Tag Archives: Dahlia Café au Lait

Finding beauty in the every day

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Hello! Life is funny, isn’t it? We go about our days, and the days turn into weeks, and the weeks fold into months. My garden is starting to wrap things up for the season, at least parts of it are, yet it seems like just yesterday when it all began. I am so appreciative and thankful for all of the beauty it has provided me for so much of the year. It certainly deserves a break!

In my morning walkabout yesterday (which is when I took the feature image above, with the pink-hued sky), I marveled at how many plants are still producing flowers. The sunflowers are producing tiny flowers along branches that are barely attached to their main stems. The sweet pea are still flowering, although they are no longer fragrant. The little lime hydrangea are producing lots of new blooms, while the incrediball hydrangea have slowed down (but not stopped).

Looking for color? The alstromeria and dahlias have show stopping colors, and are still going strong. The asters have been blooming since September and are just starting to slow down now.

On the squash side, the Marina Di Chioggia squash seem to be finished growing. They are large! I have two Red Kuri squash that have turned orange from yellow, but have not made their final transition to red just yet. The pumpkins are nearly all orange. Nearly.

We mustn’t forget the roses. They are still producing new buds, and have lots of color from flowers that are currently blooming. There is a distinctively different feel to the garden now from the summer months, but the beauty continues.

Life is full. I try and do little gardening jobs along the way. When I stop doing that, those little jobs become big jobs and doing them, even in my head, becomes a lot harder. I also make a point of going in the garden every day, even if it is just my walkabout. Between my chickens, the birds, flowers, trees, and sky, there is *always* something to admire and be thankful for.

I hope you, too, find beauty in the every day.

In Peace,
Dana

little lime hydrangeas (dwarf lime light hydrangea)

I’m so happy with how the little lime border looks – as well as the lavender border! That was a fun project this year.

Marina Di Chioggia squash on half of the arch and sweet pea on the other

This is the ‘backside’ of the flower arch, which has three Marina Di Chioggia squash (two visible here) on one side and sweet pea on the other. There’s just a short opportunity in the morning to capture pictures on the front now, as the seasons change.

flower arrangement with dahlia: tam tam, cafe au lait and maxi, asters, delphinium and alstromeria

I couldn’t resist making another arrangement! The alstromeria were new to work with here, and I’m so glad I added them! This also has dahlias: Maxi, Cafe au Lait, and Tam-Tam, with some bright pink asters and one very curvy and long stem of delphinium.

Teasing Georgia David Austin roses in a bud vase

I have a lot of flowers inside at the moment! These ‘Teasing Georgia’ David Austin roses were hanging very low to the ground where no one could enjoy their beauty. So I saved them and brought them inside 🙂

Garden with Asters Pumpkins and Pumpkin wreath on playhouse

I’ll admit that it is *much* easier to find beauty when the sky is so blue and the sun is shining! May we all have more days like these!

Thanks so much for visiting. I hope you enjoyed the tour. How do you look for beauty in your day?

Is pink the new color of fall?

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Hi there! Welcome to my blog. Well, what do you think? Is it safe to say that pink can be considered a fall color? When I look around my garden, I still see so much pink: roses, dahlia, asters, and alstroemeria, there is a lot! The traditional fall colors of burgundy, red, and orange are still there as can be seen with the dahlias, helenium, persicaria, rudbeckia, pumpkins and Rowan berries. But they are joined by a lot of pink, which I would consider to be more traditionally a summer color.

Never the less, all of the colors are beautiful, no matter the time of year. We’ve had some pretty blue skies with lots of sunshine this week, helping to slowly turn the pumpkins orange. This gardener is also happy that we had some rain this week, too.

I’ve had a lot of fun creating flower arrangements recently. The dahlia are blooming ‘like mad’ and it would be silly not to do something with them. They are so easy to work with, too. One day I used berries from the yard with them, and another day I used asters. The point is to have fun while creating something pretty. For me, I find the process of making an arrangement to be quite therapeutic. I simply enjoy the process from start to finish. All other thoughts are banished while I play with flowers!

I’ll be playing more with my feature image, too, as the pumpkins turn color and the squash continue to ripen. Stay tuned!

I’m joining The Propagator’s Six on Saturday meme. Feel free to join in!

Enjoy the tour 🙂

pink asters around ornamental grass

1 – Asters. These guys sure like to show off. I have them planted around the ornamental grass. This year I dug up two large sections that had grass intertwined in them. I was quite happy with how that went until a few weeks later the plants seemed to be covered in a powdery mildew. I still don’t know what happened. Unfortunately, a few of my plants were affected (two delphinium on the deck and some of these asters). I am hoping that it was a once off occurrence.

