A July Lily

This pretty thing is "Brushstroke", from The Lily Garden.

Brushmarked lilies have become very popular in the last several years. Brushstroke is one of my favorites. The petals are usually cream-colored, and the brushmarks are a distinct purple. I hadn't really noticed how orange the pollen was until I took this picture, though.

Lilies are fairly easy to grow here. They do have a couple of pests. One is the lily budworm, a caterpillar that munches on the flower buds. I control these by keeping an eye on the buds and squishing them. (It's amazing how hardened a gardener can become to "squishing" when a pest is eating her flowers!)

Another is the very annoying stalk borer, Papaipema nebris, which you first notice on a windy day, like this past Saturday, when you find beautiful lily stems with eleven buds broken off and wilting in the heat, and the broken stem bored hollow inside! I lost two out of three stems of a nice lily called "Roma" that way this week. You are supposed to control them by cleaning up and burning dead stalks in the fall, and I have to remember to do that this fall.

Brown Thrasher News

Two of the three hatchlings came back to our fenced yard today, and sat in the yew bush preening themselves. I could tell these were the babies and not the parents because their tail feathers are still not full length, and their eyes are still dark and have not yet turned yellow.

Knitting

I'm still working on my purple socks, a row at a time when I get a minute. Yesterday I completed a couple of needles out of the Pi doily (anyone remember the Pi doily?) and should finish that today. Then I'll take a picture of it in its "scrumpley" state before I clean and block it.

Meanwhile, lovely sunny cool weather is back, and I need to go hang some laundry out in it!