Friday Fabulous Flower - Bottle brush buckeye

 Not too many plants blossom in the middle of summer.  But the bottle brush buckeye is reliable shade tolerating plant.  Not only that but once established it manages with minimal watering.  If you have enough room this is a great plant.  Our gardens have two clusters of this shrub and it looks wonderful.

Once you see the brushy white spikes of flowers you'll understand where the common name bottle brush  buckeye comes from.  Aesculus parviflora is one of several buckeye species including red buckeye and Ohio buckeye in our gardens. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Phlox

This is not a wild phlox, but it is not a typical whimpy cultivar either; it resists powdery mildew and all the cultivars tried in this garden don't except for the spring native P. divaricata.  This plant survived a "weedy" attempt by the former owners to have a prairie and it is a big old thing reaching 5 feet tall with substantial stems and big showy panicles of pink flowers.  With the narrow tubes and small corolla opening this is without question a butterfly flower; phlox is a must for any butterfly gardens.  Bumblebees steal nectar from the bases of the corolla tubes. It makes itself at home and makes the late summer garden rather colorful.  If this strikes any of you as any thing in particular, let us know.  A few plants have pale pink flower, but most are this shocking pink.  

Summer flowering woodland perennial - ramp

While woodlands are alive with spring flowers, there isn't much flowering going on in the forest understory during the summer.  The reason for this is simple: there isn't much light and making fruit and seeds requires energy. However in the spring before the canopy closes off the light, lots of plants must compete for the limited number of pollinators.  A few plants have a different solution. Geophytes, plants with underground perennial structures (bulbs or corms), store energy during a photosynthetic season and then use their stored energy to flower and fruit either before or after their green, leafy growth period in the spring.  You are probably used to geophytes that flower before their leaves come up, but in our woodland areas a few flower after the leaves die back, and you often miss seeing them in flower because you aren't out there looking for flowers except in the spring. TPP wasn't looking for them either, but just stumbled upon some summer flowering in the wooded nether regions of the gardens: wild leek/ramp (Allium tricoccum).  This was a surprise because this species while having resided in the wildish, wooded portions of our gardens for a few years now, has never flowered before. So it gets added to the list!  All you see is a cluster of naked scapes about 30 cm tall with a terminal umbel of white flowers typical enough of whatever family the genus is now placed in. In case you didn't know, the lily family has been chopped up quite a bit by molecular data. OK, quick check, and Allium is now in the Amaryllis family many of which bear their flowers in umbels. Didn't have time to photograph it, so this image is courtesy of Fritzflohrreynolds via the Wikimedia Creative Commons. 

Friday Fabulous Flowers - Survivor Lilies

A few blogs ago a sudden and violent thunderstorm devastated quite a number of the hundreds of "magic lilies" (Lycoris squamigera) that annually adorn our late summer lawns and gardens. A goodly number survived by either flowering later or because of a sheltered location beneath some of our large trees. These are quite a mundane plant, but extremely easy to grow and they provide a week of great color in mid-August when the heat and drought of summer can make gardens fade. This has to be one of the most reliable of naturalizing bulbs. Some of the clumps in our gardens are decades old, and when transplanted they almost always grow and flower in their new locations. However don't plant them too close to smaller spring bulbs because they produce a large clump of leaves in the spring that can crowd out smaller plants. Magic lilies grow well around the base of lawn trees.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Rhododendron

Friday was one of those days when you set out to do too many things, and for reasons too difficult to explain, not to mention what some would call misplaced priorities, but still the Phactor will apologize for not posting a fabulous flower on Friday. The Rhododendron-Azalea season comes to an end in mid-June with the flowering of this Rhododendron, a big, old-fashioned plant that was well established on the property when we acquired the two. It tends to lean up against the chimney, and at 8-9 feet it dominates the back of this garden. The particular variety is uncertain (anyone?), but it has a wonderful quality largely lacking in most of the short, common varieties, although many gardens are too small, or too well kept, to deal with its size and more open branching habit. In particular this shrub is a welcome addition to the early summer garden by flowering well after all of the other Rhododendron/Azaleas. Now if only the laural oak under which it grows would stop dropping branches on it in fits of jealosy.