Oops! A bit of a late update

I was reminded in the comments yesterday that I had never shown you an update of Jess and Alex's front yard after we did so much work on it last spring. Unfortunately I totally forgot about it, so I don't have any photos of the entire yard, and when I asked Jess about it yesterday, she said everything is kind of end-of-summer worn out now and beyond pretty. So I'll just show you the only pics I have saved that she had sent earlier. Here are her gorgeous crazily-blooming begonias, with the hydrangeas in the background.

That's all I have of the font yard, but here are a couple pics of her climbing black-eyed Susan vine from her back yard, with some daisies in front.

They're on a trellis. They were kinda slow to get going, but the flowers are very pretty.

(She gave me some of her seeds, and I also have them growing up the posts under our deck now. Fun!)

Sometime after we were there, she also added this beautiful caladium in the back yard.

That's all the photos I have. Sorry.

Flowers of Newport

Along our walk, we saw lots of beautiful flowers...

Peonies:

And roses - lots and lots of roses that just begged to be photographed:

Some pansies in a planter also caught my eye:

These were really thick and pretty, but I don't know what they were. They covered a large area. The sun on the white didn't make for the best photo, though:

I don't know what these were, either, but they were dainty and cute:

Update: The flowers above have been identified (thanks, Kris!) as Evening Primrose (top) and Hardy Geranium (bottom).

These newly planted begonias are already pretty, but they're going to be 'gorgeous' when they really get going:

Yep, I helped plant those... and can't wait to see how they look in a month or so! I have it on good authority that the hydrangea bushes we planted are putting out buds - yay!

The woodruff we planted behind the hostas below is hopefully going to spread and fill in a good-sized area. The tiny white flowers smell divine!

I told Jess she must give me progress reports on how everything is doing. Maybe she'll send some lovely photos I can share with you. :)

Yellow violet

I've been having more fun with my Easy-Macro lens. I just can't seem to stop! Anyway, because of it I learned something new yesterday. I'd taken this photo of a tiny flower with it the day before:

Here's just a regular iPad photo to show what plant it came from:

Then yesterday morning, I was going to post them to Instagram and ask if anybody knew what that plant was. I tried looking it up as a weed, but I didn't find anything that really matched. So back outside I went to get another look (because I hadn't really paid much attention to the plants when taking the pics). Here are a couple more iPad shots (I should've taken the DSLR but wanted the pics handy for Instagram):

They are under some evergreens in our backyard. It was pretty windy then, so the leaves are blowing a lot in the picture below, but I took it for size comparison with the dandelions that you can see in the foreground:

While I was out there, it dawned on me that the plants sure looked like the purple violets I have in front of the house (the ones the woodchuck likes). I didn't know if there was such a thing as a yellow violet, but googling it found me plenty of photo proof that there certainly is! So that was the new thing I learned yesterday.

Yellow violet. Is that an oxymoron? I certainly think so! And really, why weren't they just called "yellows", if the violet ones are called violets??? ;-Þ

Wild sunflowers

Oh, dear... another photo-heavy post. But hey, that's what this blog is about, right? "A Photo's Worth a thousand words"! So I'll let the photos do most of the talking today. 

I actually took these three weeks ago, and every time I've thought about posting them, I didn't know how to narrow them down, because I love how they turned out, and I couldn't decide which ones to eliminate! The subject is all the same... wild sunflowers, of which we had a lot alongside our driveway, and the evening sun was just right for photographing. So here ya go... ENJOY!

Oh, yes... I have a lot more. :) But ya get the idea.....

What is this flower?

Can anybody tell me what this is? It's been in my wildflower bed for several years. I was thinking it was called godetia, but a recent Google search makes me think it's not. I tried a Google image search using the photo, but that just showed me lots of pink flowers, none of which looked like this.

Here's what the plants look like:

I took a photo of an opening bud a couple days later. The bud was blurry, but that tiny little bug sure is clear! I wonder what it is!

Here's a better bud photo:

And a shot of the inside:

This is the inside after it's fully open, and with a little mist on the petal edges:

Any identifying help would be appreciated!! (Annie Dee, I'm counting on you! ;) )

Just pretty... and playing

I dug up my wildflower bed in the spring and scattered some new seeds out there, but I didn't have much luck with anything growing, probably because my seeds were old and the timing of the rain wasn't the best. My old bachelor buttons and plains coreopsis grew here and there (and the weeds did VERY well, but I've finally managed to finish cleaning them out), and recently I noticed something that looked a bit different. It's now beginning to bloom, and I believe it's a cosmos.

There are only two flowers so far, but lots of potential for more.

I haven't had cosmos this color before. They're so bright and cheery! But have you noticed that yellow flowers seem to be the hardiest? It seems to me that there are always yellow flowers around. Okay, this is yellow-orangish, but still.....

My many-years-old black-eyed susans are blooming, too.

I did a bit of photo playing, cropping for different effects.

Close-ups are always fun.

Which of the three shots did you like the best?

There's another plant growing out there that I haven't identified. It doesn't have any buds on it yet, so I'll save that for another day, if indeed it blooms at all.

Now I'm going to jolt your eyeballs with a different color! My mini rose is blooming again, and this time it was not damaged by kittens (or whatever). A bit of misty rain makes it extra pretty.

That pink flower is an impatiens. It gives you an idea of how tiny the rose bush is!

A mysterious bug

Note: This post has been updated... the mystery is solved. See end of post.

On Sunday, I happened to notice a hole in the dirt in my flower barrel in front of the garage. It was about the size of a dime. I wondered what made it but didn't really think too much about it, and I pushed some dirt into it. Then a bit later, I notice several more holes scattered around in the dirt. They were a bit smaller and looked like this:

That bit of wire fencing is there to keep the cats/kittens out of the flowers. Well, it sorta helps... but not too much, as you can see. At least it keeps them from digging and... well... you know what cats do... in the dirt.

I then noticed bugs going into those holes in the dirt. Hmm. You can see a couple of the bugs in the air in the above photo and this next one (click to enlarge). There was a bit of yellowish color on them, and I wondered if they were young bumblebees. Of course they were flying pretty fast, making it really hard to get a good look.

I managed to get a closer picture of one of the bugs and decided it's not a bumblebee. The yellowish color I saw seemed to be just pollen on its legs. But I sure don't know what they are. Anybody else know?

Georgie was determined to be in the photo shoot, too, so here he is. :) Don'tcha just love his nose?

And here's another shot of the beautiful osteospermum, while I'm at it:

Update: Thanks to commenter Annie Dee, I now know that they are ground bees. You can see pics of many different kinds of them here.