Mid-South Gardening: July: time for the red, white and blue!!, 1 by marsue

marsue wrote:
Charlotte, your bouquet of dried hydrangeas is certainly pretty! Thanks for the information on how to dry them. The Asiatic lilies are gorgeous, too!

Genna: sorry about your bad week due to allergies and also your mom's death anniversary. Those anniversaries are always hard. My son was killed on Mother's Day 1981, which was May 10th that year. Even though Mother's Day is always on a different date each year, it is still a sad reminder for me even though it has been 33 years since he died. Yes, our peeps have had enough sadness for one week this past week. :'(

Al and I went to Mountain Home yesterday. While we were at Lowe's we "noticed" (how could we not notice--they had signs everywhere LOL) that they were having a plant sale. We picked up a hardy hibiscus and an Illustris EE.
Here is the Illustris. The second photo shows a honey bee on a coneflower. Al says it is an Italian honey bee. He used to have bee hives when he lived in the St. Louis area. He says the Italian honey bees aren't as aggressive as the German honey bees. Who knew? :D At any rate, I was thrilled to actually see a honey bee as they have been in great peril in the last few years due to over spraying by farmers. The third photo is a raspberry salvia; 4th photo is a phlox which Sandra gave me; 5th photo is a "bloom" of another kind--Callie the Calico Cat