How's It Growing: June 19, 2025
Rain, heat, rain, heat, and repeat. I’m not sure I’m appreciating this particular weather pattern but I think the garden is. The roses are in their glory days and other summer perennials are starting to flower, as well.
The tasks in the garden and around the inn are also picking up, so you’ll have to forgive me for this blog post being more or less just a photo dump of flowers! There is just so much beauty happening and I can’t help myself from wanting to capture it for endless enjoyment.
Below is the climbing hydrangea that “ate” the slate pillar at our garden gate. Every couple of year we have to hack it back to keep it under control. On the other side from that gate it is in the process of taking over a clematis pillar.
The deer seem to be leaving our White Garden alone this year so we get to enjoy the Goat’s Beard (Aruncus Misty Lace) and the Korean Dogwood. The white Astilbe will soon be blooming as well.
This is the brief period of time when I like Bishop’s Weed - when it is flowering. The rest of the time it is a pernicious weed that we have to keep trying to halt it’s spread.
The peony show is just about over but here is one last hurrah!
The battle continues. I’m running out of armament to protect the so called critter-resistant plants from being savaged by the local woodchuck. We’ve given him the name of Tough Chuck because of his grouchy expression and his persistence in trying to thwart my efforts to create a lovely garden in front of our cottage building. However, his flower munching days may be numbered. I’m going to swap out the individual plant cages for a fence around the whole garden bed. Maybe then he’ll go back to munching on the Bishop’s Weed and we can live in happy co-existence.
FYI: The little spot of non-natural green in the dirt is a chunk of Irish Spring soap. This has been useful in keeping the deer away but I think T. Chuck is eating that, too. There are little teeth marks in it.
In the veg garden progress is fast for some and slow for others. The Blackberry potatoes have turned in to a lovely shrub, the snap peas are providing yummy snacks in the garden, and the Blue Hopi Corn is starting to look promising.
Ok, so now comes the flower image dump! I’m sure I take the exact same photos every year, but every year the stunning beauty gets me and I just have to take another photo.
If you are interested in what a particular variety of flower or plant is, be sure to ask. I’m in the process of building an central image library for each area of our gardens so that when someone asks about a plant, I’ll be able to immediately look it up. I’ve been keeping this information sort of haphazardly over the years, with the details scattered in various notebooks and binders. I’m now trying to bring order to the chaos.
