Miscellaneous Monday

Random flower picture.

My Buddleia Evil Ways (from Plant Delights) is doing good so far.  I love the combination of the yellowish-green leaves and the reddish purple flowers.  [I type yellowish-green because I'm not sure how to spell chartreuse.  Oh, wait, that's what spell check is for!  So I don't have to get up and go in the other room to get the dictionary if I want to use big words.]

Topic 2.

I've put in a bunch of Rudbeckias (from Bluestone) in one are of the Mad Garden.  I'm calling it Rudbeckia Row.  Part of the difference in plant size has to do with the Guerrilla Rabbit Invasion earlier this year.  They attacked the plants to the right in this images.  Hopefully next year we won't have such a large Invasion.

Here's a close-up of Rudbeckia hirta Cappuchino.

Here's Solar Eclipse.

Not pictured:  Prairie Sun.  Hopefully I'll have a nice bloom for next weekend's Garden Blogger Bloom Day.

Topic 3.

I also photographed some pollinators.  I have quite a variety of these small butterflies, called skippers.  I've been taking pictures to try to identify species.  These butterflies tend to skip around a lot so most pictures are not good enough to post.  These are on my Scabiosa Butterfly Blue.  Can you spot both of them?

I don't have a good guide to bees.  Too bad.  I have plenty.  These next shots are on my Mountain Mint (Pycnathemum virginianum).

Look closely at these Cappuchino flowers.  See the friend?

Topic D.  

The "big" project for The Husband this weekend was installing the patio for our grill.  Our deck is small and there just wasn't enough room.  [I had the exciting job of writing an exam for tomorrow.  The down side to working partly at home, if you procrastinate you end up loosing your weekend.]

Here's The Sweaty, Hard-Working Husband.

And here's the patio.  He actually dug down and laid a base of two types of material under the pavers.  [We still need to put down some sand to fill the cracks but we're out of sand and didn't want to drive to the Big Box store in a nearby town to pick up more.]  Way To Go Husband!

And here's the grill in it's new home.

That was my weekend.  Excluding the errand running, the bike ride, the house cleaning, the answering of frantic emails from my students, the....