Garden Bloggers Bloom Day...NOvember

Well, after a few false starts, we proudly present the November issue of Garden Blogger's Bloom Day, Scotts Bay style. It's been a curious weather-week here, having gone from the snow of the weekend to various windy and rainy events to milder weather to downright spring-or summerlike weather today--temperature around 60 degrees F. (The snow, curiously, has melted...) The garden is, not surprisingly, a mess--and far, far too wet to try to clean up or get those bulbs planted--but there are still flowery surprises among the mud.
Out in the greenhouse, among a cluster of portulaca (that I forgot somehow to get a decent photo of), I found this fading but still fascinating specimen of an annual Ice Plant flower.


This photo was taken on Sunday, after the snowfall--but the honeysuckle flowers have shaken of the snow and are doing just fine.


Foxgloves are a beloved plant here. We let them selfseed, which they do without trying to take over the entire yard, and they do surprisingly wonderful things like keep flowering right into mid-November.


Although the Hansa rugosa continues to throw a few flowers, that's not really surprising; but THIS is a nice, delightful jolt of pleasure. It's a bud of Golden Wings, which has produced late flowers before, and it will open up in the next couple of days.


Has anyone else grown this and enjoyed it as much as I have? It's Lysimachia 'Walkabout Sunset', a creeping, annual variety of lysimachia that sports not only the familiar loosestrife flowers, but really attractive rose-green-bronze foliage. I'm tempted to bring this in for the winter, because of course I don't remember where I got it this spring.


Surely the most floriferous, longest blooming perennial in my garden, this dainty little beauty is yellow corydalis. It starts blooming in mid-late May, and as you can see, it's still doing so. I wish some of its relatives flowered like this, but others tend to bloom for a few weeks then just go dormant. Wouldn't it be great if the beautiful blue species, C. elata and C. flexuosa, bloomed for six months?


This has been a surprise, too--the African daisy, Osteospermum are STILL green and flowering! I took cuttings of both this one, "Astra Pink Yellow" and of a bronzy one and the lovely white cultivar, a couple of weeks ago, and while they're not rooted yet, their parent plants haven't turned to mush at all!


Meet another African star of our garden--Venidium/venidio. One nursery gives the name as Arctotis venidium and two cultivars as 'flame' and 'wine'. Whatever you call it, I love it; we have had orange, pink and brick-red coloured varieties, with beautiful grey-green foliage. The more you deadhead, the more it flowers, and oh yes, it will have to get much colder than we've had yet before it's done for the year.


Remember the other day we had snow on this bacopa, and I thought it was done? Nope. It's still forming buds and it looks just fine now that the snow has melted. This is definitely a plant that I am going to take cuttings from--tomorrow! I suppose we could take the whole plant in, but things are getting crowded in here!


Oh, isn't this a lovely, unique, graceful flower? Yeah, I know, it's common as dandelions--because it IS dandelion. I confess to being an unrepentant fan of dandelions, especially in the spring when bees are desperate for nourishment and get plenty of food from these sunny yellow blossoms. I don't mind them in the lawn, I like the way they break up the clay in the garden...and oh yes, I'm very partial to photographing their seven gazillion seeds, too!


Other flowers still in the garden include both of those dandy penstemons, (Sour Grapes and the unnamed one);
Johnny jump ups;
Centaurea montana (just the regular one, not Amythests in Snow);
Wallflowers (yellow, orange and variegated orange-pink)
Dianthus, unnamed variety
Campanula persicifolia (a repeat bloomer but this is very late for it)
Fleeceflower

Stay tuned next post (or maybe the one after) for the indoor bloom report.