My garden hit its peak bloom about a week ago. Now several flowers are in decline, especially in the back flowerbed. Here’s a list of what I can remember off the top of my head:

• Shasta daisies are starting to shrivel up. I’m going to cut off the heads and see how much rebloom I can get.
• Campanula glomeratas are mostly declining. It’s funny — some of them are flowering later than the others, and I think a few got damaged by a grass killer spray that’s supposed to not harm other plants. I tested it out in a few areas, and it caused brown spots on the campanulas.
• My Stella D’oro daylilies have stopped flowering.
• The Blue Flax is still going with morning flowers, but not as well as before.
• Foxgloves are all done, but I’m going to cut off the heads and see what else comes.
• I had a few small Delphinium blooms last month, but they’re gone now.
• The perennial geraniums are done (Johnson’s Blue and some yellow one)
• My Clematis flowered for about three weeks, way up high on one of the vines, but the other hardly got any blooms. It should keep going, but they’re not very healthy. The one that gets more sun seems a bit chlorotic.
• The Salvia ‘East Friesland’ flowered very well for many weeks. We cut off some seed heads to see if they’ll rebloom in the front, and we need to get to the ones in the back side yard too. Also, I have one of these Salvias in the backyard that I just planted this year, and it’s blooming already. That’s great for a perennial!

Here are some things that are still flowering quite well:

• Gaillardias are doing great. In fact, I want to take some cuttings off one that has mostly yellow flowers and see if I can propagate it to use that color in the front flowerbed.
• Lavenders are still going strong. They seem more blue this year than before. They’re really doing great.
• Nepetas are not only blooming strong, but they’re overgrowing. I need to chop some back a bit, because they’re overshadowing other flowers near them.
• Purple coneflowers and my one white coneflower in the front just started blooming well about one week ago, maybe two. By the way, I made a mistake with seed collecting — I thought both coneflowers in the front were white ones, so I raised all those seedlings thinking they’d be white coneflowers, but they’ll probably be purple or some mixture of purples and whites now that I realize one of the parent plants was purple.
• Mallows (Malva sylvestris) are still flowering well.
• Rudbeckias just came into their best bloom in this past week.
• The rose hedge in back is actually blooming! It’s not as thick as I’d like, but I think it’s getting better than last year.
• The ruby Meidiland roses in front have been blooming for three to four weeks really strong. They’re simply awesome!
• My pink Lavateras in the front are doing very well. They’ve been blooming well for most of a month now.
• Golden coreopsis in the backyard are still doing well. I need to deadhead them to keep them going.
• Moonbeam and Zagreb coreopsis in the front are blooming (it’s been a week or two), but not very thick. I hope they’ll get more as the weeks come.
• Some morning glories are growing with the Clematis, and they’re starting to bloom.
• Golden poppies are still going pretty well. The pink ‘Summer Sorbet’ ones are not doing well — only one has bloomed. I think they’re getting overshadowed too much by the nearby Nepetas.
• I put some Profusion Cherry Zinnias in the backyard, and they’re doing well.
• My Anthony Waterer Spiraeas are flowering and have been doing so for about three weeks.
• The Hibiscus syriacus bushes are just starting to open their first flowers.
• The butterfly bushes (Buddleia) are outstanding. I was worried about them earlier this year, when it seemed like two weren’t growing, but they have come back with vigor. The blooms just opened up in the last week or so.

Here’s an update on fruit and veggies:

• The raspberries have been producing for about three weeks REALLY well. They’re starting to taper off now.
• Strawberries are producing the first of their second wave of fruit.
• Apples are growing well — I just thinned both trees, picking the ones with worm holes to pluck off. The Granny Smith didn’t need as much thinning as the Jonathan.
• The Nectarines are growing well. I thinned them in May, and they seem to be doing well.
• The first cherry tomatoes are green and growing.
• The peas (‘Sugar Snap’) have produced quite well these past two weeks, and the vines are starting to dry up. We planted them a bit late.
• The corn is growing like CRAZY! Probably because I put high nitrogen lawn fertilizer around them. Even the little seedlings I bought about three weeks ago to replace seed that didn’t grow are growing very fast.

This past week or two has been the best for flowers. It’s been pretty impressive. I love my yard.