Six on Saturday – 29JUN2024

Chris Mousseau

Another soggy Saturday – glad to have cut the grass yesterday; also glad to have taken a few flower photos so that I can again join Jim and his crew with Six on Saturday – six things in the garden this week.

I’ll start with these Asiatic lilies – ‘Tinilco’ – now at their peak. These five bulbs are the earliest Lilium to bloom in my garden and each year I admire their strong, thick stalks topped with up to a dozen lovely, reddish-coral flowers. It’s a bit of a trade-off, this year, to have had one of the stalks lopped off a month or so ago, leaving it to grow without its topping, while at the same time another bulb’s offshoot has produced a single flower. So now perhaps I have six bulbs :).

Flower top was eaten off by something a month or so ago.
New lily bulb – I’m very careful with the string trimmer!

Next is the native lanceleaf Coreopsis – Coreopsis lanceolata – aka Tickseed. I love how cheerful and bright the flowers are this time of year, and how easy they are to propagate – simply wait for the seedheads to mature, snip them off and scatter seeds where you want them to appear next year. I find they’re not very combative with other plants though and will easily get lost or give up if too crowded.

Since I mentioned seeds…Nigella is one of those annuals that will keep coming back, if you want it to. It has one of the most interesting flowers, comes in some striking colours and develops a fascinating seedhead – perfect for dried flower arrangements. In moist, rich soil they’ll grow beautifully but even in tougher conditions, like my patch in the compacted, dry, never watered area under the house eaves, they come back year after year.

A lovely, surprise addition to the garden last year was this native Penstemon digitalis – Foxglove Beardtongue. It popped up next to the asparagus – one of those garden mysteries that help make life interesting!

It will be July in a few days, and that means it’s daylily season. Like many other gardeners in Canada, I have swaths of the common, orange Hemerocallis fulva, loved by some (including me) but detested by others for being invasive here. I haven’t taken any photos of it – yet – but instead here are three other daylilies now in bloom in my garden, varietal names long forgotten.

This one I started from seed – surprisingly simple to do – and is likely a cross of some sort.

I’ll leave with a shot of a small portion of the front yard before I took out the mowers yesterday. It’s a small, protected area bounded by shrubs and newly transplanted ornamental grasses – I can’t get the riding mower in there so it usually goes a few weeks between being cut back with the push mower. Cathy, in Germany, may appreciate the meadow-like appearance, with wildflowers making a very pretty palette. The small yellow flowers are bird’s foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) – it’s not native but can easily take over an unmowed area. Bees love it, and so do I, and although I mowed this particular patch I left strategic ovals or circles of it in the yard as a whole (the two photos, below). Also in this small patch is sweet red clover and Lamium – a gorgeous blue ground cover thingy that seems to be taking over the lawn this year. (Not sure I’ll call it gorgeous if it decides to also take over the gardens.) There’s a close-up in the feature photo.

Here’s the small patch…to my Canadian readers, have a Happy Canada Day long weekend! If you’re in the U.S. – all of next week will be like a holiday, right? To everyone else – enjoy the last weekend of June!

26 Comments

  2. Here in the Southern US, Hemerocallis fulva is called Ditch Lily. It grows gracefully and colorfully across the countryside. It is long-lived and resilient. I love it.

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  3. Like you, I enjoy the cheerfulness of Coreopsis. Mine won’t flower for a week or two yet, unless the weather warms up and tempts them to open. The daylilies are looking very colourful too. I enjoy seeing other people’s meadow areas – my grassy area is tiny, and a place our grandchildren play on, so it remains (most of the time!) well clipped. The way you have left ovals & circles is effective.

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    1. I keep our grass, quite a large area, mostly cut so as to discourage mosquitos and ticks. I also have to somewhat embarrassingly admit that I do enjoy riding the lawnmower tractor thingy…

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  6. Lanceleaf Coreopsis is native here too. I don’t have any as I usually have bad luck with Coreopsis. I love the wildflowers and the garden surprises like the Penstemons. Summer looks great in your garden.

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  8. Tickseed does not sound as appealing as coreopsis. Ick! The penstemon is nice, particularly since it is white. Some species are native here, but I have never had one appear within a garden or landscape.

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  9. Your Lamium looked familiar. Sure enough, its genus is that of our plant known as henbit: Lamium amplexicaule. Ours tends to bloom pinkish, and everywhere — it’s not native, but often enjoyed as a ground cover. Here, it’s an early bloomer, and often can be found in February; it got its common name because chickens enjoy nibbling on it.

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  10. Love your penstemon , lucky you having it just arrive from nowhere! Also love your meadow flowers, my meadow has exploded this year with so many new flowers including an orchid which just arrived from nowhere, the insects love it all.

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  12. What a lovely six this week Chris. And thanks for the link! Your lamium is a weed I have too and I believe it is actually Self -Heal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunella_vulgaris). In fact I have just pulled a huge clump of it out of my Moon Bed! LOL! We also have the lotus and it can get really tall. It is lovely, isn’t it. And leaving it standing will be much appreciated by the pollinators. The clover looks so pretty among it. I am so glad to learn Coreopsis will self seed as I have planted some in my flower beds. Have a good week Chris!

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