Bringing in the Honey at Lavender Hills Farm

Posted on September 1, 2019 by Janet

For Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, home is Lavender Hills Farm, a 25-acre property near Orillia in central Ontario, Canada.

Here, beautiful gardens….

….. and a custom-designed, bee-friendly, 2-acre tallgrass prairie meadow (seed-drilled ten years ago by their neighbors and friends Paul Jenkins and Miriam Goldberger of Wildflower Farm) supplement the natural softwood and hardwood forests and swamp that surround their farm.

Tom – who’s been a beekeeper for 40 years – tends 20 colonies at the farm, in addition to 110 colonies he manages in outyards in the region, for a total of 130 colonies. He calls himself a “sideline beekeeper”, but, of course, at one time he was a novice. He started out four decades ago working as part of the interpretive staff at a provincial park where the focus was agriculture and apple orchards. There was also a beehive under glass at the park – an observation hive – but no one on staff knew anything about bees. So Tom took a 5-day course at the University of Guelph (Ontario’s agricultural college) in order to explain to visitors the fine points about apple pollination. Later, he moved to the Orillia area and started working in adult education at a local college.

As he recalls now, he looked around at all the farms in the area and thought, “I don’t know anything about farming, but I know about beekeeping!” So he bought a couple of colonies and began keeping bees as a hobby. After working for a while in Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, he went travelling internationally. When he returned to Canada, he met Tina-May Luker and told her he wanted a job where he could ride his bicycle to work. He knocked on the door of commercial beekeeper John Van Alten of Dutchman’s Gold Honey (and later president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association) and offered his services. Two days later, he was hired to help manage between 800-1200 hives.

When he and Tina-May moved back to the Orillia area seventeen years ago, they bought their farm and Tom began beekeeping in earnest, with 50 colonies the first year and another 50 a year later. His farm beeyard is adjacent to the tall-grass meadow and surrounded by electric fencing to deter black bears.

The remainder are situated in a half-dozen outyards within an hour’s drive, with between 10-30 hives at each location. The outyards include a commercial cranberry bog, below,……

…..and a wildflower farm. His honey house at the farm is a converted double garage several hundred feet from the beeyard and close to the driveway so the honey supers can easily be unloaded from his pickup truck after a trip to the outyards.

That brings us to one of Tom’s favorite beekeeping gadgets, and one he devised himself. “In my pickup I put a piece of plywood with a little bit of a rim around it, sort of like a picture frame, and put some loops of wire into that, and that allowed me to use straps to tie down all my frame. It’s terrific, and only cost fifty bucks for lumber.”

Tom has another favorite piece of equipment, his “Mr. Long Arm”. That’s an extendable painter’s pole at the end of which he has fashioned something like a butterfly net made of fence brace wire threaded through the seamed end of a heavy-duty plastic shopping bag. “When it’s extended its full length of twelve feet,” he says, “I can often retrieve swarms that have settled well above me in the branches near my beeyards. The bees can’t grip the smooth plastic so I just shake them out into a brood box on the ground. No more ladders for me!”

As for those swarms, he says: “You can use that whole impulse to swarm to make more colonies of bees, if you want them. If you don’t want them, then you’ve got to be very diligent to manage your colonies so they don’t get crowded.”

Tom started raising queens a few years ago and finds it an engrossing learning experience. “It’s not something a beginner usually tackles, but at some point you get enough confidence to try it, and it’s very interesting. The whole idea is to try to select bees that have the characteristics that I like working with and to give me a supply of queens early in the season when they’re very handy to have.”

In spring, his bees find willows and red maple in the plentiful swamps around one of the outyards, where thawing occurs earlier than other places. At the farm, local basswood trees (Tilia americana), below, provide a good flow and produce excellent honey about three out of five years.

Abundant staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) feeds the bees and the red fruit clusters provide the fuel for Tom’s smoker.

There’s clover and alfalfa in neighboring farm fields and birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare), below, growing wild along the country roads.

Tina-May’s borders and vegetable garden provide lots of nectar and pollen from plants like Oriental poppy (Papaver orientale), butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)……

….. motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca), Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia), below…..

……thyme (Thymus sp.)….

….. and asparagus that’s gone to flower with its bright orange pollen.

