Purple Dead-Nettle (Lamium purpureum) growing from the stone wall under a railroad overpass at the back of the South Side Flats. In this sheltered position, it was already blooming in early March.
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Purple Dead-Nettle in Late Winter
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Mexican Sunflower
Tithonia rotundifolia, the Mexican Sunflower, is a fine garden flower if you have some room for it: it can grow six feet high and spread just about as wide. Tall flowers in hot colors are fashionable again, but old Pa Pitt never cared for fashions in flowers. He just likes big bright annuals.
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Sidewalk Petunia
Urban weeds are different from suburban or rural ones. Petunias often escape and pop up in cracks of sidewalks. Usually these volunteer seedlings have smaller flowers than their hybrid ancestors, and often in more washed-out colors. This flower was blooming from a concrete stairway on the South Side Slopes.
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Butter-and-Eggs (Linaria vulgaris)
Butter-and-Eggs or Toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) is a kind of wild snapdragon that came from Europe as an ornamental and made itself weedily at home. These plants were growing out of sidewalk cracks on the South Side Slopes. Note the two different color phases: one with bright orange centers, the other a more uniform primrose yellow.
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Morning Glories
Morning glories (Ipomoea purpurea) came here as ornamental garden flowers and have happily adapted to the life of a weed. They are, however, one of our most beautiful weeds, and not many of us resent them. These were blooming in Beechview at the end of August.
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Balsam
Balsam (Impatiens balsamina) is one of those old-fashioned garden flowers you don’t see too much anymore. Here are some fine examples from a garden in Beechview.
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
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Daylilies After the Rain
It had been raining all day, but in the evening there was enough of a lull for old Pa Pitt to get out and take these pictures. The daylilies are all unnamed varieties from a planting of mixed hybrid seedlings.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS.
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Purple Coneflower
This American native is one of our most beloved garden flowers. It blooms most of the summer, and it tolerates a wide variety of conditions. Butterflies love it, too. You can often find it growing wild around Pittsburgh, but it is currently one of the most fashionable garden flowers. This is a semi-wild specimen: it was a volunteer seedling whose parents were deliberately planted nearby.
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Drumstick Allium
Drumstick Alliums (Allium sphaerocephalon) are more and more popular, but still a bit odd-looking. These grew in Beechview, where they were in full bloom at the beginning of July.
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Fall Flower Show at Phipps
In honor (apparently) of its Japanese theme, the 2015 Fall Flower Show has visitors keeping to the left instead of to the right all the way around the conservatory (except in the Fern, Orchid, and Stove Rooms, because a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little conservatories). It makes old Pa Pitt wax nostalgic, because Phipps was a keep-to-the-left place for the first century or so of its existence, before finally converting to keep-to-the-right circulation at some time in the late twentieth century.
Cameras: Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z3 and Olympus E020n.
