These Oak Leaf Hydrangeas have been a great addition to the yard, and produce leaves that are amazing all year. I’ve blogged about the blooms before, but there’s even something cool about these leaves as they fall off. The fact that the leaves are bigger than my head make it all the better.

I bent down into one of the beds the other day, and came up with a spattering of chigger bits. I also ended up with this weird shot, where the wide open 1.2 aperature delivered some unexpected goodies. This is a like some kind of bizarro bokeh.

I love these hardy, succulent perennials a neighbor have us years ago. I just keep dividing, and they just keep blooming. If you know what they are, lemme know in the comments.

Have you walked around lately? Flowers are everywhere this time of year, and my yard is blooming like it’s going out of style. On Sunday morning, I took a short walk around the homestead. Below are 16 of the flowers I saw, all shot within 16 minutes of each other. I saw dianthus, coreopsis, guara, hydrangea, oleander, verbena, lantana, society garlic, and a few veggies. Enjoy!

I had a moment of food chain serendipity while playing with my boys in the front yard, which was followed by a sight both creepy and presumably moderately rare (vague enough?)

My youngest son was fussing after the cats, who were attentively stalking the mockingbirds, who were feasting on the hundreds of insects wafting up from the street garden. We naturally moved closer, and saw a light fuzzy area near the mailbox. It was moving…moving a lot.

It turns out that it was a swarm of reproductive termites flowing out of the mulch, then fluttering into the stiff breeze. Once we stepped back, we could see the termites in the air like snow. Hundreds of them, haphazardly being swept down the street in the wind (thank god!).

In the end, I think these guys were getting out because the garden became inhospitable. Let’s hope so…at least for the termites.

After reading Dr. Seuss’s “Oh Say Can You Seed” all summer long, we welcomed Fall as a great opportunity to do some collecting. Over a two-week period, my oldest son and I meticulously sought out all the best seed caches for our collection. In the end, it looked pretty cool:

Here are the details (from top left to bottom right):

1. Unidentified Weed - This bean-like seed came from a head-high weed that produced dozens of pods, each with two seeds in it. They kind of smelled.
2. Crape Myrtle Tree - We collected these seeds by swatting at our crape myrtle with a plastic baseball bat. The seeds floated down like mini-helicopters and landed on a Frisbee. They are now known as the Frisbee seeds.
3. Wild Blue Aster - I love this wildflower, and it grows under the power lines near our house. These seeds came from a wildflower bouquet we picked for Jen.
4. Live Oak Tree - These acorns are abundant in the Lowcountry this time of year. The big surprise was the larvae that crawled out of each of them. One by one, I picked them out of the container and took them outside, where I assume they wanted to burrow into the ground.
5. Pumpkin - These are the only non-wild seeds we included in our collection. They were so plentiful and unique…we just had to have them.
6. Unidentified Berry - I should know the name of this shrub, as they are everywhere in Charleston. They have thin,  yellowing this time of year, and are covered with red berries.
7. Palmetto Tree - These seeds are everywhere right now too. It’s so cool thinking that each one of them can grow a giant Palmetto tree.
8. Unidentified Weed - This weed produces long, slender pods that contain about 25 seeds each. The seeds remind us of the food we feed our Beta fish.
9. Unidentified Weed - These seeds came from a weed that has 3-inch pods with 8 seeds in each. I like them because they look like tiny Chinese throwing stars.
10. Redbud Tree - I love redbud trees, so I planted one in our front yard - they remind me of Indiana. Similar to the live oak seeds, each redbud seed had a very small insect larvae living in it. They had all hatched before we started the collection, but we saw them this summer.
11. Ornamental Grass - Not sure what species this is, but it’s variegated and is about 4 feet tall.
12. Jelly Palm - These seeds appear on the ground after the fermenting orange fruit decomposes. We like to crack these shells open to get at the three beans inside.

When I read that pruning Oakleaf Hydrangeas was wrong, I didn’t really know what to think. I had always cut back common hydrangeas, so natch I did the same thing when I got these Oakleafs a couple years ago. And besides, I didn’t really mind - the foliage was beautiful in both summer and fall.

Then I read that you aren’t supposed to prune them, so I didn’t.

Then I waited…

And this spring, something remarkable happened. These puppies bloomed like nobody’s business! It’s been a slow bloom too, so it looks like I’ll have flowers for a couple months. Needless to say, I’m stoked about this. This is a hardy plant that does well in climates like ours, and is anything but high-maintenance.

Anyhoo, enjoy the pics.