Flowers After The Rain: Photos By Amy

After just one night's good rain, billows of white blossoms cover the blackberry canes along the lane.  Their sweet fragrance fills the air.  It seems to me that new leaves have a subtle fragrance too, but  today it's the flowers that grab your attention.

Each fragile white flower will form a blackberry.  Called an aggregate fruit, it is made up of a whole bunch of single fruits containing a seed.  Each is represented by one tiny filament with a black spot on the end.  It is a treat to take the time to notice this small white beauty!

Seldom does the reality of plants in the garden come up to the image that the gardener sees in their head when they plant them.  Amy's photo of Campanula portenschhlagiana shows exactly what we were hoping for with this plant.  Growing from a space between two wall stones, the mere survival of these plants so poorly located defies expectations.  This plant was pushed into the crevice long after the wall was built.  There is no hidden supply of soil to supply nutrients for growth or flower production.  Add to that our weeks without rain and these really seem to be miracle flowers.

I had a very hard time choosing this image of a bumblebee on chive blossoms. All of Amy's photos seemed wonderful.  You might think that chive blossoms smell like onion, but they don't.  They smell like purple or a little like grapes.  This year most of our pollinators are bumblebees.  Honey bees are seldom seen in our garden now.  It is comical to watch these huge bees land on dainty flowers.  When one alights on a pansy, the flower stem and bee are pushed to the ground.  Undeterred, the bee collects its meal and moves to the next flower where the same sequence of events unfolds.

It's hard for me to think of grass as having flowers.  This little butterfly has no such difficulty.  He will hang upside down to get nectar.  We leave the ground level close-ups of butterflies for Amy!  She can still do the job beautifully!

Ed's Butter and Sugar Siberian iris is just opening.  This variety is more dainty than others.  Short narrow leaves are no match for our weeds.  Some of these have been moved out of the display garden in an attempt to get rid of the weeds.  Quack grass rhizomes that penetrate the crown of the iris are particularly troublesome.  Any piece of weed left behind will grow again.

It is such a pleasure to give Amy the camera and walk with her around the garden.  Her steady hand and artists eye capture beautiful images of our plants.  We hope that she visits again when the lilies in the foreground are in flower.