Flowers on The Longest Day of the Year

What a perfect day for gardening! The longest day of the year brought us lots of sun and heat. I found the official sunrise and sunset times for our location using our latitude and longitude on a website, though I notice that I mixed up our location on the header for my blog! I changed that today, horrified at this error. Just for curiosity, I used Google earth to see if 105N lat and 55W long exists and no, of course it does not, since the top of the earth is 90 degrees north latitude.

Blooming hens and chickens (Sempervivum), unknown variety. I'd be happy if this great little succulent just made fat little leaves, so this floral show is just an added bonus.

Okay, back to sunrise and sunset. Sunrise here was at 4:14 am and sunset was at 9:42 pm, for a daylength of 17 hrs and 42 min. There's a lot of gardening one can do between those hours. For comparison, New York city had sunrise at 5:19 and sunset at 8:27 for a day length of 15 hrs, 17 min. I'm sure Quu, my garden blog friend in northern Finland, enjoyed a nice long day as well.

My favourite perennial, Alchemilla mollis (Lady's mantle) with morning dew collected at the leaf margins, making the plant sparkle like it had a jeweled cloak.

Here's an Alchemilla mollis at the front of the large raised bed. All of my lady's mantles are enormous this year. I never knew they got so big, but they all seem to be nearly 3 ft (1 meter) across this year. I'll have to divide them all next spring!


Double flowered Aquilegias (right) are in bloom in full sun, while the Alliums are looking great behind that group of fading pink tulips. Catmint (foreground) is at its prime now, taunting me with its impending seed heads, which I will pre-emptively decapitate to prevent any further spread of this attractive weed/perennial.


I actually have vegetables growing! I've been interested in growing a "fairy garden" (essentially a miniature garden at fairy-proportions). I could call this mini-garden my fairy's vegetable aisle. I joked with RLM that my veggie garden could feed 1/8 of a person. He felt that was an over-exaggeration and that the 1/8 of a person would need to supplement with dandelions and wildberries and the occasional wild animal. Yeah, I'm no farmer.