My Garden Is the Talk of the Town

My garden is featured on the television show 'Talk of the Town' for the entire month of August, airing at a variety of time slots. If you are outside the viewing area, you can watch the program by clicking HERE. My segment is the first eight minutes of the hour-long show. You'll see what bloomed in my garden in July when the shooting took place. At that time the garden was peaking, but there are still plenty of flowers for August's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, so I'm linking with Carol at May Dreams Gardens where gardeners from around the world show off their bloomers on the 15th of each month.

You can see some of my August flowers in the picture above -- top: purple cone flower Echinacea purpurea, bottom right: phlox Phlox paniculata 'Bright eyes', bottom left: foxglove Digitalis x hybrida 'Foxlight™ plum gold.' I planted 'Foxlight plum gold' with some delphiniums in June -- choosing them because they are iconic English cottage garden plants. The label on the foxglove said it would bloom all summer. I didn't really believe it would, but as you can see there are still lot of beautiful flowers on the plant. As an added bonus, one of the delphiniums has started a second bloom.

Here they are when I first planted them:

Yarrow, foxgloves, and delphiniums in June 2017

I planted purple cone flowers, bee balm, shasta daisies, and phlox many years ago; they continue to star in my summer cottage garden. In the cutting garden, a variety of zinnias steal the show with their vibrant colors. My favorite is 'Zowie! Yellow Flame.'

The Cutting Garden

The orange and yellow zinnia is my favorite, Zinnia 'Zowie! Yellow Flame.'

The profuse planting in the Abundance Garden demonstrates how I chose its name. The obedience flowers are in full bloom and attracting a huge number of bees.

Cleome and Obedience in Abundance

Another bee magnet is hyssop. See how many are in the picture below.

Left: hyssop; top right: chocolate mint; bottom right: giant blue lobelia

The herb garden in the trug on the patio is flourishing. This year, however, the canna plants in the patio tubs have no flowers. Lesson learned: don't place too many corms in each planter. (Well, I couldn't separate the tight clumps.) But their striped leaves are lovely still.

Herb garden and cannas. Pushing through the fence is 'Pinky Winky' hydrangea.

'Pinkie Winkie' is turning red.

The little bunny (bottom right) is happy with lawn clover and no longer in the kitchen garden,

That little rabbit, called Nuisance, did a lot of damage in the kitchen garden. I found a spray deterrent that he didn't like and he moved out, I'm happy to say. The kitchen garden's biggest disappointment this year, however, is the failure of the tomatoes to turn red, due to the cool, wet summer with not enough hot sun.

Green tomatoes; Swiss chard and cabbages in the coldframe; onions drying; leeks.

Of course, we had more zucchini than we could handle even with only one plant, and a glut of cucumbers gave us a stock of freezer pickles. Tomorrow I'm canning red beets. We even have some bush beans now the bunny moved out. A productive year in spite of the crazy weather. The sun and heat have been so lacking, my sunflowers did not begin to bloom until today.

The sunflowers had no blooms two days ago.

For GBBD -- a sunflower bloom at last!

A few more pictures:

The red daylily is 'Chicago Apache'

Finally, hostas are still blooming in Serenity Garden:

Serenity

The television shoot took 4 1/2 hours for the eight minute segment, but Marie and Kim were a lot of fun to work with. I think the team did a great editing job; I'm happy with the result. (You wouldn't want to hear me talk for four hours anyway.) I hope you enjoy it.

Wishing my dear garden friends a happy Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day and, of course, thanks to Carol for hosting our favorite meme.

Pamela x

(BTW -- have you checked out Carol's wonderful book, Potted and Pruned: Living the Gardening Life? I will tell you about it in my next posting when I will review some of the best gardening books I've read this summer.)

Sit and watch the corn grow.

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