Friday Fabulous Flower - Bottle brush

 This ia an aptly named plant, it does look like a bottle brush and even better is grows in the shade and flowers in midsummer.   Actually this shrub looks good enough that the flowering is almost a bonus.

 This is the bottle brush buckeye, Aesculus parviflora.  It just now is flowering, and some of ours is growing in pretty deep shade.  The only problem is that in bad Japanese beetle years the flowers can be totally eaten.