Thanks to a really hot June, a lot of plants are out of whack here and they think it's mid-August already. The Russian Sage is in full bloom, and the asters aren't far behind. Blue Mist spirea can't wait either. I predict I'll be at the garden center in August buying leggy petunias to fill in the bare spots. The good thing is I've been eating Roma tomatoes for a couple of weeks now and didn't have to wait till summer is practically over to see some ripe ones. Oh, a lost opportunity the other day: I was sitting on the back porch caning a chair and kept hearing a "ticking" sound. I knew there was a Black-capped chickadee flying back and forth to the sunflower seed so I didn't think anything about it. When I finally looked up from my weaving there was a Broad-tailed hummingbird buzzing the empty sugar-water feeder. I'd taken the feeder out of the garage that morning and set it on the bench thinking I'd fill it later on. I zipped into the house and quickly made up some sugar water but of course the hummer didn't come back. The darn bird is punishing me, I'm sure.
Here's a double-flowering pink althea (Rose of Sharon) that's in full bloom in the front yard.
When I planted this several years ago, it was a twig and unfortunately, having no vision of the future, I planted a Butterfly bush about two feet away from it. (It's behind the Rose of Sharon in this photo). Both bushes grow to about 7 to 8 feet tall each year and they're a little too firmly ensconced to think about transplanting either one so it's always a race to see who can grow faster and get more space for itself. The Rose of Sharon won this year. The only time the buddleia hogged the whole area was the summer after a huge snowstorm mashed the althea flat and I had to chop it back to the ground. The Butterfly bush had some beautiful racemes that year, and the butterflies didn't need to play hide-and-seek with the Rose of Sharon to get to the goodies.
So, after our week of rain every day, my neighbors and I feel like we're running mushroom farms. They're everywhere, in every conceivable shape and size, some areas looking like they were colonized by Martians. This is an older neighborhood, so there are plenty of underground tree roots for the fungi to spring from. Okay, the red ones are not real, this is a picture I used to sell them on eBay a couple of years ago (heavy bidding). We have giant platter mushrooms, button mushrooms, um...anatomically correct mushrooms, and everything in between. I went out one morning to find a wee forest of some darling miniature mushrooms about an inch tall shaped just like ones in a fairy tale book. They'd sprung up through the new sod I got at Home Depot. If I owned a paint set, I would have painted little red dots on them to complete the effect. But they were gone by the time I got home that afternoon. The work of elves, I say.
So I have this friend the neophyte gardener. Two years ago she walked into my back yard, pointed to a lavender plant and said "what's that?" Since then she's bought a house (actually a garden with a house attached), and spent the next two years reading all the gardening books she could get her hands on. She now rivals Hortus Third for gardening information. She happened on to a plant she called Whirling Butterflies which I'd never heard of - turns out to be a gaura. Now, a few years back I'd tried a Siskiyou Pink gaura and in my usual fashion, tried to fit it in where I needed it to grow, rather than where IT needed to grow. Disastrous results as usual. So I never gave another thought to gaura until the aforementioned neophyte kept telling me how impressed she was with her Whirling Butterflies. When I saw it for myself I was hooked. And I happened to have a spot where gaura would like to grow. 
I couldn't find Whirling Butterflies on the day I just had to have it so settled for Geyser White gaura from Lowe's. The flowers DO look like butterflies perched on the end of long wand-like stalks. I know this is so because while putting together a last minute bouquet for a co-worker I added some gaura as an afterthought and the co-worker said, "These flowers look like butterflies!" Well I was pretty darn pleased.
Geyser White, despite its name, has a pinkish base to each white flower, and the leaves inexplicably have some purple spotting on them. This is not a new rust disease in my garden, but is common to gaura apparently. Now if I could just spot a butterfly alighting on my butterflies.
"The bombs bursting in air...." or rather, the Monarda bursting in the garden on Independence Day. This sure looks like the fireworks I saw the other night. Good thing we went to a Sunday night show since the rain tonight put a damper on a lot of fireworks displays. This is "Marshall's Delight" in its third year in my garden. After languishing on spindly stalks for the past two summers and fighting off powdery mildew, this year the Monarda has reinforced the old adage about perennials and vines, "The first year they sleep, the second year they creep, the third year they leap." 
And according to many gardeners they will leap all over the garden given half a chance. These are in an enclosed bed and if they want to crowd out the phlox that have turned a washed-out lavender they're welcome to it. Actually I think the phlox was a washed-out lavender when I received it from a co-worker who was thinning out her flower beds several years ago. That's the trouble with planting something that you can't see in bloom at the garden center, you never know what you're going to get. It was free but I'd rather have beautiful.