Friday Flower – Brrr!

I don’t know about you, Oh Best Beloved, but I need a nice warm-looking flower photo today.

It was 15 degrees below zero here last night.

-15F.

That’s cold enough to freeze the whiskers off a bunny, especially as the wind chill was at -28F.

This purple coneflower (botanical name: Echinacea purpurea) is from a clump I started from seed a little over twenty years ago. The red daylily (variety unknown) next to it was a little bitty rather pitiful-looking root I got free through a mail-order nursery at the same time. Both have thrived and multipled, yielding a large clump of each that happily grow together at the side of our house. The goldfinches love the seed heads that the coneflower form, and use them as a food source from autumn through spring.

Ya gotta love plants like these – beautiful and virtually maintenance-free.

Oh – and the bunnies don’t like them.

All together now: awwwwwwwww, poor bunnies!

Flower Fridays

Yes, I know it’s Saturday. This post was supposed to be made yesterday. Best intentions and all that.

*Sigh*

Where was I?

Ah. Yes. Flower Fridays. I decided this summer to not post a “Garden Walk” as I’d done a year ago. My intent is to instead brighten up the winter with summer photos of the various flowers in our gardens that survived the nibbling attempts of several determined bunnies.

Of course, I’ll also post on occasion here-to-fore previously unseen photos of said bunnies, too. Fat bunnies, I might add, bunnies made fat and sassy from mowing down flowers willy nilly, flowers that every garden guide guaranteed are quite bunny proof.

HA! No one consulted MY bunnies as to their culinary tastes. Which can be summed up as: if it’s considered a flower and Judy paid for it, it’s delicious.

Anyways. Back to flowers. The flowers that didn’t meet their demise as Bunny Happy Meals…

This lovely flower is a Tiger Lily (botanical name: Lily tigirnum spendens. This is the first year I’ve trying growing them, and I’ve fallen in love with these beauties. They come in orange, yellow and red.

The bunnies, btw, absolutely love the red variety. I didn’t get a single red bloom as those plants were mowed down to the height of my rabbit fencing by James and Juan. Those two rascals stood on their hind paws and streeeeeetched as high as they could to grab leaves and pull down the plants to nibbling height.

If they’re worth that much effort, what makes tiger lilies look so special from a rabbit’s perspective?

Huh.

It looks sort of like an alien out of a late night SF flick actually… doesn’t it?

Find the Bunny

Happy New Year!

Do you remember those Highlights magazines from when you were little, Oh Best Beloved, where you had to find hidden objects in a picture?

If you don’t remember, you’ve either a) never had to sit in a doctor’s waiting room or b) are very very young, relatively speaking of course…

So, here’s a chance to relive your childhood… courtesy of James the Bunny, son of Stewart, who is in his favorite hiding spot.

Can you find the bunny?

Look closer.

And closer.

There he is!

(If you can’t see him, blame my poor little camera which did its best but just doesn’t have the optical zoom oomph to take a better image!)