Thanks to Cathy over at Words and Herbs for giving me the kick in the pants I needed to get a post up on this blog! Actually there was no kick involved, not even a frowny face or mildly judgmental word from Cathy, just the thought of missing this year’s week of flowers was enough to motivate me off the sofa. Cathy’s week of flowers is such a cheery reminder of the warmth and color of the growing season it was just what I needed to reset from the gray and cold which has become the norm. Decorating for the holidays was fine and accomplished on schedule, but when I found myself moping around, cleaning a closet and eyeing the garage, I knew things were getting tricky.
So forget Monday through Saturday and let me start and end this week of flowers on the last day of the week with the first flowers of the year. I’m sure many of you would guess we would start with snowdrops 😉
March still seems a world away but every single thaw between now and then will have me thinking of snowdrops. Here they are basking in the first warm sunshine of the new garden year.
Once the first flowers arrive they’re followed by wave after wave of color. A wave which I always look forward to is the flush of tulips and daffodils which fill April and run over into May. This photo is from 2024 and I almost regret not digging and replanting all these beds again last year… well I do regret it but I don’t miss the work, and I also don’t miss the disease worries about tulip fire ruining the flowers here… the new plantings out front and in more open locations have been fire-free so far.
Tulips filling the potager beds. Many are still there, but not the masses of years past.
The waves of spring flowers end with an avalanche of early summer blooms. Iris, clematis, peonies, roses, all the most amazing flowers of the year arrive in June and it would be nice to show them but perhaps I’ll show a weed instead. Milkweed. Not quite the same as a pergola smothered in roses, but I like them just as well and it’s something a little different.
An early summer border filled with milkweed and other colorful weeds, backed with the purple smoke of cotinus ‘Royal Purple’.
If you’re counting, this fourth photo in a week of flowers should coincide with Thursday already, and we are into July. I’ve selected daylilies of course and these take me through some of the hottest days of summer, each day offering a fresh new bloom even as the gardener begins to fade in the heat. Some people are not daylily-people and for years I tried to resist but once again I’ve fallen off the wagon and am collecting and growing far more than I should.
The daylily farm. Color galore just days before the backhoe arrived.
Perhaps you recall what happened to the daylily farm this past summer. If not it involved a backhoe and sewer lines and a whole new garden to replant after the old garden was destroyed. If the garden year were still just a week I’d say Friday, Saturday and Sunday were all spent repairing but that would just not be true. Any small project can turn into an excuse to replant everything so I’ll say Friday is summer annuals. They started strong with a relentlessly wet spring but then the clouds cleared and the sun and heat did their work.
Coleus are always reliable annual color, but this year the bougainvillea also put on quite a bold show. Don’t ask me what the secret is, all I know is it was appreciated!
Annuals are work but Hydrangea paniculata is not. Saturday is a celebration of the late summer show these shrubs put on faithfully every single year. I like the ones which go pink as the flowers develop. I took a bunch of cuttings. We will see. I don’t need any more but of course will take a few more.
Hydrangea ‘Vanilla Strawberry’ shows excellent color if the nights are cooler and the rains don’t completely abandon us all of August. To counter this I give the bushes a light trim in May to delay some of the bloom, and usually this puts them beyond the most brutal weeks of the summer.
I have one day left. It’s Sunday and I feel bad neglecting the asters, colchicum and chrysanthemums of Autumn but let me go around back to where we started. The snowdrops are here again and should take this gardener through the shortest and darkest days of the year back into the next growing season.
One of the earlier fall-blooming snowdrops, ‘Barnes’ has been very reliable for me here in NE Pa, even when the winter weather takes a turn towards brutal. They’re buried in snow right now but should thaw out just fine if we get a break in the cold.
So that’s my week of flowers which all happened in one day 😉 Thanks again to Cathy for breaking me out of my blogging slump and hopefully giving me the restart I needed! The garden is covered in snow and the forecast looks cold, but maybe there’s something in the winter garden worth sharing so I’ll try and get to that. In any case have a excellent week and I wish you many weeks of flowers 🙂
sorta like suburbia 
Nice to see your post, Frank. Clever you, like the ghosts of Christmas visiting all in one night, you managed to put a year’s worth of blooms into one post! 😀 I think they call that working smarter, not harder. 👍🏼
Haha, thanks! It’s not often I’m accused of “working smarter” and many of my projects could actually be used as evidence against that 😉
That was such a lovely post Frank, and I am so glad you made it to the party just in time! 😁 I love the way you managed to sneak snowdrops in twice! I also love your day lilies… and the pink Echinacea next to them is a gorgeous planting combination which I will unashamedly try and copy next summer. And I need to find some shade for my Hydrangea paniculata as they always seem to get singed before the flowers open properly here. Yours is so pretty. Thanks for joining in and sharing some beauties, and have a happy snowdrop season! 🌼🌺🌸
This hydrangea is actually in my MIL’s garden because it would always singe in the heat of summer. It singed there as well but I started nipping the shoots back in May and now it blooms late enough to avoid the worst of the heat. I actually took cuttings last year because it’s so nice there I wanted a bush of my own again!
Heh heh, I did feel guilty sneaking in the snowdrops a second time but 😉
I’ll have to try that on one of my hydrangeas and see if I can make that work. Thanks for the tip!
Well done, Cathy. Frank was becoming very invisible online!
There are always intentions to do better but they always fall short! Now it’s so cold and gray I don’t even want to think about the garden… well not the December garden, but I do waste a tremendous amount of time dreaming of the June garden!
Ours has become a winter quagmire where any sort of work is out of the question – though I will need to go about and pick up the multitude of fallen branches and twigs, nothing very big, which are littering the ground after a storm which passed through today.
A lovely year of flowers in one post. I love the hydrangea. And now we have more snowdrops to look forward to, to get us through the winter.
Ugh, getting through winter… here there is nothing but cold and snow and gray skies. It will be another few weeks before I can even imagine snowdrops, but there is that hope!
Perfect for brightening a dull winter day, thanks Frank
Thanks Annette!
Oh, these photos are joyful! I agree with Annette, it really is a bright spot when needed. Those tulips are something else.
All the bright colors of spring and summer, it’s really a tonic for these winter days!
I could use a good kick in the pants to get writing! And I need to start reading other blogs again, too. Cathy’s are always so good, and I miss her. I can’t even say why I’ve let it go . . . maybe I’m just going in too many directions all the time? Anyway, it’s a nice Year in Review you’ve written, and I’m sorry I missed out on the Week of Flowers. Maybe next year.