Love that China Bride! It's going on my "gotta have one" list. I live in my parent's home as well, and have flowers that they planted 40 years ago. I know what you mean about reminding you of your childhood. Precious memories.

Thanks for sharing your garden photos...love the roses. My Knockouts are really blooming...I don't do hybid teas, too much trouble down here in this hot and humid climate, but the knockouts are great. I have zinnias too, mainly to attract the butterflies. Do you get many butterflies on yours?
I really need to get China Bride....haven't a clue why I don't already have it. :)
Jan

Rita,all of your flowers are beautiful.Love that RRETTY GAUDY and SUSAN WEBER Your roses are gorgeous and so healthy looking.I grow roses, too,but in this heat here,they looking really bad.I might have a dozen blooms today out of 100 bushes.And the blooms are very small.They burn up before they have a chance to do anything.I have one daylily bloom and its on a NOID and can't get a picture of it as its facing a rose b ush,and no way to get a picture of it.Too hot for pictures anyway here.Its 98 out but with the humidity,feels like 108..Your Zinnias are beautiful, too.I use to grow alot of them,too.I injoyed all your flowers,Thank you for sharing your gardens.

Jean

Yes, I do get lots of Butterflies. I have 5 Butterfly bushes and they are blooming now too. So between the zinnias, which the butterflies love also, and the Butterfly bushes, there are butterflies floating about all day long now until the late fall. When the Mexican Sunflowers start to bloom, thats another thing that both the butterflies and Hummingbirds flock to.

Reita, your lilies are just beautiful. I have a lily bed
but they are all thru blooming except my Candy and Stellas.
Thanks for sharing. caroline

Jean- I have about 200 roses. All types, single and thick flowers, hybrid teas, floribundas and shrub roses and everything in between. I do have to spray them with a fungicide every two weeks or there would be no leaves (blackspot). The roses blooming now have really tiny flowers compaired to the spring because the heat does cause them to make smaller flowers and it has been really hot here for July. But still, they are really colorful and still look good.

You have a gorgeous garden! I love your roses and zinnias. Of the daylilies, I especially like Circular Thinking, and of course China Bride and Susan Weber.

Juliet

Your garden still looks great! The roses and zinnias sure are going strong. I wish I could grow roses, but I got rid of all of them because of the Japanese beetles.

Rita,

Beautiful pictures as usual!

I am very sad for you that your daylilies are almost over, but at least you still have wonderful color! I am a rose lover too, and that was my passion before I discovered daylilies. I still love them, but find that I totally ignore them when the DL's are blooming. It looks like yours are staged nicely though...starting their next round when the lily show is over! (I think that mine will be this way too..roses are resting right now, and I am just at DL peak.)

Your Pretty Gaudy is fabulous, as is China Bride and Susan Weber!

I am still crossing my fingers for your rebloom!

Julie

I have almost no Japanese Beetles here, knock on wood. I do have afew of those other oriental beetles that are a lighter shinney grey. But I had more of them last year and just hand picked them off the roses everyday and dropped them in the cup of soapy water. This year, I have so few, I don't even need the cup of soapy water.

I planted the zinnias because they give me all summer bloom until the frost kills them and I like lots of color in my garden.

Its funny but the daylilies were something I originally thought of because I wanted blooms that would fill in after the June spring flush of roses and before the roses cycled again. Well, that has certainly happened because I really got a lot of daylily bloom. But my thinking has sure changed. I never got depressed when my spring flush of roses was done but I just can't stand the thought of the daylilies being done for the year. Thats why I am hoping for rebloom and why I bought lots of northern hybridized daylilies that should have more guaranteed rebloom. I don't know what it is about the daylilies but they are just the most addictive flowers.

I was just thinking before that my daylily bloom is deffinately much longer. Now the evergreens are new so they started earlier but what I was thinking of is my older dormants that I have had like ROCKET CITY AND SPELLBINDER, LIME FROST AND BOLD TIGER. They started last year on July 6th and were done before the end of June. Around the 26th I think. Here it is August 1st and those dormants are still blooming in my front yard. Started at the same time as last year again. I can see that theres not much buds left but still looking very good. So either because they have just been here longer or because there was lots of rain or what, I don't know, but the bloom season on them is deffinately longer that last year.

