Flowers At Home
That Make Me Happy!

You might say I'm a plant guy. I love beneficial plants of all sorts. I love to take care of them, and I especially love having them around our home, indoors and out.

With much thanks to my lovely wife and her decades of adding perennial flowers to our borders, and to my equally long era of adding flowering shrubs and trees and, more recently, planting flowers in my vegetable gardens, we are blessed with a very wide variety of outdoor blooms that begin in early Spring and don't end until late Fall, as well as many indoor houseplants that blossom.

In the flower beds that surround our home, we have or have had several varieties of daffodils, bleeding hearts, coreopsis, evening primrose, sundrops, tiger lilies, Asiatic lilies, white lilies, Solomon's seal, turtlehead, red and yellow bishop's hat, carpet bugle, bugbane, stonecrop, several shades of purple iris, dwarf purple iris, cosmos, white iris, lily of the valley, pink lily of the valley, purple and white violets, false indigo, grape hyacinth, black-eyed susans, asters, saxifrage, morning glories, peonies, several varieties of pink roses, yellow roses, 4 colors of ground phlox, and more that I can't think of right now.

Every year I grow at least 3 rows each of snapdragon as well a few more rows of an ever-changing variety of other annual flowers in my raised garden beds. Plus I plant tall sunflowers in several bare spots in the borders around our house. And the herb bed contains chives, dill, lavender, thyme, oregano, mint, sage, and catnip that bloom every year.

As for bushes, there's forsythia, 4 different colors of lilacs, pink and red azalea, rhododendron, wisteria, hydrangea, honeysuckle, forsythia, several different kinds and colors of roses, plus some less conspicuously flowering evergreen bushes including arborvitae, boxwood, holly, and yew.

Then there's the 2 large red maple trees in our front yard, the 2 magnificent tall tulip trees along our side yard, and the mega-hedge of arborvitae trees along the back. Not to mention all the white clover in our lawn and the pink clover here and there around the perimeter.

Indoor blooming plants include: night blooming epiphyllum, spathiphyllum, african violets, asparagus fern, orange clivia, jade (which I didn't even knew blossomed until one day, decades after getting it, one of mine suddenly did!), and others, some of which bloom as often in the winter as they do in the summer.

So, for your viewing pleasure, here's a large sampling dating back to 2001 of our Flowers At Home That Make Me Happy!

June 27, 2024

Carpet Sedum

June 18, 2024

the new Hydrangea in our front border

Creeping Jenny

Mitzi bouquet #2
(with a bit of #3 at upper left)

Threadleaf Coreopsis

White Clover in our front lawn

June 11, 2024

Pink Rose

Sundrops

Spiderwort

June 6, 2024

Whitney Bouquet #1
&
Red Speckled White Lily close-up

May 28, 2024

Pink Foxglove

White Foxglove

Double Impatiens

May 10, 2024

Double Dwarf Tulip

Holly

pots of Pansies on the porch

red Azalea starting to open

volunteer Strawberry among the foxgloves

Wisteria

Wisteria with bumble bee

April 4, 2024

Daffodils in the snow

October 10, 2023

Pink Hydrangea

Mouse Earred Coreopsis

Red Zinnia

the last Snapdragon of the season

Sungold Tomatoes

Dill

Pink Zinnia

Orange-ish Zinnia

Roses

Little Purple Asters

May 1, 2023

Euonymus

Dwarf Purple Iris

September 27, 2022

Large Purple Asters

Pincushion Flower

September 18, 2022

Bachelor Button

Black-eyed Susans

Cosmos

Euonymus

Lemon Leopold Sunflowers

Zinnia

July 7, 2022

Catnip

Zucchini

Queen Anne's Lace

June 26, 2022

Cilantro

Bok Choi

Tall Snapdragon

June 21, 2022

Yellow Columbine

Lavender

Pink Clover

Red-Twigged Dogwood

Threadleaf Coreopsis

June 12, 2022

Mountain Laurel

Sedum

Purple Verbena

Gazania

Red Petunias and Yellow Mini Petunia-looking Flowers

June 4, 2022

Burnet Saxiphrage

Pink and White Striped Petunias

Mouse Earred Coreopsis

Pink Petunia and Purple Don't Knows

White Clover

May 30, 2022

Peas

May 21, 2022

Lily of the Valley

Pink Lily of the Valley

Chives

Red Azalea

Bush Rose

Purple Iris

May 16, 2022

red Bishop's Hat

Wild Strawberry

(Only the the flower makes me happy ---
I've been pulling this weed out of my lawn for decades.)

Honeysuckle

pale lavender Phlox

purple and pink Plox

April 25, 2022

Pink Azalea

Grape Hyacinth

April 15, 2022

Forsythia

Red Maple

old Hyacinth

April 14, 2022

Large Cup Daffodils

Common Boxwood

February 7, 2022

Orange Clivia

Tulips

September 7, 2021

Wisteria

Giant "Evening Colors" Sunflower

It is an honor that this photo was selected to be part of the UMass-Amherst's Mass Aggie Seed Library 2024 Nature Photo Exhibit!

August 27, 2021

"Evening Colors" Sunflowers

Snapdragons

Hydrangea

Pink Turtlehead

June 10, 2017

Tulip Tree

May 2015

Solomon's Seal

April 2014

Potted Sunflowers

August 2014

Summer Squash

Summer 2013

Orange Day Lilies

Petunias

Pink Climbing Roses

light lavender Lilac

Multi-Colored Rose

Red and Yellow Lilies

Hydrangeas in Full Bloom

November 2013

Thanksgiving Cactus

I had been jokingly calling this what-I-thought-was a Christmas Cactus a "Thanksgiving" Cactus because it always bloomed in mid November. Then I learned that there actually is such a thing as a Thanksgiving Cactus and that this is one of them.

December 2013