flowers

My first lily is blooming! Hooray! This flowerbed has been looking rather pathetic since the daffodils and irises finished and the nasturtium, petunias, and marigolds aren't doing much yet.
Two big female zucchini flowers today, but no males yet. Why do girls mature faster?
This kind of odd yellow thing started growing out of the side of our compost and is getting slowly bigger. It is more attractive than the compost bin, at least, so we let it stay for the time being.
These turn into very bright pink flowers in late summer and self seed like mad. WE had a single planter of them along the south fence and now the south fence is solid seedlings.
The summer camellia is starting to bloom.
Luckily we seem to have a good number of bees around. This is just a random flowergrowing out of a lettuce planter.
The blue hibiscus is really going strong now.
I love these flowers. I hope they self seed and coming in next year.

flowers

One of my blue hibiscus (hibisci?) survived a too early flowering and drastic prune and has come back strong (the other didn't make it). The plant is now about a meter high. I had no idea it was a tree when I bought it. I thought it was going to be short, like petunias or something.
The azaleas are starting to bloom despite being in terrible soil and abused terribly by the dog they are plugging along.
The southeast flower bed is looking a bit sad as the daffodils and irises are finished and the lilies have another few weeks at least until they start blooming. The pansies were starting to look pathetic and harbor nests of gejigeji. I have planted nasturtium, petunias, marigolds and a few other things but they aren't doing much yet.
The northeast flower bed is coming along. You can kind of see the blue hibiscus in the photo above, back left. Campanula look ready to bloom soon.
These are my pots of flowers along the parking area on the northside of the house. I just redid another two today, pulled all the sad pansies and found a huge ants nest. Yuck!
I don't know what this is, but it's quite pretty. It got really leggy, though, I will have to give it a good cutting back this fall.
The sunny lettuce has bolted.
I am going to try to grow mint on the embankment. We have been steadily pilfering it from the embankment upriver while walking the dog.

flowers

Name That Flower time! I got these from my weird little cast-off flower shop. Unmarked for 30 yen (30 cents). I was so curious as to what color they would be. These two, two orangey/red ones that got moved two days ago, and one that still hasn't bloomed. We'll see if they make it through the summer, the ones I bought in the spring last year died, but I hope having started these in the fall will give them a head start.














I think this is more or less a weed, but it's pretty.




















This is the second year for these bulbs. ???













I bought this blue hibiscus, not knowing if it was annual or perennial, nor how tall it would get. It was only a few inches high, who knew it would turn into a tree? But its leaves came out in January, and then died in the frost, so I pruned it, and now it is making new leaves. I hope it survives, because it did have pretty flowers in the summer. Are those little blue flowers to the right forget-me-nots? I've forgotten...