Gardens Attract The Best Visitors

Gardens bring rewards in addition to beautiful  blooms, fresh food, and a healthier body.  As we provide shelter and nourishment for birds and butterflies, we receive the joy of viewing some of nature's loveliest creations close up.  The garden is never more alive and enchanting than when you step into it and see butterflies dancing across the top of blooms.  My Pagoda Flowers have been luring Zebra Longwing butterflies in for weeks.

Pagoda Flowers also entice our smallest feathered friends...a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird.

My bed of Zinnias is where the butterflies are always cavorting.  I can see about half this border from my kitchen window and it's lovely to watch them fluttering from flower to flower.  A Gulf Fritillary...

This Buckeye butterfly is one of the first I've seen this season...

And these little guys, I don't know that I've ever seen them before.  A pair of tiny Fiery Skippers.

This next photo is also a Skipper, Horace's Duskywing.

There have been a lot of Spicebush Swallowtails in the garden also, but they are probably the most nervous butterflies I've ever seen.  This one finally sat for half a second...

Male, Ruby-throated Hummingbird on magenta  'Wendy's Wish' Salvia.

A 'mama' Eastern Bluebird nesting for the second time this season.

Another female Ruby-throated Hummingbird dining on a Hardy Red Gloxinia.  I've been spreading this plant around my shade gardens as it just has the look of  what a hummingbird would want.

Everything is still blooming with wild abandon, although our full sun, rainless days are rushing the blooms toward decline quicker than I would like.  Daylilies, agapanthus, and roses...

Gaura doesn't mind the heat, it sheds it's blooms at the end of each day and begins anew each morning.

Sunny in the morning...

The only shady spot in my front gardens in the afternoon.

I hope you're all having a great weekend...happy gardening.