Four Out Of Sixty-Seven Garden Pictures

The star of this picture is clearly the perfect Black Swallowtail Butterfly sipping nectar from the Purple Coneflower.  That would be a native butterfly on a native plant, but the Gloriosa Daisies and the slightly perforated leaf of a Mexican Sunflower are my favorites too!

Another favorite of mine, the Grey-headed cone flower, is a native too, but it is not native to New York.  It seems to have no shortage of pollinators just the same.  I love the way these lovely yellow flowers float above the stone wall on slender stems.  I wonder about the name since the buds look green to me and the tiny flowers are clearly dark brown.  This photo shows how the flowers begin at the bottom and finish at the very tip. Like most composite flowers these look gorgeous for a long time.

You might think that a plant named Arnica Montana would be native to Montana, but no, it comes from Europe.  Amy planted this one from seed.  I checked to make sure and the leaves definitely match the desired plant.  We actually have two of them. At first I thought we had nothing but weeds here but the Arnica is coming on strong and will win in the end especially if it gets a little help.

This wood betony plant is hardly ready for a photo op. It's flowers are nice, but the leaves are obscured by the cage and weeds.  It is the Clearwing Hummingbird Moth that makes this picture special for me.  If you have never seen one of these unique creatures You have missed something amazing!

Ed's daylilies have been so outstanding.  The brilliant  red to orange to yellow color of this one makes it pop against the green background.  Why even the ant is in focus.  I always think of my  Father when I take 67 pictures in one afternoon.  He would have loved  digital photography!  Many of today's pictures  have been already hit the trash.  Others have been saved perhaps to be used later.  These four I had to share! 

A Perfect November Day

The weather forecast for today predicted a fantastic day.  A hard overnight frost was followed by clear skies and temperatures that reached well into the 50's.  This glorious afternoon was spent running fallen maple leaves through the lawn mower creating perfect garden mulch.  The bags of shredded leaves will be piled and covered with a tarp.  If all goes as planned, we will find fine, dry, aged, ph proper mulch for our basil planting next June.  How much better than that does it ever get?

Our original Gloriosa daisies were given to us many years ago by Elle, an elderly gardener that took us under her wing.  Many of her plants still grow in our gardens so we remember her fondly and often.  This last of the season flower looks rather stunning dressed with frost.

Foxglove has found many locations around the garden to send down roots.  We prefer to have it grow at the base of stone walls.  That type of location seems satisfactory to the plant as it reseeds wildly there.  A generous coating of frost highlights the texture of these leaves.

Cone flower has been a favorite of the lady of the garden forever.  It now grows here in unmanageable numbers.  We hate to discard living plants but a run through the compost pile happens to this plant rarely.  An end of the season flower still holding petals and a perfect seed head looks lovely with its frost overcoat beginning to melt in the morning sun.

If our overnight freeze was harsh enough to end nearly all of the tiny biting black bugs, this will have been a truly perfect  day.