Hello from New Mexico! 27 July 2008

Greetings!  I am spending the evening recovering from jetlag, so i thought it would be the perfect time to upload a few of my most recent photos (hopefully older ones will be forthcoming, though not necessarily while I am away).  The below ones are all from the 25th.

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) remains a bee favorite!

There is a second bud just starting to open on the lower right.  I don’t know if this is a cultivar as I got it at last year’s estate sale simply labelled “purple coneflower”.  The bean patch is in the background.

Another shot:

The same bee enjoyed Echinacea purpurea ‘White Swan’ (given as a gift by a mail-order company this spring) as well:

The coneflower I got at the estate sale, simply labelled “white coneflower” (cultivar unknown), is the bloom ripening on the right.  (Its petals have turned from white to cream as it ages.)

Bud on unknown sunflower

Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’

I planted this in the spring, as some of you may recall.  I have been so beyond pleased with it.  It started blooming earlier than the species anise hyssop (I believe it is a hybrid between the species anise hyssop and another native hyssop) and just keeps going and going and going.  And bees love it just as much as the species anise hyssop!

In the background are the species anise hyssop (smaller similar bloomstalks in the lower left), rose campion ‘Gardener’s World’ STILL blooming after at least six weeks (magenta rose-shaped blooms on right), and other things.

Ironweed buds swelling (easier to see if you click for the larger version of the photo)

I bet the ironweed blooms while I’m away.  That’s the Maximillian sunflower in front of it; it opened its first few blooms in the couple days before I left.  I’m so proud of the ironweed for having adapted to the dry, windy site.  It wilted a lot in its first weeks there and I was wondering if I’d made a mistake in thinking it could survive such tough conditions, but it’s done so beautifully that it’s now putting up new stalks from its roots.

Hardy marjoram (really an oregano) delicately blooming behind (blurry in foreground) centaurea ‘Colchester White’.

I’ve never grown this centaurea (a tender one) before and I really like it.  Its silvery leaves light up this area of the garden and it looks great with coreopsis ‘Zagreb’ (which has been blooming beside another of its arching leaf sprays).

The unknown plant (the one I couldn’t even find in any of my charts or notes from last year, but was sure I’d intentionally planted at some point) has indeed turned out to be a patrinia as I suspected. This was unfortunately my best picture.  That’s one of the cardinal climbers winding in around it; the cardinal climber outgrew its pole and started winding back and forth between the patrinia stalks.  It helps them stay steadier in the wind.

It has done astonishingly well (and this despite being damaged by both of this summer’s hailstorms) and the tallest bloomstalk is now about five feet and getting closer to surpassing my own height each day. It is BELOVED by small pollinators – I see at least one on it each time I walk by, no matter what the weather – and just before I left I saw a huge wasp, a kind that catches and eats prey we humans consider “pests”, nectaring at it as well.   Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’ (just behind the patrinia) and Echinacea purpurea (vivid in background) share this shot.

Globe thistle finishing blooming (left) with a bloom of sunflower ‘Vanilla Ice’ (right).  Globe thistle is another bee favorite.

Agastache cana ‘Heather Queen’ in foreground; hybrid agastache ‘Acapulco Orange’ floriferous in background (another unbelievably outstanding performer this year!).  ‘Heather Queen’ and ‘Acapulco Orange’ are both supposed to survive winters in my USDA zone (allegedly 6B), so we’ll see if they actually do.  (Agastaches, like dianthus and lavenders, tend to survive better in drier winter climates, though. My garden is unusual in better mimicking Mediterranean climates than typical Northeastern North America gardens, so more lavenders and dianthus survive for me than generally do for others in my area.)

I had seen bumblebees occasionally try to feed from my long, tubular agastaches that are so heartily recommended for hummingbirds (my four cultivars this year are the hardy ‘Acapulco Orange’ and ‘Heather Queen’ and the tender ‘Summer Breeze’ and ‘Apricot Sprite’) and they had given up, so I’d figured you needed to be tiny (I’d seen very small pollinators simply crawl into the bloom) or have a long feeding mechanism (like a hummingbird or a butterfly) to be able to successfully gather nectar.  But then a day or two before I left, I saw something fascinating:  a bumblebee figured out how to feed from them, and since almost no other insect is doing it in my garden, spent at least fifteen minutes wandering from bloom to bloom and stalk to stalk gathering the pollen from such a rich, nearly untouched source.  It would stick its head right in the bloom, looking for all the world like it was stuck in a Venus fly trap.  It would spend an average of thirty seconds stuck partway into the bloom, and then would pull itself out and move on to a new bloom.  Bees are so interesting to me!  I find their learning process fascinating, and am very curious as to what the difference is between different ones – why some figure one thing out and others don’t, why some try a new-to-them flower and others don’t (and why some try harder than others to figure out how to eat at a new flower), why some seem to favor certain colored flowers or certain species of flowers, etc.

Lantana ‘Red Spread’

I’ve never tried this one before.  So far I like it.  Lavenders shown behind it (providing nice foliage & bloom contrast).