In the designed meadow, masses of coreopsis give way to purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), blazing-star (Liatris pycnostachya and L. ligulistylis). The final act, lasting from August well into October, stars the goldenrods, and Tom and Tina-May grow four species including stiff goldenrod (Solidago rigida, syn. Oligoneuron rigidum), below,

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…. rough-leaved goldenrod (Solidago rugosa)….

…..and the very late-flowering showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), below.

Says Tom: “Goldenrod is a good honey, very dark and somewhat strong tasting. The bees produce a bright yellow wax when they’re collecting goldenrod.” But this late flowering of the goldenrods and native asters also helps the health of the hive, as Tom explains. “There’s an expression that it’s really good to have ‘fat bees’ going into winter, meaning bees that are really well-fed. And being stimulated by a good flow of nectar and pollen allows them to make the physiological changes they need for winter. Bees in the summer, they’re flying around, they last six weeks, then they die. But in the winter, they have to sit in a hive, they don’t go out for six months, so their whole body, essentially, has to work in a different fashion.”

Most years, Tom’s colonies winter very well, with his survival rates matching or bettering the provincial average. “I make sure the bees are well fed, because that stimulates them to keep brooding up later in the season. So I feed them in the fall. And I make sure the mites are under control.” Here’s a little video* I made of Tom explaining how he checks for varroa mites. (*If you’re reading this on an android phone and cannot see the video, try switching from “mobile” to “desktop”. Not sure why that glitch occurs.)

Honey extraction begins in late July and extends well into October.

From time to time, Tom enlists the help of family members like brother-in-law Paul Campbell, seen assisting him below.

Here’s a video I made of Tom and Paul at this time in late summer moving the honey frames for extraction.

Over the years, Tom has automated his honey harvest to lighten the load, but it’s still hot, sticky, noisy work, with rock music blaring from speakers above the clatter of the hot knives of the decapping machine….

…..and the whirring of the horizontal extractor.

Here’s a video I made of the honey extraction process at Lavender Hills Farm. Because it’s hard to hear Tom over the machinery and the music, I put in a few subtitles.

Tom and Tina-May, below, are regulars at four farmers’ markets in the area….

….selling honey, mustard, honey butter, herbal soap, candles, and treats like honey straws that children love. “Farmers’ markets are a great place to get to know your customers and build a steady market for your product,” says Tom. “People want to know that you’re the beekeeper, and they want to hear stories about keeping bees, just like I’m telling stories now.”

It’s a demanding occupation with lots of tiring physical work and he gets stung “dozens of times a day, sometimes”. And the challenges are many now. “When I started,” he recalls, “There were no parasitic mites, viruses weren’t an issue, and agri-chemicals didn’t seem to be as big a factor. You could put a box of bees in the back of the farm, they’d winter all right, and you’d get a box of honey. It’s certainly changed in the past twenty years.”

One of the newest factors is small hive beetle, and though it’s been seen in the Niagara region, it hasn’t yet made it this far north. However he’s heard talk of beekeepers arranging refrigerated storage for their honey frames

But Tom is still enthralled with the whole thing. “Keeping bees is a very elemental occupation. The bees are subject to all the natural forces around them, from the plants to the weather and all the variations in between. It’s one expression of nature that you can roll up your sleeves and get right into. And that’s very enjoyable, because every year is different.”

If there’s one piece of advice he’d give to a new beekeeper, it’s this: “Get two hives, not just one, because of the chance of you either making a mistake or nature dealing you a blow that might take one of your hives, but you’ll always have another one.”

And that could be the beginning of a very long love affair.

***********

This story is a much-expanded version of an article that appeared earlier this year in a beekeeping magazine. It’s a joy to know both Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, below, with me at the Gravenhurst Farmer’s Market on Lake Muskoka this summer.

Honey bees are favourite photography subjects of mine. To see a large album of my honey bees on flowers, have a look at my stock photo portfolio.

