Surprise in the Garden

After a long, three-year wait, my stargazer lily has finally bloomed!

I had about 20 of these at the farm house and dug up the bulbs and brought them over here three years ago. Only one survived, but it didn't bloom last year or the previous year.

Tonight, I was in the garden pulling some weeds when I caught a whiff of that unmistakable Stargazer Lily fragrance. I turned to look and was overjoyed to see two large flowers.


Then, as I walked over to turn on the hose, I saw the tiger lily also had two blooms. What a nice surprise.








Behind the shed, the sunflowers are in bloom.

And, it appears they've learned the routine of following the sun throughout the day.

In the morning, they face east and in the afternoon they face west.




We finally burned the sticks that have been piling up in the burn pile. We have two sycamore trees in the front yard that desperately need a visit from a professional tree trimmer. Every time we have a storm, our front yard is littered with sycamore sticks. We've thought about having the trees removed due to the mess -- not only the sticks, but the trees also drop lots of bark and leaves all summer long. The only thing saving them is the shade that really helps keep our house cool. I guess it's a trade off.



We think the raccoon family broke our bird bath, using it as a step stool to get up to the bird food and corn on the squirrel feeder.

At lunchtime today, I stopped at Roseland Garden Center to see if they had any plastic bird baths. They didn't, but they did have a very pretty ceramic bird bath, with a screw-top bowl. This would work because even if the raccoons climbed on it, the bowl wouldn't fall off onto the bricks below and break. It would take an incredibly fat raccoon to knock over the whole bird bath because it's really heavy. I took a photo of their color choices so I could decide which might look best in the back yard. I think I like the purple one the best.