The View From The Window

 Sorry, the gap between posts is getting too long, but my computer has been acting up.  Every morning after breakfast, I mosy on over to our living room window where I sit and read the news, and can't resist taking a few pictures of the brigh Day Lilies straight in front of me.  The view is increasingly blocked by the Echinacea, but they're beautiful nonetheless.  Here they are.

Our view, to provide some context!

Hope you enjoyed those!

Colour in the Garden

 The other night Mrs. F.G. borrowed my camera to get some pictures in the garden, and was pleased with what she captured.  It's the most colourful time of year in the garden, and though the colour is scattered everywhere, it adds up to a lot of bright highlights.  These photos are all taken by the Head Gardener herself!

The orange flower behind the giant dragonfly is Butterfly Weed.

Hope you enjoyed these!

Back to the Garden

 I shared a number of the Day Lilies now in bloom, but there are numerous other flowers adding their colour to the garden.  Indeed, this is about the most colourful time in the garden all summer long.

Mrs. F.G. usually picks something new to grow every year, and this year she decided to grow Geraniums from seed.  The effort was a great success and after planting the seeds very early, like January, the flowers were ready to plant out in spring.  Since then the Geraniums have added lots of colour, especially at the front door.

The white daisies are now blooming.

We've still got some nice bright colour from the Maltese Cross.

Our red rose is blooming madly and our light pink one is also now in flower.

We have a few Cosmos blooming, with those tiny thin stems that serve as 'leaves'.  These flowers will last through into the fall.

And now the first of the Echinacea are flowering.  These pink ones are the most common variety, and spread through the garden easily, but we have them in several other colours.  These dominate our garden through into the fall.

Today I'm looking out the window at very thick yellowy clouds and the house is very dark.  It's smoke from the wildfires in north-western Ontario, taking our usually good air quality down to the worst in the world today.

Summer Wildflowers

Mid-July is the season for summer wildflowers, those usually beautiful flowers that some call 'weeds'.  They deserve a lot of credit though, since they grow all on their own, unlike the heavily pampered flowers we grow in our gardens.

Buttercups are one of the first here, and one of my favourites.  The town left these growing in a nearby ditch for a few days til they were mowed down.

Bright yellow Bird's-foot Trefoil spread all the way up the Collingwood Street hill.  Here I was literally only a few hours before the mowers!

This is one of those nasty invasive plants that is spreading widely here, Wild Chervil.  You can see it in ditches and along field edges all around here.

And this is Dames-rocket, easily confused with Phlox.  But this one has four petals, Phlox has five.

This is the remarkable seed-head of the Goat's-beard, like a giant dandelion seed.

This scraggly looking plant is Sow Thistle, taken in front of the brick wall of the new Long Term Care Home.

This pretty purple bloom is Knapweed, a plant with tough wiry stems that spreads too easily, but with a very pretty flower.

My favourite among all these is the Chicory, such a gentle blue.

The Osprey Nest

 On Sunday afternoon we decided to drive to Jolly's in Flesherton.  If you're not local, or even if you are, you may not know that Jolly's has a reputation for the biggest and best ice cream, cones around!  And they have a wide range of flavours too.  I still picture taking our grandson ten years ago, when he got a brilliant blue Bubble Gum cone.

We settled for chocolate and peanut butter in one and pralines and cream for the other, and after a few minutes went on our way.  Next stop was the causeway across Lake Eugenia.

Lake Eugenia is a man-made lake, dating back to 1905 when what is now Ontario Hydro built a dam on the Beaver River just above Eugenia Falls, creating the lake.  They sold off cottage lots, so now the lake is totally surrounded by cottages.  But on the causeway they put up a nesting platform, I'm guessing to stop them using actual hydro poles.  We have stopped for years to check it out.   The lake is still generating significant electricity.

We crept up slowly, not sure what we were seeing until we got closer, but it certainly appeared that there were two large birds sitting on the enormous next.

There were two young in the nest.  They sat quite still even as we got close, and we had a really good look.  Unfortunately these photos were taken through the windshield facing directly into the sun and it was quite hazy, so all I really got were silhouettes.  They looked large enough that they would soon be learning to fly.

Osprey are fish-eating hawks, so they are found on the edges of lakes, preferably shallow ones where the parents can catch lots of fish to feed the family.

This is the most heavily cropped image you'll ever see, but at least I tried!  It does show a hint of the light and dark colouring.

Just to help you, this is a great photo I got on another Osprey nest, 

where there were three young looking over the edge at me!

Day Lilies!

Our day lilies have finally started blooming, bringing another burst of colour to the garden.  Day lilies are exactly what the name implies, they bloom for one day at a time, and then wilt.  Mature plants will have numerous buds though, so the blooms can continue for a week or two steadily.  You'll see a lot of these in the next week or two!

This is the first of the Day Lilies, a single bloom quite low among the leaves, but it marks the beginning.

The very next day this red one added to the colour.

And then our favourite, 'Saugeen Sunrise', a beautiful two-tone orange bloom (the only one of all these that we remember the name for - there are hundreds of different named varieties).

Then the dam burst and numerous blooms emerged at once.

The blooms are often mixed together so it's hard to get a good picture.

Another of the 'Saugeen Sunrise', shot from our living room window.  In getting all these photos I'm limited to that window, or to the patio, but the blooms may face any direction, and I'm limited to the direction I can aim the camera at.

In spite of all that I think I got some beautiful photos, largely because of the colour of the Day Lilies themselves.