Serendipity Gardens by Carol Hegel Lang

The month of July not only has fireworks in the sky for July Fourth, but the gardens become an explosion of color as the annuals, lilies, daylilies, rudbeckia, hydrangeas and the rest of the perennials start to put on their show. Just this week, the annual poppies have started to open to a bright crimson with black centers all along the driveway mirroring the color of the patio gerberas planted in the front garden  expansion. Not to be outdone is the supertunia vista fuchsia blooming in the whiskey barrel that is next to the Victorian gazebo. What a riot of color these deep pink colors are providing in the gardens.

Just starting to bloom is the self-seeding annual coreopsis, a bright yellow with a deep brown center, that is sprinkled throughout the cutting garden and along the driveway. The blue bachelor buttons have been blooming for several weeks, adding color while the rest of the garden has been forming flower buds. Most of the daylilies are just about ready to open and will provide many different colors of yellow and pink in many of the gardens. It won’t be long and the phlox will start putting on their fragrant show that will last until fall and become a magnet for the butterflies and hummingbirds.

The two new hydrangeas, bobo hydrangea paniculata, that I added to the expanded front garden are stealing the show with their huge creamy white flower heads. It has taken me two years to get these beauties, as they are new and were in short supply from every garden catalog that I tried to order them from. This year they were available locally at my favorite garden center. Thank you, Tony Hill, for carrying these lovely beauties!

Along the north side of the house is another new variety of hydrangea paniculata, strawberry sundae, and it is gorgeous and will work well in either containers or a small garden.

Once the lilies start blooming, there will be color in all of the gardens for much of July and early August, and many of them are very fragrant. Next year the expanded garden will have even more of these as I have placed orders for about fifty more of these beauties to grace this garden and give me lots of color.

It would be difficult for me to pick my favorite flower blooming during this month because they are all beautiful and the added bonus is that they are magnets for butterflies, bees and hummingbirds.

Along the split-rail fence the cannas are growing in leaps and bounds and soon the bright red flowers they produce will really make this front garden sizzle. I am so glad that I decided to plant them along the fence this year because I will be able to enjoy them from my kitchen windows and watch the hummingbirds from an even better place.

This year the cosmos will really be a surprise for me as most of them were the ones that self-seeded and usually that means they will be the single pink variety and not the doubles. I did plant a small row of mixed doubles because, with the wet spring, I couldn’t get into the garden and plant the ones that I wanted without compacting the soil. Once the small row was planted I decided to just leave all the self-seeders that came up and be surprised at what colors bloom this year. That is what I love about the gardens: you never know what plants you will have and where they will be in the gardens. It’s like a birthday surprise and Christmas all wrapped up into one package.

My favorite eyeliner lilies will be open in a few days and this spring I added even more of them to really give an impact when you walk into the garden. The blooms are enormous and white-edged with a deep brown and black line and really catch your eye. They are replacing the delphiniums that I took out of the garden last fall so they have to be gorgeous.

“Each moment of the year has its own beauty.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Carol Hegel Lang is a green thumb residing in Albert Lea. Her column appears weekly. Email her at carolhegellang@gmail.com.