More Calendula Firepower

Since I haven't gotten any new pics taken the past few days I just thought I'd go ahead and show off some more Calendula firepower currently on display in the front boulder bed. I took these shots the same day (Sunday) as the delicious yellow cream one I posted last night, and if you look in the background of the first shot you'll see it where it's blooming, but now with another couple of blooms opening.

I really wanted to get some shots yesterday, as we had a few monarchs working the garden in the afternoon, but due to their skittishness and a regular breeze, I just wasn't able to capture them at the right time. They were visiting the coneflowers, these calendulas and of course the still blooming bee balm. Our friend the hummingbird was also paying frequent, if short, visits to the bee balm both in the front garden as well as the back corner of the lot, so with the constant stream of the bees, there was a lot of feeding going on amongst the garden denizens. I suspect there was a whole lotta pollinatin goin on as well, with all that traffic!

These three examples (along with the one posted last night) show a nice range of the variation in colour and flower shape you find with Calendulas ...from the almost dahlia like textures of the orange, to the intense lemon yellow daisy-esque, to the more traditional shape that we find with French marigolds. Fernymoss will argue forcefully that Calendula is the real marigold, not those intensely hybridized ones we generally imagine when we hear the name. In fact, the two are not even botanically related species. They do share a similar range of colours from red, yellow and orange, though I've rarely seen red Calendulas (at least in our experience).

As I mentioned in a previous post, Calendulas are a really easy self-seeding annual to grow, and once you've done it successfully one year, you can just let them progress through their cycle till the seed heads dry up, break them up and scatter them where you will and they'll be back in successive years. As Ina Garten would say, How easy is that?!

P.S. There's a bonus bug for Olivia in one of these shots ... can you find it?