June Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Although it's only June, my garden is starting to visibly decline from the peak of its May glory. We had a huge lightning storm on June 4 - lightning experts were quoted in the newspaper saying that it was the most prolonged and intense lightning storm they'd ever seen anywhere in the world, and the map in the newspaper showed that our town was right in the center where the storm was most intense of all - and a lot of the flowers were knocked down by that. My poppies are looking increasingly dog-trampled, the smaller of my two silver bush lupines shriveled up and turned brown while we were camping at Little North Fork (I think this was from drought - it looks dead but it actually isn't, so I've been watering it now in hopes it will recover), Boston dug up my evergreen currant and my blue elderberry (the former looks like it may recover, but the latter looks like it won't), and either Boston or Ganymede or both leaped into my volunteer willowherb and broke off 90% of the branches at ground level. Also, bermudagrass is taking over the entire yard with a ferocity that I don't remember it demonstrating last summer. But then, last summer I only had two plants, so I was more free to douse the yard with herbicide to kill everything in sight.

Anyway, you won't be able to tell from most of these photographs that my garden is in decline, because I took most of these photographs at the end of May, before the decline began. For example, when I took this photograph, Boston was still the only dog in the family. She posed with catmint and deergrass (both in the foreground), beardtongue, poppies, and silver bush lupine (all in the background to the right of her).



( More garden pictures )