Wednesday Wandering

Walking through my cottage garden....

The roses this year are the best they have been in years. In the past several years the deer or rabbits have eaten the canes over winter and as the roses would recover somewhat from that stress and start to bloom then the Japanese beetles would move in and destroy the blooms.  

I am thankful this year I can stop and smell lots and lots of roses! 

This one is called Seven Sisters. It's a rather unruly old rose. My husband's aunt gave me a cutting years ago and I planted it on a little trellis in the middle of a circle where I have a fairy garden. For years I kept the Seven Sisters confined to the little trellis in the middle of the fairy garden.   Then one day a couple of limbs of a giant mulberry tree in the border line between the cottage garden and field fell over in a windstorm and landed right smack dab into the middle of the fairy garden. Limbs can't easily be removed so they became a place for Seven Sisters to climb and you can't see it from this view but what is left of the fairy garden circle is between two mulberry limbs. One of these days I'll get up the strength to move all the miniature plants, sundial and stump with fairy door to a new fairy garden and just let the rose ramble where it will.   When the grandkids (and some great nieces and nephews) were younger the fairies sometimes left tiny gifts for them to find so the first thing they would do when they came to visit would be to ask if they could go to the fairy garden.  Then they would ask if they could play on the tire swing.  Ah, memories!

There are several Dwarf Asiatic Lilies in the fairy garden in bloom now. I don't think the plants are even a foot high but they are loaded with blooms. My husband bought me one cute plant in bloom a long time ago and I put it in a pot on the deck. The Fall of that year I planted the bulb in the fairy garden. Since then I have been able to divide it several times. The gift that keeps on giving!

(Hmmm...pink and yellow with pops of green might make a nice color combo for a quilt). 

The Martagon Lilies (aka Turk's Cap Lilies) are still in bloom. They like dappled shade. It was getting too shady for the poor darlings so last week I spent some time cutting away scrub brush (mostly invasive honeysuckle) that pops up back along the fence line and now they are back to dappled shade. 

The yellow and pink ones bloom later than the burgandy ones. 

Clematis

Clematis

Foxglove. I started these from seed several years ago. Now I'm hoping to start more in different colors. The seeds are like dust. 

Pearly everlasting. I started this perennial from seed too. The flowers can be dried.  Looks like this little one has some type of rust. 

My Purple Coneflowers are starting to bloom. I think due to dry conditions the plants are the shortest I have ever seen them. 

And finally Armenian Basket flower in bloom. I started this from seed a couple of years ago and this is the first time I've seen it in bloom. My husband picked out the seeds when were were browsing an online seed catalog. I planted it down at the top of the cutting garden because I thought I read it can get invasive so I put it where I could keep an eye on it. It's in front of an old piece of snow fence I put around four small blueberry plants I put in last year.  The white flowers in the background are a native wildflower (weed) that popped up out of nowhere and are called Daisy Fleabane. The purple flowers seend themselves everywhere and are Sweet Rocket.