Over and again, I recommend 4-Season Gardens. I currently live in the Ozark mountains, and in a few months, the weather here will get brutally cold. Tender plants will need to be moved inside or else they will die, and I won’t see anything blooming here for months. Before I moved to the Ozarks, I gardened in New Jersey, a state that is often covered by snow in winter.
But regardless of the weather outside, I enjoy watching it happen from my doors and windows that look from inside out.
But it is not winter yet. It is August 25, and it is still hot in the Ozarks, but all around my garden, I see signs of fall.
Today, I’m singing an end-of-August song. My grasses, which are annuals in most of the USA have reached their full heights and have filled in the areas where the plants that bloomed earlier would have otherwise left holes. Purple Fountain Grass is the arching grass on the left and the tall, spiked green grass on the right is Lemon Grass that has flourished. The sunflowers are about finished in my garden, but two late sunflowers are twining up the arbor in the back of the above photo. The blue is mist flower or agastache, which color-wise, is a perfect companion for the black-eyed Susans or rudbeckias that are the flowering heroes of my August garden. In the above photo, you also see some black-eyed Susans winking from the rear. In the lower, mid-front of the above photo, there is one coneflower still hanging on to summer, but the coneflowers passed their prime a couple of weeks back.
Black-Eyed Susans Are the Heroes of My Late Summer Garden
To Everything, There Is A Season:
During early spring, I am thrilled by all the spring bulbs and soon, the peonies take center stage, but all those early-flowering plants either die back or simply quit blooming and thereby fade into the sunset of my garden, That’s when the annuals begin to shine.
Sundial with Zinnias, Coleus, and Impatiens
Jacki Kellum Garden
By July, the Daisies and the Black-eyed Susans or the Rudbeckias stretch toward the sky, but even after the daisies have stopped blooming, the Black-eyed Susans are still parading around my garden, and fortunately, the native mist flowers join them soon.
Today, on August 25, 2021, I spotted a Painted Lady Butterfly feasting on the mist flowers in my garden. At first, I thought that this little guy was a Monarch, but I know that Monarchs are much larger.
Painted Lady Butterfly – Image Credit Flicr
I researched the Painted Lady, and I discovered that the Painted Lady Larvae feed off Black-Eyed Susan plants as well as plants from the aster and mallow families, and today, in my garden I still have plenty of those plants available for baby Painted Ladies to eat.
Although it doesn’t have the star-lie appearance of most of the aster family, Mist Flower is one of its members.
I also have several varieties of hardy hibiscus plants in my garden, and my Vintage Wine has been blooming for at least a month.
When my grasses are tall and full, I know that pumpkins are not far away, and not far from that, winter will chill the air and freeze the ground, but not much longer than that, April will come again. She always does, and one reason that I love gardening, is that through my garden, I enjoy every season. April Com, Come She Will: