Summer's Flying By

The seasons are changing again. Yes, it's still quite warm, summer will technically be summer until the end of September, but the air is different now, the nights are different. I'm not looking forward to the coming fall and winter. Let's enjoy the sights of summer while they're all around us! All photos clickable to enlarge.

This small Monarch butterfly has been visiting my zinnias recently.

I planted bright magenta morning glories this year instead of the blue variety. They're just starting to flower, and like the cool nights of September and October more than the wilting heat of summer.

My now almost nine-year-old "annual" begonia is doing really well in this humid, rain-filled summer.

None of the sunflower seeds I planted this season came up, but this "volunteer" from last year is more than 8-feet tall.

A wild sumac is flowering on Pink Gardens' property.

The "bleu-cheese" pumpkins are flowering quite regularly now, but have yet to develop any fruit. Yes, that's a bee in the center of this blossom. All of our squashes and pumpkins have the same color flowers, no matter what variety they are. Their shapes vary slightly, however.

A pink zinnia glowing on the east side of the vegetable garden. They're so bright and saturated with color it's almost impossible for my camera to capture them.

Black-eyed Susans in the front yard of the house. It has been a VERY buggy year. Every blossom and leaf of every flower and vegetable in the yard has been bitten, eaten and spit out, lol. We keep an organic yard, so no pesticides are used. We just have to think of it as growing a colorful salad bar for nature's creatures, large and small.

One of the strangest variety of Petunias I've ever seen. They're chartreuse and pink, and the blossoms vary from almost solid pink, to solid chartreuse, to pinwheels of both colors. This is a single plant! The flowers are so thin and fragile that if an insect even flies by, they rip and tear. It's planted alongside bright orange single marigolds, a purple tradescanthia, and a pale pink Verbena, which isn't visible in this photo.