We've had a couple of heavy rains in the past week or so finally making it finally possible to plant the last of the things in pots. Plus it was a good day to do some significant cutting things down. The asters were the big chore - the purple one (which I'm pretty sure is a wild one) had got totally out of hand so we dug out all the asters - even the named ones! The only survivor was the purple one that grows up through a dwarf lilac - DH thought it looked too pretty to remove! It'll at least get cut down when the flowers start to fade. This is what the side of the road looked like when we were done (we have regular garden waste pick-up with the weekly 'green bin' garbage collection):
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You can also see that there is hardy hibiscus foliage in that pile. We cut down all the Disco Belles, which are finished now and starting to yellow. The 'child' pink one is still going strong though so we left that one. It seems to have changed this year - perhaps reverting to something in its ancestry. It's always been later to start blooming, and blooms later into the year, than the Disco Belle parent - but never this late! Plus the flowers are a different shape and color than they usually are. This is what it looked like today:
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Here is a very out-of-focus picture of the aster that DH wouldn't cut down:
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Rouge - has your Paprika rose been putting out long canes with new flowers? Mine has lots of them now. Last year it produced a few but there are many more now. It finally occurred to me that these new, long canes must be seedling ones from last year's hips! My seed-grown Angel roses do that and the OSO Easy roses look much like the Angel ones. The Peachy Cream rose is also doing the same thing. All these roses now have hips coloring up from the summer flowers plus the new long flowering canes. Roses bloom the first year from seed so it makes sense to me that these new canes are seedlings.
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Tomorrow, weather permitting, we'll finally get the Midnight Marvel hibiscus and a couple of seedling Japanese Maples into the ground. That'll be the last plantings for this year. A week or so ago I picked up about 8 Christmas and Holly ferns for $2.75 each and planted them in a small bed near 'the wet corner' where an old, dead apple tree finally fell down this summer. There are a bunch of trilliums there so the ferns will be good companions for them. I'll plant two of the JM seedling there too I think.