Mistflowers

Blue mistflower close up, almost blossomed out. September 2026.

Eagerly awaiting the late September blossoming of the blue mistflowers. One of the reasons: I have a LOT of them!

Large cluster in foreground and another in background are all mistflowers. Grow like weeds but native and beautiful. September 2026.

Moth becoming

Two weeks ago I’m walking the path along the front of our house when movement in the dead leaves caught my eye. I saw an amazing insect squirming around, kind of walking in little circles. Examining the photo, I figured it to be a moth with wings not yet dry and fully erect. Regal Moth was the closest I could come (only having a photo of a female). The wing markings don’t seem to be correct, but they might change when they are fully deployed.

A couple hours later it had disappeared.

Hold-outs

I seem to be on a leaf and garden kick. Though two short cold snaps have sent 99% of the plants into dormancy (unless they’re evergreen), a few brave stalwarts instead focus on the above-average warm weather to pop one last bloom out. November 3-9 ranged 65-75F with just a dash of rain the final two days. And then the 12th through 16th blessed us with sunny days of 64-73F. Look at these little troupers:

The blue mistflower who refused to die. All of its nearby compatriots are brown. Interestingly, the broad leaf or two at the top are from a purple coneflower, also still green. November 2025.

Another purple coneflower with living on its mind. All of the originals have gone to see on the right, but no matter. Let’s make more! A nascent bloom can be seen to its immediate left (the little white spiky one). November 2025.

Black-eyed Susan: you can see dead plant everywhere but it decided to come up again when the weather warranted. November 2025.

Today in the garden

While weeding something moved, just a bit, and I spied this Southern toad. I haven’t seen one around this house since we moved in over 8 years ago, but saw them regularly at our former house on a pond. Pretty lethargic—it’s a nocturnal creature. September 2025.

One month ago today we woke in our own bed after flying in from Belgium the night before. Only now am I catching up to yardwork, which these days consists of staying ahead of the interlopers in our all-natives garden covering the front yard and hacking away at plants in the back before they can seed. Their days are numbered: two weeks from now we hope to start the replanting of the backyard. I question, at times, why we paid so much to plant perennials which should natively grow here but there ya go. A complete and pleasant shock has been seeing the blue mistflowers explode in size and coverage. These beautiful and late-blooming plants had for years volunteered amid the purple coneflowers I’ve showcased many times on this blog. Most of them were taken out to facilitate the new landscaping plan, but the architect of that plan instructed his crew to transplant as many as possible. Given that it was a week into October, he also sprinkled any seed heads he encountered. I think the much better soil helped them out a little bit:

This bank of blue mistflowers looked reasonably modest in size when we left for Europe on August 7, 2025. They’ve now taken over this segment of the yard, overwhelming several plants underneath them. September 2025.

Detail from a much larger photo of another bank of the blue mistflowers, showing how small flowers form much larger clusters. This photo is unretouched except for a slight amount of sharpening I added to see the flower petals better. September 2025.

I had to transplant two which ‘volunteered’ at the edge of the walkway to our front door and by doing so, obstructed most of the sidewalk. One withstood the shock and has many buds on it. The other has stood with severely wilted (but green!) leaves for almost four weeks. I keep telling it, “hang in there! You don’t need to bloom! Just live!”