Alstroemeria Summer Paradise series 'Summer Break'

2 – Alstroemeria Summer Paradise series ‘Summer Break’. I am so pleased with these lovelies! I planted them this year and they have happily been blooming ever since. There are still lots of buds to bloom on the three plants, providing a lovely splash of (pink!) color. They are great as cut flowers, too.

sungold sunflower with marigolds, asters and sunflowers in the background

3 – Sungold sunflowers with marigolds and asters. I could not resist using these sunflowers again this week. They are just fantastic for providing a substantial amount of color! My ‘caged’ sunflowers in with the blueberries are super pretty, too. I didn’t plant them, but I’m sure glad for them!

dahlia, ivy, black berries and elder flower berries arrangement
dahlias: cafe au lait, coffee at midnight, tam-tam, and maxi

4 & 5 – Dahlia arrangement with blackberries, elder flower berries and ivy. This was so fun to go around the yard and find different things to fill the arrangement with. I just had a thing for berries on this day, and it worked out so well. I’m still getting used to dahlias. If you wait to use them until they are fully open, then they won’t have long to live in an arrangement. It is best to use them before they fully open. I used chicken wire to keep the flowers in place. This works really well, and is something I can use over and over again. The dahlias are: Cafe au Lait, Coffee at midnight, Tam Tam, and Maxi.

dahlia and aster flower arrangement

6 – Dahlia and aster arrangement. More pink! This is a much smaller arrangement that I made with a focus on pink. I thought the tiny pink asters worked really well with the dahlias (Cafe au Lait and Maxi). Super easy, and I used the chicken wire again.

Dana with cake and flowers

One more picture: My birthday is at the end of September. What a wonderful time to celebrate life! My daughter made this chocolate cake with meringue buttercream icing for me. It was so delicious!

I hope you enjoyed the rather pink tour! Have a great week!

In Peace,
Dana

This isn’t an Irish summer!

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Hi there! Welcome to my blog. My family and I were away on a wonderful holiday to Greece last week and we’ve come home to the most amazing weather here in Ireland! This is not your typical Irish weather. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had some beautiful summers here. But the weather is usually mild (read: not hot) and we wouldn’t typically get lots of consecutive days of sunshine. So while we could really use a good rainfall at this stage, the abundance of blue skies and sunshine is such a welcome treat. As for the garden, well, it is thirsty. Very thirsty. Rain is in the forecast and I’m really hoping that it gives the garden a good drink (at night, of course!).

The flowers are definitely suffering because of the lack of water. Mostly they just bloom and die (quickly). I’m trying to capture them as much as possible while they look good! I have a bunch of dahlias that are all blooming together, which is so pretty to see. The delphinium is one of my favorites simply because the colors are so striking (more so when having two complementary colors). And I could not resist cutting some of my sunflowers. What a collection of colors there are!

I do hope your summer is going well. It is flying by much too quickly. I’m joining the Propagator for his ‘Six on Saturday’ meme. You might see some flowers from last week (different pics, of course!) – that means they are my favorites!

Enjoy the tour!

bowl of blueberries and bouquet of delphinium Shelby and Blue Ocean

1 & 2 – Blueberries and Delphinium Shelby (in the center, light color) and Blue Ocean (darker color) and Kitty. What a difference it makes to cover your blueberries to protect them from the birds! We have never had so many blueberries to eat ourselves. 🙂 Poor birds, but lucky us! The delphinium are in pots on our deck. I love their colors.

Dahlia Café au Lait

3 – Dahlia Café au Lait. What a stunner this one is. I have a few different tubers and one produces pink-tinged flowers and one produces cream-tinged flowers. If I were to critique them I’d say that they’re a tiny bit too big, and would be more ideal a little bit smaller – for arrangements, at least. But I do still like them very much! These are in containers on our deck. The dahlias in the ground are *almost* ready to flower…

Magic star lilies

4 – Lily Magic Star. At least that’s what I bought! I’m not sure it looks like magic star, but it is very pretty. I love scented flowers. Love, love, love them. This is also in a container on our deck and is really putting on quite the show.