Pollen for Honey Bees in a Rainbow of Colours

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Janet

You hear a lot about flower nectar, when people talk about growing “flowers for bees”, but you don’t hear nearly as much about pollen. And given that pollen, and by extension pollination, is the principal quid pro quo in the evolutionary pact that sees bees trade sex services for food, much more should be written about pollen. It is of vital importance to the bee larvae, for which it is the protein that develops their growth. In one of my classic old books on beekeeping, Plants and Beekeping by F.N. Howles (1945), he writes: “It has been calculated that about ten average bee loads of pollen are necessary to produce one worker bee and that on an average one pound of pollen rears 4,540 bees, which works out at about 44 lb. of pollen for an average colony’s breeding requirements in a season.” Without sufficient pollen, the colony would die off.

Because I spent several years photographing honey bees (Apis mellifera) for a book idea I once had, I got to see a lot of pollen up close and personal, like the golden pollen being patiently collected from Gaillardia ‘Mesa Yellow’, below.

I saw bee faces completely dusted with sticky pollen; I watched them perform aerial dance maneuvers as they packed pollen into their corbiculae, before settling back onto flowers; and I observed them flying back to the hive, legs laden with saddlebags of pollen in all colours of the rainbow, like the white datura pollen below.

It’s pollen colour in all its wonderful variety that I want to celebrate here, from the first blossoms of spring to the last of autumn.

Let’s start with hardy perennials and bulbs. Crocuses have very large pollen grains. I’ve watched honey bees curling their entire bodies into silken crocus chalices, like C. x lutea ‘Golden Yellow’, below.

Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) produces azure-blue pollen.

Little striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides) rewards visitors with beige pollen.

Grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum) can often be seen with bees working the flowers as they open from the bottom of the spike up. Pollen is whitish-cream in colour.

Orchards are filled with bees in spring, among them honey bees, thus ensuring that there will be tasty fruit come late summer. This is the hardy ‘Reliance’ peach (Prunus persica) with light-brown pollen.

The Dutch call alpine rockcress (Arabis alpina) “honigschub’ or honey bush and it’s easy to see why. Very early in spring, before most perennials have thought about emerging, arabis is feeding the bees nectar and a sticky light-brown pollen.

Although forget-me-nots are prodigious nectar sources – especially considering the vast quantities of the tiny flowers in spring gardens – their pollen grains are among the smallest measured and from my observations, not very prominent in corbiculae (pollen baskets). But for a bee to insert its tongue into the narrow corolla of a forget-me-not, the net result will be that some pollen will dust off on the proboscis and the head, which the bee will gather for the hive. And because of that narrow opening, pollen is often mixed in with the nectar that forget-me-nots yield, and is measurable in the honey.

Though the shrubby European honeysuckles like Lonicera tatarica, below, can be invasive, they are good early sources of pollen.

The bright-orange pollen of California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) is always a great lure for honey bees.

When the yellowwood tree (Cladrastis kentukea) has a good year for bloom – sometimes just one year in three – the flowers with their tawny-gold pollen are avidly sought out by honey bees and native bumble bees and solitary bees.

Beekeepers always know when Oriental poppies (Papaver orientale) are in flower, because homecoming bees are dusted with black pollen.

Peony stamens are a rich source of pollen, with one count estimating a single peony might have 3.5 million pollen grains. This is Paeonia ‘Sunday Chimes’, below.

The knotweeds (Centaurea sp.) are excellent plants for bee forage, and beautiful in the late spring-early summer garden. Globe centaurea (Centaurea macrocephala) offers pollen in golden-yellow…..

….. while Centaurea dealbata ‘John Coutts’ produces creamy-beige pollen.

Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) is irresistible to bees when the prominent stamens are yielding their creamy-white pollen, below.

Native American copper iris (I. fulva) is popular with hummingbirds, but on the High Line one day, I watched honey bees patiently working the flowers and securing ample loads of near white pollen.

Knautia macedonica is my very favourite pollen producer, yielding a rich magenta-pink pollen that makes honey bee faces look adorable and their packed corbiculae seem like airborne jewelry.

Roses, especially single and semi-double forms with prominent stamens, are often good sources of pollen, which they yield mostly in the morning, apparently. The David Austin shrub below produced amber-brown pollen.

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Certain clematis species are good sources of pollen. One that flowers in early summer is Clematis koreana – and the bee working it had packed a jewel-like pollen pearl in her pollen basket.

Filipendulas are good forage plants and native qneen-of-the-prairie or meadowsweet (Filipendula rubra) provides pollen in early summer for native bees and honey bees. This is the showy cultivar ‘Venusta’ with creamy-white pollen.

