After carefully nurturing this year’s Victoria water lily (affectionately nicknamed Vicky) since June, she finally rewarded us with a flower! We awoke on August 23rd to a pristine, white flower.

Victorias are night bloomers and this is the first night flower, taken early the next morning.
The flower goes through an amazing transformation while it is closed after the first night. When it opens the second night, the flower is deep pink. In this case, the cool night temperature kept the flower from turning completely pink, so it ended up being two toned. Kind of neat looking!!

7:56 pm	8:02 pm
8:09 pm	8:16 pm
Exactly one week after the first flower, Vicky opened her second flower. These four pictures were taken in a 20 minute time span. You can almost see the flower open as you watch! The flower wasn’t quite open in the forth photo, but it was getting pretty dark, my camera batteries died, and I got distracted by the two raccoons that showed up to crash the party!

You can see all of the pictures of Vicky in the Victoria Water Lily 2005 gallery.

The warm days and cool nights we’ve been having lately have made for some heavy dew in the mornings. I wish I was a better photographer, so I could capture the natural glitter and do it justice.

Water on a lotus leaf is magical.	The water lettuce looked like it was covered with diamond dust.
Hosta ‘Royal Standard’ flower scape.

By this time of year, most gardeners try to overlook the hostas and understandably so…the foliage is often starting to look worn out and ragged. The fall flowering hostas are the exception. They usually look as fresh as they did in the spring. That is definitely no small feat, but in my opinion, the fall bloomers also have some of the most beautiful and colorful flowers.

Hosta ‘Raspberry Sorbet’ is one of my favorites for flowers. Not only are the scapes colored in shades of pink and raspberry, but the scapes are perfectly proportioned to the plant. When it is in full bloom, it is a perfect bouquet of purple striped flowers above green, wavy leaves.	Even without flowers, yet, the scapes of Hosta ‘Red Dragon’ really stand out against the fresh, green foliage.
Maybe not very exciting color-wise, the double flowers of Hosta ‘Fujibotan’ are still pretty.

Ornamental grasses add a lot of dimension to the late summer, fall, and winter garden. We don’t have many good, red grasses that are hardy in Iowa, but Panicum ‘Amber Wave’ is possibly the best. It does start of green in the spring, but by late summer it will give the purple fountain grass a run for its money!

The Purple Coneflowers are still going strong. There is a whole series of new colored coneflowers, now, and we will have a couple of the best available next spring.

See more garden pictures from August in the August 2005 gallery.

Speaking of next spring, you may not have heard about our latest project. We purchased a local nursery business who’s owner is retiring. Part of the purchase is a 28′ x 44′ double poly inflated hoop house. As of today, both end walls are up and we are almost ready to start putting up the support hoops. Our goal is to have it use-able before it turns cold, so that we are able to over winter, and propagate from, our remaining tropical water plants. We hope this will also allow us to offer you large plants in the spring.

The other part of the purchase includes hundreds of perennials, tropicals, house plants…some stuff we have no idea what it even is!!! No, we are not going to start offering this stuff as part of our regular selection, but it does mean we will have a lot of odds and ends for sale next spring.

Always gotta keep life interesting!