More Yellow

 We'll do a few comparisons today. I'm starting with the Forbidden Fruit hosta. It was so not yellow last year that I thought it might have been mis-labled. However, it clearly did not get enough time outside. This year, it looks great. I hope it makes a baby soon.

Here's what it looked like last year. It was one of my almost free plants. Big difference



The next comparison is the sad little non-hardy Sedum mexicanam 'Lemon Coral' I got for almost nothing because it was beat up. As a reminder, here's what it looked like on May 20.



One month later, I am loving this. I will bring it inside for the winter, and hopefully manage to keep it alive.

It's similar to the Sedum 'Angelina' that Betsy gave me, which is hardy, but the 'Lemon Coral' is more yellow-green, so it's a color I would like to keep. This is the 'Angelina' starting to bloom. You can hardly tell them apart in the pictures, but in real life, the 'Angelina' is a bit more toward golden.

This is the almost free Corepsis I got last year that was all battered with many broken stems. Looking happy this year!

Edited my brains out, need to keep that up. We had 1.9 inches of rain over 36 hours.

See Color of the Day - Yellow

The Rest of the Freebies

OK, techically, the plants I bought yesterday were not free. You can say one of them cost $1.06 and the rest were free, or they each cost 9.6 cents. Take your pick. But in fact, I got $88 worth of plants for $1.06.

This is the best of the lot in terms of desire for me, and it's also the healthiest. Yes, another hosta. As long as I can keep the deer from eating them, I don't have to worry about flowers. The shades of foliage provide the color. One of the risks of buying clearance plants is that you may not know what you are getting. This one had a tag. Supposedly, it's 'Forbidden Fruit." Hmmm. I doubt it, but we'll see. The center color is supposed to be more golden and the edge more blue. That would be nice. It may get bleached out later in the season. Is this considered late?

These don't look like much right now, but I'm super happy to have them. I used to have some astilbe, long ago, but they eventually died out. I know two of them are white 'Bridal Veil,' and one is pink 'Rheinland.' The fourth one is pot luck! They were all pot luck when I bought them because it turned out the tags had slipped down the sides of the pots. They don't like to be transplanted mid-summer, but I'll try to keep them watered. I put them right back where the astilbe used to be. That garden used to have more sun, and I think that made the previous ones a little unhappy. Ignore the unweeded area behind them. These won't bloom again until next year. (Yeah, there's a baby white pine in there I need to move.)

Finally, because I needed to pick one more plant, I chose this Coreopsis. I don't know what cultivar, and haven't tried to figure it out yet. I've sort of been working at weeding the sunny garden, but haven't made much progress, so for now, this is thrown in very near a bunch of grass that will have to come out. But it's blooming! Of course, everything was root-bound, so it will take a while for new roots to spread anyway.

Hopefully, I can keep them happy, but the price was right!

Also under the heading of freebies... there is a black raspberry bush growing under the outside steps. Not an ideal location, and I'll probably chop it out in another week or so. Meanwhile, it's been providing me with one or two berries a day if I can get them ahead of the birds. There aren't enough berries to really do much with except eat them, but it's a nice treat. I do love them! We called them blackcaps when I was a kid.

I spent the whole day finishing up writing an article about my hike for Outdoors.com. I am getting paid for it! Just sent it off. I'll let you all know when it's published.

The only gardening that happened today was to plant the plants shown above. I do have to move one plant I put in the rock garden. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought it. It doesn't want full sun, and it's very unhappy. Sigh. The starlings that are mobbing the mulberry tree pulled up a couple of things, but I don't think they really killed anything.

The big unhappy news is that my scanner, a quite good one, will not work with Windows 10. No drivers to download, just "sorry, tough crunchies." I can still use it with the old computer until that totally dies, but what a hassle. To replace it with comparable quality will be over $300. The list of reasons I did not want to upgrade the computer goes on and on.

I don't want to end on a low note, so let me tell you that one of the frost burned hosta I bought at half price a few weeks ago, and there were two in the pot, is going to bloom. Hosta flowers aren't usually very exciting, but hey. I'll take it's picture when it performs.

See Astilbe in Bloom

Yellow Memories

 
Not enough snow left today to be pretty. How about some yellow beauties that never got on the blog for one reason or another?

Blue and yellow are my favorite colors. Some days it's blue, some days yellow. Yellow seems good today.

One yellow maple leaf (Norway maple) conquering the early snow.



A field of goldenrod with some Joe-pye weed mixed in from September.



Coreopsis and a little worm!



Some member of the Oenothera family- evening primrose, but this is a garden one, probably under the common name of "sundrop" because it's not necessarily an evening bloomer. Taken in June at the Cherry Point labyrinth garden.



Day lilies, always a favorite of mine.



Birdfoot trefoil, a common and alien roadside bloomer. I love its clear yellow color even though it's alien.



And finally, I'll come back (from two years ago) to the green striped aspen leaves. I found out what causes this. I was seeing it way too often to be a fluke. There is a tiny moth caterpillar that burrows into the leaf tissue near the midvein, and excretes a chemical that keeps the leaf cells in that one section alive so the caterpillar can have something to eat. In the spring a little gray and happy moth will emerge.



Have a happy sunny yellow day!

In other news: I participated in a l-o-n-g meeting, and wrote part of a chapter. Needed to do more, but it didn't happen. Sigh.

	See Yellow Rose of Michigan
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Primary Colors

Today was gray and foggy and rainy. I spent all day inside. Got a lot done, but I choose to show you some bright flowers from earlier in the week.

OK, it's not quite red, but it's the closest I can come right now. This is smooth rose, Rosa blanda, a wild rose with no thorns. It was growing on the banks of the White River.



For yellow, we have lance-leaved coreopsis, Coreopsis lanceolata. This grows wild in hot dry waste places, but it's happy enough in dry, sunny garden spots too.



Finally, I think I promised Ann to bring you this plant, and here you go. This is wild lupine, Lupinus perennis. It's always blue-purple, and is the required host of the Karner Blue butterfly, which is endangered. It doesn't seem to grow well right where I am, but a few miles east it covers the roadsides at this time of year.



Ellen and I have a play date tomorrow. Stay tuned!