Lilacs and Roses

Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and here we all
are at one point or another. It's not a question of superior or inferior taste, merely
a question of which detour we are on at the moment. Getting there (as they say)
is not important; the wandering about in the wilderness or in the olive groves
or in the bayous is the whole point.
- Henry Mitchell, Gardening Is a Long Road, 1998


I wandered about in my garden yesterday and photographed a few of the blooms.


A stray seed dropped by bird or wind. This is just one Dame's Rocket plant that shot up like its namesake among the coneflowers and phlox.


Max Frei geranium. Give this one a pass, a very, very neat and tidy mound with very few blooms.


Columbines drift around my garden and turn up in different places every year.


Immortality has been blooming for weeks and will bloom again in the fall.



Jupiter's beard almost blooming.


This clematis blooms among the English roses.


NOID



Old faithful viburnum opulus


Spiraea vanhouttei was one of the first things I planted just after I moved here.

One of our native dogwoods, Cornus alternifolia or Pagoda Dogwood, has a very graceful horizontal, layered habit. Two of them shade my porch on summer days.