Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Signs of the Seasons


Summer continues to change day by day, and since I practically live outside every day now, I notice a lot of the little changes more than I used to when we mainly visited on weekends. The birds are quieter now, the musical spring calls gone and birds busy raising young, moving stealthily among the branches, to avoid giving away their nest location. Crops are maturing in the farm fields, and I amuse myself trying to recognize them; the hay is mostly in. Flowers in the meadow change constantly. Yesterday I noticed the first Queen Anne's Lace in bloom; soon they will turn wide stretches of roadside and field into white. The first Evening Primrose is in bloom too, joining dozens of other 'weeds' like vetch, viper's bugloss, daisy fleabane (above) and brown-eyed susans in turning the meadow colourful.


And in the garden, the peonies and iris are suddenly over, while the daisies, valerian, sweet william, bear's britches, and daylilies are out. The 'stella dora' daylilies (widely used in institutional landscaping) border the path in the garden with their small (for a daylily) orange blooms, but the fancier daylilies open one huge blossom at a time, welcoming the day with a new flower.






The hostas, known mainly for the foliage - and we have a lot of them - are now coming into bloom. Not as showy or colourful as many other garden flowers, but when you have a lot of them the flowers turn long swaths of the garden white.

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