The blooms of this mallow are beautiful. Mine is a bit leggy. Maybe next year it will be more compact. These plants get about 4 feet wide and just as tall. The blooms droop pretty quickly in the heat, and they only last one day. If you pick the blooms very early in the morning they can be brought inside and they will stay open and pretty all day. 
This is a Dame de Coeur rose.
This weekend I didn't work too hard. Too hot!
Gathered up some eggplants and tomatoes from the Vegetable Garden.
Moved some Evergreen Viola from a neglected flowerbed over to the Shade Garden.
Sprayed herbicide in the paths in the Vegetable Garden, the Shade Garden, the Rose Garden, the Star Garden, and the Infinity Garden.
Pulled weeds. Lots of weeds!
Turned the soil in one of the beds in the Vegetable Garden and planted burgundy okra. The world needs more okra.
Swam in the pool and listened to rockabilly on the radio.
Fertilized in the Vegetable Garden.
Something big - I assume it is an armadillo - has dug a big hole/den in my Greenhouse. I need to get him out of there, but I'm scared to mess with him. Damn armadillos!
Watered my fruit trees and the shrubs in the Greenhouse Garden.
Deadheaded my roses and my bee balm.
Sunday my husband and I packed a lunch and took the dogs to Lake Livingston for a swim and a picnic. I think we were the only people in the park. Too hot for sensible people to be spending time outside.
Bailey Red flowers are singles. It is one of the few rose shrubs I have with single flowers. Why have singles when you can have doubles? But I was intrigued with the pretty, prominent yellow stamens of the flowers. And Bailey Red grows very big hips that turn a pretty orange in the fall.
Black and Blue Sage is a great salvia. Salvias are deer resistant plants. Deer don't seem to like to eat any of them. And there are so many varieties of salvias. If you have trouble with deer you can grow nothing but salvias and still have an enormous amount of variety in your garden.
This is a single bloom of Strawberry Seduction Yarrow.I gathered lots of tomatoes, eggplants, the last of the parsnips, and the last of the carrots.
Planted some more okra. It's the only thing that will grow in the heat that I'm aware of.
Weeded and weeded and weeded.
Watered the fruit trees and the shrubs by the Greenhouse. It'll be a challenge getting them through the summer.
Fertilized the roses in the Rose Garden with fish emulsion.
Fertilized everything in the Long Border with a slow release organic made from chicken manure. Yummy.
Sprayed herbicide in various places.
I had an appointment with a landscaper to get an estimate for some work I want done down the slope behind the house. He didn't show up. Irritating.
Took a walk in the morning.
Watched butterflies.
Swam in the pool. The water is already hot.
In a Texas summer, roses, even antique roses - the truly time-tested work horses, are not great performers. The flowers get progressively smaller as the heat rises. There are also fewer blooms. But, considering it is the middle of June (with temperatures already in the 90s), my rose garden looks pretty good. A steady fertilization schedule helps sustain blooming because hot temperatures deplete the soil of valuable nutrients. Of course, the hotter it gets the less motivated I become to haul heavy fertilizer around!
Two rat snakes mating. They were only a few yards from the pool out back.
Two less snakes in the world. I won't miss them.
Cannas are like works of art in the garden. This Scarlet Wave Canna bud is very exotic-looking.
Nancy's Revenge is a colocasia. Their leaves point down to the ground from the point where the stem and the leaf join together. Alocasia leaves point skyward from the point where the leaf and stem meet. That is the difference between the two species. 
This is a bee balm bud.
This flower is not fully open. Soon wonderful multiple levels of tubular petals will fan out all around the center. Bee balm has very complex flowers.
Raspberry Wine Bee Balm is just coming into bloom. It is going to be a beautiful show. 
I bought one plant the spring before last. It did not bloom the first year at all. This spring it was popping up all over the flowerbed where I had it planted. I had to pull up a lot of it because it was taking over. I also dug some of it up and moved it to another flowerbed. It is very aggressive. I have Bartlett's Bee Balm growing next to it. The Bartlett's is in full bloom right now, almost on the decline, in fact.
Limerock Dream Coreopsis has such sweet flowers! I don't know much about this plant. This is the first year I have grown it. I planted it in early spring. Only time will tell how well it comes back after the winter. A strong return is important to me. I have such a big place and so much space, strong perennials a very important to me.
This is Big Daddy Hydrangea.
This is Whirling Butterfly with some Silver Frost Sedum groundcover that I just planted growing next to it. Whirling Butterfly is a good middle-of-the-border plant because long stems grow up and wave in the breeze. The bottom of the plant is pretty inconsequential so it is best to have something growing in front of it to cover it up. This garden is very narrow so unfortunately I cannot have anything in front of it covering up its "feet". Perhaps I'll move it someday to the Long Border which is considerably wider and therefore allows me to have low, medium, and tall plants layered together. It spreads pretty quickly. I had a very small plant last summer which I dug up from my garden in Houston. This year that same plant is about three feet wide.
Belinda's Dream looked really pretty this weekend. It is my favorite rose, an outstanding shrub rose and the subject of more of my photographs than any other rose in my garden.
Veronica Speedwell is a true blue flower. Very pretty.
A beautiful morning.
I planted these Striped Beauty Cannas around the pool this spring. Cannas spread, some think they spread aggressively, but that's ok with me. I have plenty of room here, and eventually I can dig some up and move them to other spots. The lower flowers wilt and die first. The flowers remind me of ladies dressed in ball gowns that have dragged the train of their dresses in the water. The leaves of this beautiful canna are variegated stripes.
I love larkspur. They are beautiful flowers, and the greenery is pretty, delicate, and fern-like. It's important that the greenery is pretty because they grow from seed - I've never seen plants sold in a nursery - and they grow all winter and into spring before they finally bloom. So it's good that the greenery is attractive on its own. Here in the South the seeds can be sown in September, October, and November. And, of course, the plants reseed, so you can also just let the seed fall to ground naturally when the plants die off. Once the seed has fallen just pull up the brown plants. They aren't perennials. They are reseeding annuals.