Bumble bees and honey bees are always buzzing around globe thistles (Echinops sp.), which yield a whitish pollen from the masses of tiny flowers.

To see a planting of helenium or sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) in full sun in late summer is to see a happy bee festival. And the abundant pollen is rich orange. One source mentions the bitter nature of helenium honey, but at the point where helenium is in flower, beekeepers are often letting the bees collect nectar for winter honey stores.

Japanese anemones (Anemone x hybrida) yield neglible nectar but the yellow stamens are rich sources of white pollen.

With its masses of tiny, white flowers, sweet autumn clematis (Clematis terniflora) is very popular with bees. I watched the honey bee below doing an intricate aerial dance to pack in white pollen from a massive vine.

By the end of summer into early autumn, the various goldenrods and asters (Michaelmas daisies) offer nectar that is often vital for bees to survive winter, though most beekeepers must provide additional winter food for their bees. (Goldenrod makes a strong honey that is not generally sold commercially.) But bees also collect pollen from these late perennials, like the very late-blooming showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), below, with its golden-yellow pollen. This will help sustain the hive until spring.

Of the asters, I loved this image of a bee hanging from lance-leaved aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum), its corbicula packed with yellow pollen…..

….. and the beautiful New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) and its many cultivars, like the one below, are well worth growing in every garden – something lovely for you and the bees as the season ends.

Annuals and tender perennials and bulbs can also be good sources of colourful pollen. This is Ageratum houstonianum with lots of pure white pollen.

Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) and their many cultivars are a treat for all types of bees, especially the native sunflower bees adapted to this North American flower. But honey bees enjoy nectaring on the tiny ‘true’ flowers and gathering the yellowish pollen, too.

Single portulacas (P. grandiflora) have bright orange pollen, as you can from the bee crawling out of the silky blossom below.

I’ve seen lots of tender S. African bulbines (B. frutescens) growing in summer gardens recently, much to the delight of honey bees gathering pale yellow pollen from the feathery stamens.

Weeds like Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) are never appreciated by gardeners, and many are highly invasive and on noxious plant lists. But you will often see bees of all kinds foraging for nectar and pollen on thistles…..

….. and dusting themselves completely with the white pollen of the pretty blue summer flowers of chicory (Cichorium intybus)…..

…. and flying about with the telltale yellow ‘pollen head’ that is a sure sign that the bee has been in a toadflax flower (Linaria vulgaris).

Finally, I’d like to include a few vegetables that bees like – not for the stems or the roots, but for the flowers that have resulted from the plants “bolting”. This is what happens to a radish (Raphanus sativus) when it’s going to seed – yellow pollen much appreciated by this little honey bee.

Brassicas like broccoli, cabbage, kale and Brussels sprouts also form flowers as part of their biennial life cycle – and the bees love the yellow pollen that forms.

Last but not least, a perennial vegetable we all know and love for its tender spring shoots – but have you watched bees gathering bright orange pollen from the tiny, yellow male flowers? It is a feat of acrobatics worthy of any high-flying trapeze act!

(PS – Are you a bee-lover? To see a large selection of my honey bee stock photography, visit my Smug Mug pages. And you’ll find a load of bumble bees and other native North American bees and bee kin on my page as well.)

Monkshood & Snakeroot for a Fall Finale

Posted on October 21, 2017 by Janet

What a luscious October afternoon! I looked out my back window and was drawn, as I always am this time in autumn, to the furthest corner of the garden, where a little fall scene unfolds that I treasure more because it’s a secret. Want to see it? Let’s take a little stroll past the messy pots on the deck with their various sedums and swishing sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula) out into the garden past the table and chairs that haven’t been used since… when? August?

Keep going to where the lovely chartreuse Tiger Eyes sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) is currently doing its Hollywood star thing in brilliant apricot…..

But what’s this scene, just behind it?

Yes, two stalwarts of the autumn garden – and I mean autumn, fall, October! Autumn monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’) and autumn snakeroot (Actaea simplex), aka fall bugbane. Each year, they flower at the same time, and enjoy identical conditions in my garden, i.e. the most moisture-retentive soil (lowest corner of the garden by a few inches), with reasonable midday sunshine but dappled shade a good portion of the day. The fragrance of the snakeroot is fabulous, something a little soft and incense-like, or reminiscent of talcum powder (in the nicest way). Colour-wise, I love blue and white, from the earliest anemones-with-scilla in April to this shimmering, assertive finale.

