In the Garden: August & September
“We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”
August was brimming with scabiosa! The sweetest little blooms on delicate and dancing stems. And none of my photos adequately capture the success we had with them! I’m afraid I am so fearful of showing an unkempt garden that sometimes my documentation suffers because of it. By the time July concludes, our flower beds are overrun with weeds. We’ve had some hiccups with the landscape fabric I thought would solve all our problems, so the past two years I’ve tried to do without it. The dream is to have mulched beds—maybe we can see that through for 2024.
Scented geranium was another triumph. I recognized them at our campus greenhouse earlier in the year and thankfully I bought seven plants. Although I wasn’t sure if I spaced them too closely in a raised vegetable box I borrowed from the tomatoes and peppers we normally grow, I wanted to keep a close eye on them. Oh how wonderful they smelt! I could bury my nose in their leaves every time I walked past them in the garden.
English garden rose harvest on August 25, 2023
Scented geranium ‘Attar of Rose’ blooming on August 7, 2023
Dahlia ‘Totally Tangerine,’ hydrangea ‘Sweet Summer,’ scabiosa ‘Oxford Blue’ on August 7, 2023
Fringed bleeding heart and ‘Charles Darwin” blooming on August 13, 2023
Formosa lily and dahlia ‘Sweet Nathalie’ on August 21, 2023
‘Lichfield Angel’ English garden rose by David Austin on August 28, 2023
Dahlias ‘Cafe Au Lait’ and ‘Fleurel’ on September 12, 2023
With the onset of September, we were in full on planning mode for our largest wedding of the year, so our photos stop at the twelfth of the month. Which is fitting because everything was a blur after that! We ran out of time to dig up our dahlia tubers this fall so these beauties are overwintering in the garden. Fingers crossed they survive the winter.