Yellow

Back to the garden... Everything that's not brown or red is yellow right now - shades of spring. Every time I think the balloon flowers are not worth it (they spread and I'm too weak-willed to pull them out, their beautiful flowers always face backwards, they're too tall for the place they're growing), I see them in the fall and fall in love again.

 

I should really plant some of these next to the physostegia, blooming at the same time.

The maple tree is not one of those knock-your-socks-off maples, but it shows shades from pale cream to apricot to red. Here it is being yellow.

 

The fothergilla had a brief episode of some kind of blight, but I basically ignored it and it happily went away. Now I don't know which I like more, its yellow color or its leaf shape - oval? ovoid?

 

Next is this pairing. The aucuba, which has been here since I moved in, just goes placidly on, glowing in the part shade along the fence line. At Merrifield a few weeks ago I happened upon a hypericum, which I've been thinking about since the garden tour last spring. This one is a golden variety, 'Brigadoon,' meant to echo the yellow leaf of the aucuba. If I like it - and if it likes the site - I'll get a few more and let them spread.

 

In pointed contrast to all of this is the white oak, which has dropped a ton of acorns this fall and is redder than I ever remember.

 

What happened to June?

Well, it turned out to be the hottest June on record. At the very end of the month, a cold front came through, but it was a false and evil front: thunderstorms in Silver Spring, not a drop here. Even the perilla is wilting. Yesterday and today I've been watering, which I hate to do, but I don't want to lose the shrubs - okay, not anything else, either.

What else happened:
Hiking in North Carolina - the last of the rhododendrons in bloom
 

  
 

Lots of white in the garden
  


 

Discovery that the tithonia was not the Mexican sunflower I remembered, tall and branching, but a lovely but short zinnia-like plant. Had I but known, I would have planted them in a group rather than spacing them throughout the garden, where they look silly.

 

Also, that these dark dahlias are perfect with the deep red-orange day lilies - just need to move them so they are amongst said lilies next year.