sam's) about four years ago and every year since I have thinned liatris. In case anyone wants any, this fall I'll be thinning them again and if you don't take them I'll be throwing about fifty bulbs away!

This is one of those weird plants that I don't really adore because it isn't all that cool of a plant. It's scarlet runner bean, an annual vine, that I planted about three years ago and I just keep putting it in the same place because it isn't any trouble. I save seeds from it every year and just sow in the Spring.

Another case of the plants not reading the books. Check any of the manuals and they will all tell you that you have to dig up your dahlia tubers if you don't live in a frost free zone. When we lived in central Florida when I was a child my mother dug up her dahlias to lovingly store them in dry peat moss till all the nasty frosts were over. Which is where I learned to hate digging up dahlia tubers. So a few years ago when we went to Sam's and bought dahlia bulbs I figured I would just let them die and buy new the next year. The next year we went to buy more dahlia bulbs and planted them, and then the year's before came up. Since then we have been having about 40 to 50% of the previous years dahlia production. This year we have about 12 Plants coming up. I figure in about 3 years we'll have to buy some more. Something besides light pink please!

Kathy is enamored of giant head sunflowers. If you will look at the picture close, you'll see this is a species sunflower. This is what happens when you are too lazy to the flowers off before they start dropping seed. I always figure if God wants to plant it, I'll enjoy it. Kathy disagrees when God plants Johnson grass. She says this year I'm pulling sunflowers so she can plant the giants next year. And some sunflower trivia: sunflowers are members of the Asteraceae family which means that the flower is not really a flower. It is actually thousands of tiny flowers, some circular, some ray type.

We went down to farmer's market the other day and found these great Persian shields and begonias and they immediately went into the cement planter by the front steps. The shield has since been trimmed back a little bit and is bushing out some. I'll post some more pics when it gets a little fuller.

And on the same trip we got some sweet potato vines. Notice how well-behaved the Marguerite (the light green) is. It is keeping to itself and giving the blacks plenty of room. I'll take another pic in a few weeks to show you how it has about choked the blacks out. It is an aggressive little sucker!

I know I've shown the flowers on the chaste tree before, but just one more reminder of why I love these things.

Well, for those of you that have been praying, mom is supposed to come home on Friday. She of course was ready last week and never mind that she couldn't stand up. Keep her health in prayer, please and if you have any extra prayers ask for me and my sister to have strength so we won't choke her.

Spend some time today thinking about the flowers that God gives us. Large or small, Smelling like perfume or a rotting corpse, they all have a place in God's world and he watches over every one, and if he'll watch over them, how much more of his attention will he give to us?

Wayne