What’s popping in mid-June in my mid-North Carolina garden

vegetable garden, fruit trees, and a berry patch, but my real love is my flower garden. May saw Bearded Iris, Siberian Iris, Peonies, False Indigo, Wiegela, Forsythia, Japonica, Columbine, poppies, and roses, but then we had a bare couple of weeks when I had to settle on spirea blossoms nestled amongst the peony leaves for my centerpieces.

But now it’s mid June, and everything is popping in my garden. Here’s what’s in bloom right now:

Calla lilies. These came with our house (as did the aforementioned peonies) and every year when they make their brief appearance I always resolve to plant more…but they’ll be gone in a week and I’ll forget soon.

Salvia, a.k.a. sage. A couple of different kinds. Annual salvia actually grows as a perennial here, which is very cool. So I have annual salvia, but also two perennial varieties as well: Salvia guarantica, which grows like the weed that it is, and the more typical purple salvia, which I can’t identify because it looks like so many different kinds.

Echinacea, or Purple Coneflower, has just started blooming. This is a wonderful flower. A couple of years ago one of my patches bloomed with double blooms, like this variety: Echinacea purpura Double Decker, but it hasn’t come back.

Butterfly bush has just begun to bloom. This makes an excellent and sweetly fragrant cut flower. We have an ancient bush with white blooms, and although many people think you have to cut it back every year in order for the plant to bloom, my neglected, gnarled old butterfly bush is proof that if you forget to cut it back they’ll still bloom.

I have some peach glads that’ll bloom by Sunday. I dug these out of a ditch last year and they’ve multiplied themselves 2 or 3 times since then. I have great dirt!

As for annuals, self-seeded cosmos and zinnias are blooming, as are my marigolds, which I planted in my vegetable garden to distract potentially bad insects, and we’re just a few days away from sunflowers.

The exciting thing is that in a couple of weeks there will be new and different thing popping in the garden…for July!