Julie- I have lots of color because I worked very hard at planning it that way. I worked for years on this shrubby section of my yard to attract songbirds. As I was getting it closer to what I wanted some years ago, I thought it was just paradise in the spring but I needed more color in the yard. I wind up adding roses, more bulb lilies and eventually daylilies. I have lots of other flowers too that I forget to mention such as Purple Coneflowers, Sunflowers, Mexican Sunflowers, Milkweeds, lots and lots of Sedums, lots and lots of vining Honeysuckle, Joe Pie Weed, Catmints and Hummingbird Mints.

I always use some annuals to help with the summer color and plant impatients by the flats in the shadier areas. But as I put in these new gardens last year with the terracing I had done, it was just really the icing on the cake as the gardens that were then able to be created are now some of the best garden beds in my whole yard.

Rita - I love your photo of PRETTY GAUDY with its big edge. I wish I could get mine to bloom the first time, much less rebloom. I got it from Maryotts last year. I know you've had wonderful luck with them, but I haven't. They ship too late for me, and the daylilies get too stressed from heat in the mail. Only one of the five I got last summer from Maryotts bloomed this year. That was AWESOME EDGER, but it shows no signs of reblooming.
MEXICAN MAGIC is the largest of the plants, but there are no scapes in sight. PRETTY GAUDY was really set back by the drought.

Debra

Debra- I have MEXICAN MAGIC also from Maryotts. It did fine last year and bloomed in the fall. This year it is two very spindly fans that lay on the ground and refuse to stand up no matter what. Needless it say, it did not bloom. So one that doing poorly in my garden is doing at least better in yours.

The only problem I had with the later shipping dates on the Maryotts stuff is that mostly it does not bloom the first year, at least that is what happened last year on most of them. They made up for it this bloom season.

I really have had very good luck with not only the Maryotts intros that he ships but with any of the daylilies that he grows for resale. Afew clunkers but truely I have been thrilled with them in general. In my garden at least, they seem to love it here. I know that Carla in NJ also grows alot of Maryotts and they do wonderfully for her also.

Pretty Gaudy is really struting her stuff. Rather gaudy if you ask me. Love the edge.

China Bride, I love it everytime I see it.

Way back when I used to grow roses. The hybrid tea roses and they were more trouble than they were worth, with all the spraying, watering, fertilizing and cutting that went with it and gave them up. Now I see they have all these care free roses. I may have to get a couple again and try them out.

Tom

I love seeing China Bride again, also Susan Weber.
Your Zinnias look so very healthy, w/o mildew - lucky you!

I also have native Tiger lilies, all around the property, mostly at the edges of the woods. Mixed in with them are native daylilies, which I don't dare add to my gardens!
I do have one clump of native TLs in one half shade garden, but they're easier (than native DLs) to control and dig out if they start to multiply too much.

Beautiful roses! I can't grow them. They don't like me. Japanese Beetles everywhere, and I don't want to take time to dust or spray. It's enough just taking care of everything else around here!

Great photography!

Julie

Tom: When I first got into roses my plan was to get easy care no spray types. I actually bought a bunch of Double Knockouts, Flower Carpet Appleblossom and a Carefree Delight, non of which need any spraying. I of course asked lots of questions on the roses forum. So a person on the roses forum here on Long Island was having an open by invitation open garden and she invited me also. I went there and when I saw the roses in her back yard my jaw dropped as I had never seen anything so lovely before. So much for my original plan of no spray, no fuss.

The funny thing is my garden turned out nothing like hers even though she was the inspiration. Hers are mostly Austins and old garden roses. I can count the number of old garden roses I have on the fingers of one hand and have fingers leftover. Don't have much more than that in Austins either. But I have lots of Hybrid Teas, lots of Floribundas and shrub roses. My favorites are the shrub and floribundas. I also have lots of old garden rose look alikes (flower form) that are recent roses.

I don't know what you might be looking for in roses but I would recommend two shrub roses, no spray, no fuss blooming machines that that would be CAREFREE DELIGHT and THE GIFT. Then there are the Knockout series and you can not go wrong with them.

Julie- I have never had any problems with the Tiger Lilies being overly aggressive. They do multiply but then so do any of the other kinds of lily bulbs I have planted around the gardens here.