These are 3 pictures of flowers blooming in our yard this summer. The first picture shows an Amaryllis belladonna plant. These beautiful fragrant light pink flowers have appeared for the second year in a row from a bulb that I planted in the ground several years ago. The flower stems appear from the bare earth about a month after the leaves turn brown and die in June. Ours has about 10 flower stems this year, about twice as many as last year.

The second picture shows a cluster of purple dahlias that I planted in one of our raised bed gardens last year. These dahlias have grown vigorously and bloomed profusely in our raised beds, which get watered regularly and have some protection from snails and slugs. When I tried to grow dahlias in the ground a few years ago, snails devoured them.

The third pictures shows a group of hollyhocks growing in another one of our raised bed gardens. I planted the hollyhocks by seed last summer. They have grown very quickly over the past year with regular watering, but no fertilizer. Some of our hollyhocks are now over 8 feet tall. Our hollyhocks started blooming in early July, and they were full of dozens of flowers of various shades of pink and white for over a month. Now they are starting to fade. This picture was taken about a month ago.

This is another photo of one of our pink Color Magic roses.

This is another photo of our Sheila’s Perfume rose.

This is a photo of our Double Delight rose.

This is a photo of our Surprise rose.

Below are a few plants called Viburnum Opulus Roseum (also known as the Snowball flower) that we planted as nursery transplants last year. They are full of their characteristic snowball-like flowers now. Ironically, their buds form and open as springs arrives, the temperatures warm, and snow (if you ever get it in your area) is just a distant memory. Both the snowball and the philadelphus are only spring bloomers. Both have a tendency to grow quite large unless pruned regularly.

Every April and May I am enchanted by the beauty of the 2 dozen or so roses we have growing in our backyard. Below are pictures of a few of them. The first picture is Sheila’s Perfume, which is an incredibly fragrant rose. However, the candy color of these roses tends to fade quickly in a few days.

This second picture is Ginger Snap, which has an amazingly bright orange color.

This third picture is Color Magic, which has very large flowers that darken from light pink to deep pink as they age over a period of about a week.

Late March and early April is lilac season in our area. We have several of the Descanso lilac hybrids including lavender lady and blue skies, which do not require as much winter chill as the standard lilacs. I took these pictures on March 31. Lilacs have been one of my favorite garden flowers for a long time because of their fragrance and beauty, even though they only bloom once a year. Our lilac flowers are fading now, just as our roses are starting to open.

Another flowering plant in our yard that is looking particularly attractive right now is our princess flower. After nearly dying to the ground in late December after nighttime freezes, it has grown so vigorously that it is now a large bush covered with violet flowers. See picture below. The cold weather wasn’t severe enough to freeze the root system. If that were to happen, I am pretty sure it would have killed the plant.

Brugmansia is another frost sensitive plant that we have in our backyard. It died to the ground last December during the same bout of freezing weather. It has also grown back vigorously since the spring. It is now over 6 feet tall and full of flowers again. It’s a Charles Grimaldi Brugmansia.

We have 7 hydrangea plants, but the hydrangea shown in this picture is growing better than the others and has the most flowers. It’s growing under our yellow peach tree and only gets a little filtered sun for a few hours a day in that spot. One of our older hydrangeas is getting sun all day. That plant often looks wilted and the leaves tend to get sunburned. We have added aluminum sulfate around the roots of the hydrangea in this picture for the past few years. Aluminum sulfate is supposed to turn hydrangea flowers blue. Its flowers used to be light pink and now they are more purple, but they are still no where near being blue.

The white star jasmine that is growing up one of our backyard fences is in bloom now. Its flowers have a wonderful summertime fragrance. We often open the bedroom windows next to the jasmine to let the fragrance come into the house.

This picture shows one of our pink roses. It was at its peak bloom about a month ago when this picture was taken. I love this particular rose, because its flowers last so long. The flowers just started to fade a few weeks ago. Many roses open and drop their petals in about a week or less. But these flowers hold their petals for weeks without dropping them. In fact, the flower petals stay on for so long that they start to turn brown on the plant before they fall off. I don’t know what variety of rose it is, because it was planted by the previous owners and there’s no tag on it.