June & July Summer Blooms

As I looked through my SD cards in my camera today, trying to clean them off, I realized that I had taken a lot of native wildflower pictures.  Every year, I try to document via pictures all the wildflowers that are blooming each month, so that I can see the progress we're making. There are several that do very well here and, in spite of the very hot, dry weather we've had, they are at least daring to spread their petals and square off with the intensely hot sun.

Late June Bloomers
These were planted in December, 2014.  They did okay, in 2017 but at the end of June this year, my gray-headed coneflowers were kickin' it in the west savanna area.

Gray-headed coneflowers

Black-eyed Susans

Virginia Mountain Mint

Butterfly Milkweed (bloomed from June through July)

Ox-eye Sunflower

July Bloomers

The heat intensified in July, but still, the wildflowers were determined.

Lobelia

Royal Catchfly (red) and Black-eyed Susan

Even more Gray-headed coneflowers bloomed in July

Ladino clover seems to love the heat

Queen Anne's lace (wild carrot)

And 4 years after planting - looky, looky who showed up!!  Royal Catchfly - there were 4 plants this year (also planted in the Savanna with the Gray-headed coneflowers).

The Partridge pea started blooming in early July, but has really been showing off since the last week of July into August.

Partridge Pea

Of all the blooming flowers I thought the honeybees would love, the sumac was not even on my list! But, turns out sumac is one of their favorites here.  So, I guess I'll let it stay.

Smooth Sumac - only 1 of 2 flowers on this page that the honeybees seem to really like.

Rose Pink

The Rattlesnake Master is spreading like crazy - it has basically taken over my specimen garden, ousting most of the coneflower varieties there and only the prairie blazing star is hanging on. Since it's a native wildflower and all kinds of bees and butterflies love it, I'm not going to try to stop it. It's too hot to try to fight it. The clever prairie blazing star has managed to spread to other parts of my field, so it has figured out how to outrun the rattlesnake master.

Prairie Blazing Star in a field of Rattlesnake Master.

Wild Quinine

Turns out, the most favorite plant on my property for the Bumblebees have been all the St. John's Wort bushes I've planted.  They are crazy about it...unfortunately, the Japanese beetles are too. *sigh*
Interestingly, I haven't found one honeybee on the St. John's Wort and the Bumblebees are enjoying a pollen Bonanza!

St. John's Wort

I have a lot of favorites, but Wild Bergamot scores in the list of my top-five.

Wild Bergamot

Trumpet vine

We plant a LOT of red clover - the Bumblebees love it and the Honeybees don't use it (due to the difference in the length of their "tongues").  Guess who just bought 50 more lbs. of red clover? Heh!

Red Clover - Bumblebees LOVE it!

Common Milkweed and Wood Sage

Bindweed - the flowers are open in the morning, but close up when the temperatures start rising.

Ironweed (with Queen Anne's Lace in the foreground)

Prairie  Fleabane

This picture doesn't do the wildflowers justice - Wild Quinine, Queen Anne's Lace, Coneflowers, Sumac and Prairie Blazing Star are just a few of the predominant native wildflowers you can see here (click on the picture to get an enlarged view - that's true for all of them).

July - Wild Quinine dominates, but it will soon retreat and another will come up to carry us into Fall.

Passion Flower

Wood Sage

Lastly, a few of which we're not sure

Wild Potato Vine?

Well, I have searched & searched and we thought the vine & flowers in the picture to the left were either a variety of Morning Glory, or "Redvine"; but the best online site I can find calls it "Wild Potato Vine"

UPDATED 8/15 - Thanks to Chuck Yetter & his wife, these have now been *correctly* identified -  they're called "wild petunias". 

A field of wild petunias - you're welcome, Chuck!  :-)

Field full of "wild petunias".

Out of all the flowers above, the only ones I've found that my honeybees really like are the Butterfly milkweed and the Smooth Sumac.  I've been searching all my August blooming flowers and haven't been able to find from where my honeybees are getting their pollen and nectar stores for the Fall.  Today though, my investigation may have identified their source.  Stay tuned....pictures and details are forthcoming!

My Blue Moon Martins

I still have 2 pair of purple martins here with their young.  Two nests with 5 nestlings each, chirping away, preparing for flight.  Thanks to all the rain through July, there is a veritable bounty of dragonflies, butterflies, bees, and many, many more insects flying these days, so there is plenty of food for them.
I passed by my native wildflower specimen garden yesterday and as I quietly watched all the insects, flitting about, I thought, "hey, make a movie to show this and you can set it to music"!  Then, it suddenly occurred to me - I had all the background music that I needed and as I listened, it made me grin, ear-to-ear as I compared them to human parents trying to get their stubborn teenagers to do something they didn't want to do.  HA!  Even birds have to deal with teenagers!
My 2 pair of adults were flying about, screeching to their kids to come fly with them and they even made a couple of cameo appearances in my movie below.  "It's time to go!" they seemed to say with a great deal of urgency.  Their many different vocalizations made me laugh and snort while taking the flower garden video.  They sounded like they were trying to be very stern and convincing, attempting to get the youngsters to launch.  It's surprising how loud they were - it was even more surprising how loud their kiddos were as they chirped back to their parents, demanding another bug. 
It worked for one gourd as all the young from one of them finally fledged yesterday.  Today, I only see the one remaining pair, persistently trying to coax their young out.  There are regularly 8-10 visitors here every morning, but for such a social bird, they are surely desperate to leave and join the larger flocks at some of the roosts.
Enjoy the video - both the visual beauty of the insects, but also the beautiful audio.  I think it's one that I'll listen to several times over the winter months, until the next season begins.