Gladiolus Pink Parrot and Rose Supreme

5 – Gladiolus Pink Parrot on the left and Rose Supreme on the right. I have to correct my post from last week as I named Rose Supreme Pink Parrot. These are in pots on our deck (I sense a theme here). The deck flowers provide a beautiful sea of color for me to look at when I am in our kitchen. It’s my favorite view from inside the house!

vase of sunflowers yellow, brown, burgundy in sunshine and at sunset
sunflowers in a vase

6 – Sunflowers! Wish I could tell you exactly which varieties these are, but since I switched and swapped and tried quite a few at the start, I’m not quite sure. The brownish ones are Clarets, I think there are some called ‘sunny flowers’ and some called ‘Waooh!’. I like them because they are smaller and manageable for vases. Each stem has many flowers on it at every stage – from tiny buds to mature flowers. For this reason, I don’t really like cutting stems. But I do have a lot this year, so a few vases now and again is fine (right?). The top two pictures were taken in the evening, right after I cut them and about 15 minutes apart. The sunset lighting really changes everything. The bottom full photo is from the following day, and it was so windy that my husband is actually holding the vase for me! All to get the perfect picture 🙂

Thank you for stopping by! Which was your favorite flower?

In Peace,
Dana

Autumn vibes for this Six on Saturday

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Hello there, and welcome to my blog! This fall has been filled with amazing colors, and that’s even before including the beautiful sunsets and sunrises. It has truly been non-stop beautiful. We’ve had mild weather for the most part, so far. I’ve been pottering about the garden, getting little jobs done here and there. The garden still looks good, thanks to fall blooming plants (fall bloomers), the changing colors of leaves and lots of pumpkins! I’ll again be joining the Propagator for his meme ‘Six on Saturday’. Let’s begin!

Dark pink asters

1 – Dark pink asters. No official name on these, but they are still going strong, even after my ‘light pink’ asters have long faded. They are a fabulously vibrant, fuchsia color and just shout ‘look at me’! They are quite tall, at least three feet, and *really* get blown around a lot (we live in a windy spot). A super easy plant that provides lots of color.

Princess Anne David Austin Rose

2 – Princess Anne rose. This David Austin rose shrub, Princess Anne, has been covered with bright pink roses all summer long and is continuing now through the fall. The flowers are also fragrant, which is a lovely bonus. The color is striking and can be seen from across the garden. This shrub does tend to get blackspot easily, unfortunately. But that’s my only complaint!

sunflower stem with multiple flowers

3 – Sunflower – Claret F1. This is probably one of the very last of the sunflowers to bloom. I had one plant in an extra bed which I needed to clear to plant some winter garlic. There were just two stems on the plant, so I cut them off and brought them inside. The teeny, tiny little blooms growing up the stem did indeed bloom after a few days! It was nice to have a bit of the garden inside. By the way, the wreath in the background is a hydrangea wreath that I made a couple of years ago. I’ll usually keep them until their color fades. This blue one hasn’t gotten the boot yet!

4 – Dahlia Café au Lait. I think the back of this lovely lady is as pretty as the front! OK, so I didn’t know you are supposed to cut the main stem of the dahlia shortly after it starts to grow, so that it will then have multiple blooming stems instead of one main – too heavy – stem. Erin at Floret Farm happened to have a video mid-season explaining all of this, and while she said it wasn’t too late to do this, I think that in Ireland it probably was too late. Anyway, with the weather being unpredictable, I brought the dahlia inside and it has continued to bloom, beautifully I might add. I am looking forward to getting it right next year!

Japanese Anemone dark pink

5 – Japanese anemone, dark pink. I have loads and loads and loads of the light pink variety of Japanese anemone (they spread like crazy)! But this was my only dark pink variety, stuck in the middle of all of the light pinks. I am not quite sure if I’ll manage to single it out to ensure it will multiply instead of the light pinks, but I really should try as it is very pretty.

I hadn’t realized that I’d picked mostly pink flowers for today’s post! Next week I will have to show you the blueberry shrubs and their amazing red leaves, which are providing some fabulous color in the garden. But back to pinks, check out this sky!

Sunrise blue and pink sky

6 – Sunrise over the garden. What can I say? It is such a treat to get up and see the sky like this! It really lit up my pumpkins, too. They have all turned orange, and just in time for Halloween! (Although I’m likely to keep them on for fall harvest decorating, instead of jack o’lantern use.)

Sunrise with moon in sky

One final look at the garden with the beautiful sunrise and visible moon. I hope you have had a beautiful October, too. I think we’re spoiled with all of this beauty to help us get through the not quite as beautiful winter months. That works for me! Take care!

In Peace,
Dana