My Favorite Garden Flowers

   We have hundreds of flowers and flowering shrubs as a part of our landscape which we tend to each year along with our very large vegetable garden.   We don’t use any pesticides in our  gardens and only fish emulsion to feed our gardens with nutrients.  That’s it!

My favorite garden flowers are not roses because they attract Japanese beetles.  I love peonies, however, they attract ants by the thousands where I live.   I love zinnias and foxglove because they attract bees which are the most effective pollinators on the planet earth.

I wish I could plant azaleas on our property, however, they attract ladybugs.   That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that I share my home with ladybugs all year long!!  Those small pretty bugs which are wonderful for gardens because they eat aphids and other destructive plant bugs, hatch in our attic and spend their fall and winter days walking along a ceiling or wall inside our home.   Suffice it to say, I don’t need azalea bushes no matter how pretty lady bugs are.

Impatiens is one of my all time favorite flowering plants.  The rich color of the flowers against the dark green leaves makes it a very attractive plant which grows into beautiful mounds if planted in some sun, mostly shade.  And here’s the best reason to plant this in your gardens – the sap inside the stems of impatiens neutralizes the chemical which enters your skin from poison ivy and poison oak.  Imagine that!!  No more Calamine lotion and no more oatmeal baths.  The sap  neutralizes the itching, relieves the discomfort and eradicates the rash.

Black-eyed Susans and marigolds attract song birds and I don’t know any better way to relieve stress than to relax on a chaise listening to the sweet sounds of birds.

Got mosquitos?  Plant plenty of geraniums near to your sitting areas.  Mosquitoes find the geranium scent offensive so you can relax in your mosquito free zone.  You can also crush a geranium leaf and rub it on your skin which will release it’s scent and keep you mosquito free for 1 – 1.5 hours.   Unfortunate for me, I react to geranium leaves and break out in a mild rash when I dead-head the flowers and have too much contact with the leaves.

Hmmm…I wonder if the sap from the impatiens stem can be used on geranium rash instead of the good old stand-by, Calamine lotion.

HAPPY GARDENING!!