Today our good friend Carla Zambelli Mudry is welcoming us back to her garden in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
July means daylilies—lots and lots of daylilies! And sunflowers, hydrangeas, milkweed, echinacea, and more! My garden is even more alive with summer color, and I just had my first open garden day for my gardening group. That is something that can make us gardeners a little trepidatious. It is not easy to open your garden up like this, because you wonder if visitors will see what you see.
One of my favorite books is The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. As a child, I read it over and over. It captured my imagination, and how could you not love the idea of a secret garden full of flora and fauna tucked away? Maybe on some strange level this garden I now have is my secret garden. After all, it was a feral garden when I first started with it. The old lady whose house we bought had grown ill and died. Her garden went untended except for the barest of maintenance. I unearthed garden beds slowly from under very overgrown conditions. It was an excavation of sorts, and this summer when I performed another great forsythia massacre, I discovered a giant elderberry (Sambucus) with a trunk as think as a tree trunk.
Now my porch is bare of plants that need to be planted, and it will be all about enjoying my garden and maintaining it until fall. Here in Pennsylvania we are also feverishly squashing every dreaded spotted lanternfly we come across. They are a really destructive pest, sadly.
July is for daylilies (Hemerocallis) . . .
. . . and sunflowers (Helianthus annuus, annual) . . .
. . . and more daylilies! This one is a double cream.
Oh, and how about even more daylilies?
This daylily’s dark shade of purple is almost black.
The pale lavender forms a delicate pattern on this daylily.
A crisp white daylily
It isn’t all about daylilies. Some coneflowers (Echinacea hybrid, Zones 4–9) are joining the show.
A little squirrel statue hides under a fern frond.
A Buddha statue meditates by some hostas.
This bird bath welcomes feathered friends to a lush woodland planting.
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Comments
You have some great daylilies and I can well imagine that their bloom period puts a daily smile on your face. I sometimes joke that when my various clumps of colorful daylilies are in full flower, it's like the circus has set up camp in my back yard. I'm also captivated by your closeup of the annual sunflower...it's a beautiful picture.
That cream double daylily really pops in your picture, as does the purple - they look like they are coming forward, right off the computer monitor! Gorgeous photos, and great plant portraits. Thanks for sharing.
I just had to save your photo of the buddha and bench to my Pinterest files! Love the way the fairy statue is so subtly tucked in amongst plants as she should be! Your daylilies are doing fabulous! It's nice that another gardener like you came along to continue on with the old lady's garden. Old gardens should all be inherited or passed on and appreciated like antiques are. I don't know of many "old" gardens out surviving their owners. So many fall into "non-gardeners" hands. I really enjoyed your garden photos, very pretty.
I love The Secret Garden!!! And that double cream daylily made my day - gorgeous! You don't have to worry a second about what people will think of your absolutely stunning garden - it is delightful and I love the backstory of bringing it "back to life."
Greetings and what SUPER PHOTO's of the Daylilies. What are their names? The http://www.daylilies.org site (free) will give the hybridizer name and description if you enter the name of the cultivar. I am a AHS Exhibition and Garden Judge, and there is likely a daylily club near most members (worldwide). Since there are 90,000 registered now it helps to know its name. The newer introductions are representative of the improved plant, flower period (some from May thru Nov), vigor (so you can share((or buy)) with your friends)Thank you
thanks for posting, what a lovely garden (you must not have many deer!)
I particularly loved the mention of the 'forsythia massacre,' I'm about to have one of those myself!
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