And did I mention pollinators? As in bumble bees of different species, honey bees……

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(WHO has the beehives near my house? I’d love to know)…..

……hover flies…..

….and paper wasps, below, as well as ants and cucumber beetles.

Monkshood is deadly poisonous, but its pollen seems to be an attraction for bumble bees and honey bees once the asters have finished up.

Finally, do note that the snakeroot is not any of those fancy-schmancy dark-leaved cultivars like ‘Brunette’, but the straight species with plain-Jane-green-foliage,. And that it used to be called Cimicifuga, but the gene sequencers have now moved it into Actaea. It is a lovely plant and should be used much, much more.

Butterfly Milkweed: PPA’s 2017 Plant of the Year!

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Janet

You know that feeling of pride you get when a friend receives a well-deserved award? I feel exactly that way about an outstanding prairie wildflower that I’ve been growing here in my meadows on Lake Muskoka for many years. So, when I heard that The Perennial Plant Association chose my very favourite perennial – butterfly milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa — to be their 2017 Plant of the Year, I decided to honour it with my own blog.

The PPA award is not the first laurel to be bestowed on this lovely wildling. In 2014, it was awarded the Freeman Medal by the Garden Clubs of America, as a native deserving of wider garden planting. And the GCA president asked me if I would donate my photo of a monarch butterfly on the flowers, below, which I was happy to do (see down this page).

Despite the plaudits, butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) is not the easiest perennial to grow, unless you happen to garden on a sand prairie. It has a deep tap root that makes it rather difficult to transplant. And seeds are often notoriously slow to germinate and grow, sometimes taking 5 years to grow enough to set flower buds. But give it a little rich, free-draining, gravelly soil and lots of sunshine, and watch the pollinating insects pile on. Foremost, of course, is the beautiful monarch butterfly, which uses it – as it does all milkweed species – as food for its caterpillars. If you’re lucky, you might see the female monarch ovipositing on its leaves or flowers.

Come back and you’ll see the little egg on a leaf….

… or perhaps right in the flowers.

Follow along over the next few weeks and you’ll see the various instars of the developing caterpillar munching away on the leaves….

…. and the flower buds.

But monarchs aren’t the only butterflies fond of butterfly milkweed. Many others love the nectar-rich flowers, including the great spangled fritillary…

…. hairstreaks, below, and many others.

Bees love it too. On my property, I often see the orange-belted bumble bee (Bombus ternarius) nectaring….

….and the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis), too.

Here’s a little video I made of the brown-belted bumble bee foraging on my butterfly milkweed. In the background, you can hear a red squirrel scolding and a lovely Swainson’s thrush singing its flute-like song.

Naturally, many native bees seek nectar from butterfly milkweed. I’ve seen long-horned (Melissodes) bees….

…. and tiny, green sweat bees (Auguchlora pura), all enjoying the flowers.

Honey bees are avid foragers, too.

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However, if summer rains are abundant, it’s happy with those more drought-tolerant natives. Here it is growing very wild in dry soil with Coreopsis lanceolata.

And it does well in fairly dry conditions with Anthemis tinctoria.

On the other hand, it does well in reasonably rich soil with my Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, where I can run the hose if rains don’t come (like this summer)…..

…. and peeking up through my grassy monarda meadow, near a lush pink lily.

I’ve grown it with Penstemon barbatus ‘Coccineus’….

…and with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta).

And I’ve seen it looking pretty with daylilies and catmint in a friend’s garden, too.

Butterfly milkweed’s blooming season is so long, it counts numerous July and August plants as companions. Here is a bouquet I photographed on July 17th, 2010 with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta), false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), veronica (Veronica spicata ‘Darwin’s Blue’) and blue vervain (Verbena hastata).

… and a collection of little bouquets I made on August 16th, 2013.

If you want to know absolutely everything that might flower at the same time, here’s a montage I made one year on July 7th, 2014. Yes, that’s butterfly milkweed near the lower right corner. See if you can guess the rest!

