What’s Blooming – Late May/Early June

It’s time for me to do another edition of “What’s Blooming”  before those blog post ideas start piling up in my head again.  Let’s jump right in with some favorites of mine, that have actually already come and gone, peonies.  I have 4 peony shrubs along the side of my driveway.  I don’t know the names of the specific varieties, but I have:

a dark pink,

a medium pink,

white

and a pale pink with a bit of fuschia edging.  You can see this edging a little better before they fully open:

In the same garden with my irises, I’ve planted some other perennials to keep the color going once the irises have faded.  The next one to bloom after the irises, is what I call my “crazy poppy.”  I call it this because of its bright orange color…

its funky purple middle…

its wild looking bud (if you click on this photo and head to my Project 365 entry with this picture, you find some pretty funny comments when I played a guessing game with the folks who commented on the project)…

…and this plant’s tenacity!  When I first planted this flower, I thought I had purchased something more to the reddish-pink color category in keeping with the color scheme of this particular garden.  When it first bloomed that shocking orange, I actually tried to get rid of it.  But it just kept coming back, so I kept it.  Now it has kind of grown on me, despite the way it clashes with everything else I’ve planted in that garden.

A received a little surprise among my blooms this year.  I have an old-fashioned whiskey-barrel planter in which I plant a “spike” surrounded by annuals each year.  My girls marvel at how late into the fall and sometimes even early winter that spike survives.  This year, however, something else apparently survived.  Before I got around to planting this year, I noticed greenery coming up in the barrel.  I didn’t think much of it, assuming them to be weeds.  Weeds they were not!

I  planted those thickly settled members of the carnation family (I think)  last year. (Tracy, can you help me out?  I can’t remember their name!) I know they are not perennials, so I can only assume they re-seeded themselves and managed to survive a New England winter.

Growing in great abundance this year are my clematis vines.  Again I don’t know the specific variety.  I’m a bit disappointed in the orientation of the vines this year.  You see this view..

..faces down the side of the house that no one ever travels.  I meant for them to face out toward my driveway, but all the blooms this year are on the other side!  They are looking quite prolific this year too.  There are a ton of buds still to open.  I think I got quite lucky with the light for these photos because I’m pleased with the true color of the purple that is shown here.

While I was happily snapping away at this prodigious proliferation of purple, I noticed a little visitor:

While I’ve never been a fan of spiders, a cute little daddy-long-legs generally doesn’t send me running for the hills.  Speaking of small visitors, one morning last week while I was getting ready for work, I found this one scurrying around my grill!

While not as adorable as Tracy’s recent shots, I thought it was pretty cool to have a little red squirrel  showing up on my deck for a couple mornings!  It may not look like a red squirrel in this shot, but I swear there’s a red tail hanging behind him or her.  I took that shot through the sliding glass door on my “behind glass” setting so I could grab the picture without sending the subject scrambling from the sound of the squeaky door.

I have a few other shots of things in bloom that I have posted on my Flickr photostream that I haven’t added to this edition of What’s Blooming.  I just decided they weren’t all that spectacular, but if you feel like checking ’em out, please feel free! (They are kind of scattered over pages 1-3)  If there’s one that you are curious about, or think maybe I should have included in this post, please let me know in the comments.