White flowers

I've never been a fan of white flowers. I'm not enough of a designer when it comes to choosing plants to appreciate them for their accent value, and it seems to me that if one is going through the trouble of planting flowers, color is an obvious reward for doing so.

So I don't knowingly buy white flowers.

Earlier in the spring, I started some Zinnias from seed and was looking forward to the pinks and purples of this particular variety (whose name escapes me at the moment). They have large, almost Dahlia-like flowers and I really liked them last year. The package clearly shows them coming in three colors: white, pink and purple.

When they were big enough, I tucked four in the alley garden and four in the raised bed out front. As an aside, I have been very pleased with converting that from veggies to flowers (thank you farmers and grocery stores from whom I can buy food).

Here's what I got:

Funny, they've grown a lot since I took these. But you get the point. Two white ones above, two white ones below...

And here you can see two more white, plus the two pink ones that were in the mix.

A friend gave me a few Calendula seeds a couple of years ago and they've gone bananas in this bed. I've pulled a bunch of them, but not enough. I wanted to have a few amongst the other things I put in there. I bought three Dahlias and planted a couple of specialty sunflowers that aren't blooming yet in this photo. 

They are all nice, and the bees love them. It feels good to plant stuff for the bees. 

We've gotten a lot of rain this summer. And not a lot of the scorching heat that can happen in July in August. Good for us, as it hasn't been enough to cause flooding and it keeps the threat of wildfires down. 

In other news, I've been in contact with new friend M, he of the blind date a few days ago, and we're going to get together this weekend for dinner or something. I've finally matured to the point where I realize that it's too soon to tell anything. Too soon to project about what might happen, so I might as well just enjoy the ride.