I have planted dozens of young butterfly milkweed plants here at Lake Muskoka over the years, like these ones offered by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (along with suitable nectar plants), as an encouragement to ‘bring back the monarch butterfly’. Most took, provided I irrigated them for the first summer; a few didn’t.

But I have also managed to grow many from seed, which is harvested from the typical milkweed fruit capsule. The ones that were most successful were those I guerilla-sowed, using the toe of my boot to kick them in along the edge of a gritty, community pathway midway down the hillside on a neighbour’s property. Under that granitic gravel, below, there was actually rich sandy soil and adequate moisture, given that the path sits mid-slope on the hill. But this tough environment best replicates the natural ‘sand prairie’ that butterfly milkweed likes.

You can also buy a seed mix in multiple colours: ‘Gay Butterflies Mix’, below.

Want to try your hand sowing butterfly milkweed? Follow these seeding instructions in a propagation guide in the Minnesota newsletter of Wild Ones: “Collect when pods are cracked open. Remove down; cold stratify in fridge in damp sand for 90 days. Broadcast on soil surface in spring when soil is warm.”

Best of luck growing this worthy award winner! You and the pollinators – including the lovely monarch butterfly – are worth the effort.

My Cups Runneth Over (With Bees)….

Posted on July 31, 2016 by Janet

(Hmmm. I just re-read my title and almost changed it, but decided not to. Snicker away – I’m going with “cups”.)

My second yellow-gold blog for July (the first was on companion plants for blackeyed susans) honours another composite prairie perennial that has pride of place in my meadows at Lake Muskoka. Cup plant or Indian cup (Silphium perfoliatum) gets both its common name and Latin specific epithet from the way the leaves encircle the stem, thus making the stem appear to pierce the foliage – i.e. a ‘perfoliate’ habit.

This clasping leaf arrangement creates a kind of ‘cup’ in which water can collect after rains, supposedly providing drinking water for birds and insects. Alas, insects are often found floating in the water, with some experts suggesting that it may actually act as a deterrent against insect pests that might climb up the stem.

While it is a fabulous native, indigenous to moist woods and prairies in much of mid and east North America, including my province Ontario, its tendency to colonize makes it problematic. In fact, though it is classified as “threatened and endangered”in Michigan, it is “potentially invasive” and banned for sale in Connecticut. I received my fleshy roots from the compost bins of Toronto’s beautiful Spadina House gardens, and the gardeners gave me fair warning that it was invasive, and hard to dig up to control its spread. So I don’t; I merely enjoy it and give thanks for it when the bumble bees are nectaring on the big yellow flowers.

Here are bumble bees in action, along with a surprise visitor for whom those itty-bitty leaf pools are no deterrent, when tasty cup plant seedheads are the rewards for ascending that thick stem.

Honey bees love cup plant as well. There are no apiaries near my cottage on Lake Muskoka, but I photographed this one in the meadows at Miriam Goldberger’s Wildflower Farm an hour so south.

Butterflies like the monarch enjoy cup plant, too.

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I grow cup plants near my stairs so I can photograph the pollinators at eye level.

But they’re in my meadows as well. Though they prefer adqequate moisture in the soil, they are surprisingly drought-tolerant (as they’ve had to be this hot, dry summer), but will develop yellow leaves and stunted flowers in time. Here’s a colony below my bedroom window amidst sweet blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia subtomentosa) still to come into flower.

They make good companions to gray-headed coneflowers (Ratibida pinnata), which bloom at the same time.

They are easily the tallest perennials I grow. Last summer (a season of good rains), I lay down the loftiest stems so I could do a measurement. Yes, 9 feet.

I leave you with a little narrated tour…..

….and a cottage bouquet showing cup plant flowers in the bottom tier, surrounded by summer flowers like ratibida, perovskia, liatris and goldenrod. Yellow/gold for July 2016, over and out.

Janet Davis Explores Colour

In the garden & the world

Tag Archives: honey bee

Bringing in the Honey at Lavender Hills Farm

Pollen for Honey Bees in a Rainbow of Colours

Monkshood & Snakeroot for a Fall Finale

Butterfly Milkweed: PPA’s 2017 Plant of the Year!

My Cups Runneth Over (With Bees)….

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