Black-eyed Susans
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The Black-Eyed Susan is the Maryland State Flower. There are a few plants that always grow in the front flower bed – coming up year after year since we had a butterfly garden there more than 10 years ago. The other plants were not as enduring. The day lily bulbs are so dense that the leaves shade out just about everything else.
The Black-eyed Susan leaves come out early and are big enough to hold their place among the day lilies. Sometimes the buds form low enough that they are protected from the deer by the day lily leaves around them.
Other times the buds are on the end of spindly stems and the deer sometimes eat a few of them. The buds must not taste as good as other vegetation because the majority survive.
I’m always please to see the flowers more easily after I cut back the day lily leaves in later summer. The Black-eyed Susans become the big color in the garden then.
When I was taking pictures of the flowers recently – I managed to get close enough to get a relatively good picture of a bottle fly. The temperature was in the low 60s and the fly was not as active as it would be later in the day.
Unique Activities for Yesterday:
Working Cat. My daughter sends us texts with pictures of her cat. He became part of the family during the pandemic, so the pictures provide our first impressions of him. He has favorite lookouts where he can monitor the rabbits in the yard. Her annotation for pictures below were “working at his desk” and “at his standing desk today.”
