(I struggled with image classes on this post and think I fixed them but apologies if a later update blows out my edits. I’ll fix it. Eventually.)
Above: Bottle gentians, blue, late blooming, good cut flowers–in particular with late flowering orange and yellow daisy-shaped flowers and dahlias. Native.
Allegedly attractive to bumblebees, the egg-shaped flowers don’t open beyond what you see. For pollination to occur and for their utility as a pollinator food source, the flowers are only opened by the buzzing vibration of bumblebees, yet as attractive to bumblebees as they supposedly are, bumblebees don’t necessarily want to work harder than the rest of us to get dinner. They have other things to do as well. Given plenty of easier pickings…maybe they wisely choose to work no harder than necessary.
Furthermore…bees aren’t world travelers or big readers. If there are no similarly shaped flowers around, maybe the idea that bees simply know how to approach them is false.
This bed is on year three, and it looks very much like the bumblebees are getting the hang of it. The ones that have tattered looking edges are those that have been pried open by newly knowledgeable bees, perhaps. After a few years, this is the first time I’ve seen the gentians gaining approval from the bees, though I failed to get a good picture of them.
The colocasias/alocasias on the patio in bowls of water overwinter as houseplants. I sit them in pie plates filled with water and refill every few days. The colocasia on the right is ‘regular’ elephant ear. I overwinter these in the back corner of a badly insulated closet with the amaryllis.
The ficus and aloe are also houseplants, and the hibiscus which is barely visible among the collection of pots upper left-ish. Its main function is as a reliable home for spider mites the by February will populate the ‘Coffee cups’ alocasia. The hibiscus hasn’t bloomed in two years but it’s easy to over-focus on ‘winning’ and fail to ask, ‘Is forcing this plant to Frankenstein through life in a climate it dislikes a good use of my time?’ so I don’t ask myself any questions about it.
At some point I’ll do a post on alocasias versus colocasias. Information is conflicting about these plants. the only one I grow in pure soil without sitting in a bowl of water is the elephant ear on the far right (it is the type you can get at Walmart – Colocasia esculenta.
Technically I think Alocasia leaves point upward (as in the letter ‘A’) and Colocasias droop downward but I think those species are going to be combined or split further because that isn’t universally true and I at least don’t care for them the same. And confusingly I think ‘Coffee cups’ is a Colocasia and that one I grow in water (To be clear….when I say ‘in water’ I mean ‘in a clay pot that sits in a few inches of water’).
And to confuse things further I think they are very often mixed up and mislabeled in the trade.
For the dahlias, I’d been using 7′ partial hoop supports made from witch hazel and will probably do it again. It does require some maintenance year over year, but it is that or prune the dahlias and while I do some touch ups here and there I don’t have the stamina in August to tend to a great deal of dahlia pruning. So supports it is.
The area just behind that is a slightly higher terrace of bearded iris and a great many weeds I am pretending I will not have to deal with, ever.
They need a ground cover, and bearded iris are fussy about being overly moist, so I think their most likely future companion will be shallow-rooted and fleshy ‘John Creech’ sedum and 3-4 years of war with the weeds I failed to pull this year. Or the previous year.
So dramatic! And the flowers themselves are so elegant when they show up in early June:
The Japanese forest peonies seed around, which is quite nice, as there is something magical about them.
I’ll do a fuller post on the native asters in general, but the cultivars are doing well:
Although I haven’t seen the aster cultivar ‘bluebird’ in several years. I blame voles.
And the mums are coming into their own, having their moment on the stage:
Here’s a newbie to the cutting garden:
‘Herbstonne’ is new to the cutting garden this year, and the result of an end of season plant sale. This species/cultivar can grow to 7′ tall.
Last but not least of the flowers….
I love these. And they are a huge hit for pollinators looking for end of season food sources.
And finally, well, this is gross…
The tomato hornworms arrived a few weeks ago and went to town on the tomatoes. It was fine, the garden has given its all by September and so have I, and there are only so many tomatoes one can store.
The hornworms are beautiful and fascinating and also doomed. The small dots of white are the eggs of parasitic wasps, which paralyze and slowly ingest the worm.
It is impossible not to have mixed feelings because it’s a bit grisly out there at the moment, like there is medieval torture happening in the previously serene vegetable garden. On the other hand, gardening organically requires the embrace of natural checks and balances.