Late July Photos

The month has been fairly kind to the lawn and gardens, even with a solid week of 95°+ weather in there.  Burn on the lawn is minimal, and the gardens responded by blooming more!

As always, you can embiggen any photo by clicking on it.

First, the general lawn shot:



And a general around-the-curve shot of the gardens.  The cleome are doing very well, so well that I'm weeding them out and throwing them away.  Colors are drifting a bit as the generations spin on, the ones here are a light pink and a rich pink respectively.





Here's the other garden curve in the back.  The cleome here is a rich magenta, the ultimate goal on color throughout the garden, mixed in with lighter magenta and pink ones.  Unfortunately, controlling the reproduction of cleome is nearly impossible, so I'll have to breed the colors by choosing parents to make sure that the hues are at least carried recessively.





If you noticed the large red shrub above, it's a crepe myrtle.  Which is fairly amazing for Pennsylvania, actually.  Crepe myrtle are more of a southern state plant, but I managed by putting this on life support for several years before planting it in a well-protected and warm microclime in the garden.  This crepe myrtle is just about done with its first bloom, and I'll remove those front-hanging branches once it finishes up.




One of the test plants in the garden this year is an Easter Egg Plant, which is actually an ornamental eggplant.  This one definitely passed the test and will be showing up in following years, although I'll probably move them to pots to show off the eggs better.  At the moment the eggs are white, but they'll turn yellow through August and orange in September.  That top egg isn't flawed, just a little dirty.