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The summer heat has started to ebb away here but, oh, my, has this been a long, hot summer! Temperatures have frequently been up around 27°C and sometimes higher, so it has been too hot to work in the garden for long. (And I’m a Scot, so I’m not well-adapted to hot weather!) Happily, it’s now cool enough to catch up with some of the things that are waiting to be done.
To celebrate the return to more normal temperatures ( 🙂 ), here is a little bit of floral warmth. The tithonia (with its busy bumblebee) is actually from a few summers ago. I grew these brilliantly orange annual flowers just the once, but their memory lives on in a number of photographs. I’d be tempted to grow them again, but I now have fruit trees growing in that sunny spot. Maybe I’ll find another space for them in the future.
The heleniums in the photo above are just as attention-demanding as the tithonia, but I’m less keen on the red and yellow colour combination. (So there’s no surprise that these aren’t in my own garden, but were in a garden I visited recently.) I do love the shape of heleniums though; the swirl of the petals suggests a dancing movement and there’s something delightful about the way the centre of the flower becomes almost spherical as it develops. I have tried growing a yellow cultivar and a dark red one in the past, but I haven’t been able to keep them going for more than a few years here.
I like the bold red of the crocosmia below. This plant had spread to make a very dramatic clump that drew me to it as soon as I caught sight of the colour. Brilliant as it is, I don’t have it in my own garden. (I did try it years ago, but it was never happy in our very dry conditions.) Nowadays I’m not sure I want to add many flowers with really ‘hot’ colours to my garden. Our summers are becoming so scorching that the last thing we need is to add to the suggestion of heat. With that in mind, I reckon I’ll have to stick with mostly cooler colours, such as blue and white, to try to bring a slightly cooler feel to the garden.🌼
Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature 
Well, you know me.. I love sizzling colours! These are gorgeous. Crocosmia is a weed here, perhaps just one type, but a weed nonetheless. We inherited some plants by the garage where it does no harm and we let it be, it’s nice when it flowers. Tithonia looks fantastic, I’d like to have that!
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Hehe, Liz, these are certainly sizzling! Crocosmia can be a real nuisance in Scotland. I can remember great clumps of it in my parents’ garden when I was a kid but it’s too dry here for it to spread so much. The tithonia was spectacular and something I would grow again some day. The bees liked it too!
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We don’t have Helenium species like that bright red one in Texas. And speaking of which, your mention of 27°C won’t get you any sympathy from folks here, where the afternoon temperatures throughout August often reach between 35°C and 38°C. Today’s high in Austin was 37°C.
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Oh, argh, I wouldn’t last long in Texas! I am much more acclimatised to heat than when I first came down here. There’s a lot of difference in summer temperatures between the far north of Scotland and here and I do like the extra warmth in spring and autumn. We did have temperatures almost at 40°C one year and it was awful.
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True…they have flaming colours!
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I think they would have felt too hot here this year! We do have a lot of softer and cooler colours in the garden here, which are a bit more soothing.
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I’m with you on the hot colours, I’m really not a fan and would far rather have a cooler, gentler palette in the garden . . . maybe it’s a Celtic climate thing we share? 😉I do like that crocosmia, though, it’s a gorgeous shade and there’s something about the photo of tithonia that brings shot silk or taffeta to mind. Very pretty. 😊
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I see the tithonia as being like silk too – that slight suggestion of iridescence maybe. It’s like the orange isn’t just a plain colour, but rather a mix of two. A Celtic climate would have been welcome this year! Luckily the temperatures have now gone down a bit, so we can enjoy being outside again. But if summer temperatures keep rising it may be a real problem.
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I had to laugh when I saw your comment about the temperatures. Granted, it was a sympathetic laugh, but on the other hand, when I got up this morning and checked the temperature at 6 a.m., it was 27C. Having that as a high for the day would be heaven.
I’m quite fond of sneezeweeds. I’m assuming that yours are a cultivar; I’ve never seen such brilliant color in our natives, even though they’re quite bright. We have a purple-headed that’s lovely, and its rays tend toward red, but it’s still not as vibrant.
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Hehe, we really aren’t used to much heat over here! (And the temperatures we grew up with in the north of Scotland were never very warm in summer – just getting used to England was a bit of a shock to the system, never mind the temperatures we get now.) We may be able to get by, but it’s much harder for the plants, especially some trees, to cope. It has been very dry for a long time, so most plants have been very stressed. In the future we’ll have to make sure to plant things that are drought and heat tolerant. For wildlife it must be a problem too, with some things having to move further north to survive. (It also means that we start to see insects etc. that wouldn’t normally be here.)
I think the sneezeweeds we see are probably cultivars, but it’s impossible to know for sure if they’re growing in other folk’s gardens. (The two that I tried here were.) A purple-headed species with reddish rays sounds like a real beauty!
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I’ve got some lovely photos of the sneezeweed sitting around — I’ve been so bad about regular posting. I’ll bump them up a bit so you can see them.
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I’ll look forward to that, Linda! 🙂
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Lovely sizzling colours. I should try to grow Tithonia, but I suspect, like Zinnias, they would be eaten.
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You might get away with the tithonia. I can’t be sure, because it’s a long time since I grew it, but I think the stems and leaves might be quite rough, so not so inviting to nibblers. (We’ve had a lot less S&S here this year – so there’s some comfort to having so little rain this summer!)
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Despite the occasional Cornish mizzle I haven’t found many slugs this year and virtually no snails. I might chance the Tithonia then. And maybe water in some slug nematodes as September is when they tend to lay eggs. I did this last year, but didn’t bother in April when I usually do.
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I’m entranced by the pinkish bloom overlaying the orange petals of the tithonia, that gives an almost-neon look to the blossom – very striking and eye-catching.
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That’s what I like about tithonia too – it’s a lovely effect! 🙂
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The vibrant reds and orange celebrate the heat.
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And there has been plenty of heat to celebrate, hehe! It’s getting a bit cooler now, though, so a lot more pleasant to be outside.☀😎
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