Rounded is definitely dogwood, especially with an early spring flowering.
Haven’t ever seen the star-pointed flowers above, but they do seem dogwood-like.
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Vs “flowering dogwood”
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Yep! Thanks!
It does seem like the Kousa blooms earlier than it used to…
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The climbening begins ↓
These nasturtiums are supposed to climb, too ↓
How quickly we grow weary ↓
These peonies have a cage thing around them, but they grew much taller than usual this year. At the last minute before blooming, the stems between the top leaves and the blossoms just shot up. I wonder if the cage has collapsed a bit, I should check.
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Very nice arrangements!
I’m waiting on some nasturtium seeds that are backordered when it said they were in stock 
I really enjoy nasturtium - especially harvesting the leaves and flowers to spice up salads. Unfortunately they’re almost always sold as ornamentals so I never really know what the flavor profile is going to be like year to year (I think the Alaska blend is usually nice and spicy)
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Oh, I knew that you can eat nasturtium flowers, but I didn’t realize that people ate the leaves too!
I’m not sure what type mine are (beyond being the cheap brand of seeds from Target), but it does say on the packet “Edible flowers!” so I have hopes 
Hope you get your seeds soon!
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Yep! Whole plant is edible. The variegated types look really unusual in a salad. The ones I like most are a little tart but have a mild spiciness that’s unlike spice pepper or hot peppers.
Yours look great - hope you have a good batch!
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From last week, here’s one of the hollyhocks that I planted seeds for last year. They’re biennials, and they don’t bloom until the second year. I planted a whole row of them along the back of a large raised bed, but only three of the plants survived the neighbor’s cats using the bed as a litter box 
(Don’t get me wrong, I love cats!) ↓
Today, let’s see how things are coming along… Well, darn, all three plants had flowers and/or buds, but now they’re gone! 
↓
Something munched out on them. Whatever creature it was, they provided their own table service to a cozy little dining spot a few feet away. I do hope they enjoyed their meal, but they didn’t even finish all of their food! And they didn’t clear the table or sweep up afterwards ↓
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Deer. They don’t discriminate at all.
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Deer love hollyhocks
Iirc, the leaves of the hollyhock, harvested young and tender, are edible to humans too. The plant is a relative of the marsh mallow plant, and good eating for lots of critters.
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No deer here, so I suspect it was the squirrels. They don’t seem to discriminate either!
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Ah, the Malvaceae, okra, cotton, hibiscus, durian, cacao, and tillia, the smell of summer evenings in Italy.
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durian?!
no thank you.
however, TIL durian, okra and cotton are related to hollyhock!
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And Linden trees, of which there is one in front of the house here. Who knew it was such a big happy family!
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That’s the tilia (tiglio in italian), lime or basswood in UK or US. In the evenings in the countryside they make such a wonderful perfume.
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↓ AT LAST!!! A nasturtium flower. The seed packet says they bloom until frost, so perhaps there will be more. (Though I think it’s not a sunny enough spot for them)
↓ Morning glories, good old reliable morning glories, did better. They reseed themselves each year there. The deep purple ones were planted years ago by a neighbor, and they would just grow up the light pole. When she moved away I started putting up strings for them. This year I also planted seeds there for “Heavenly Blue” morning glories, but, as you can see, they came out magenta. A little (very little) research tells me that the color has to do with the acidity of the soil. Next year I may look into that and see if I can get them to be blue.
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Sounds like hydrangeas. You can make them blue instead of pink by changing the chemical balance of the soil.
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Rescue orchid from my local Buy Nothing group. Potting mix and the original peat nursery plug were bone dry. The leaves are limp, and almost all the roots were dead. I removed the dead roots, and it’s left with these few. I’m attempting to rehydrate it—shallow water, the cloth to wick it upward without drowning the crown—I have no idea if I’m doing this right. 
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I think the whistlepigs go after it, as well.
I’ve read that if deer are hungry enough, they’ll eat anything, but in 20+ years at our house I have not ever noticed the deer going after daffodils, azaleas, or geraniums (pelargoniums?), and they don’t seem to bother with purple coneflower. They also don’t bother our herbs (rosemary, lavender, basil, thyme, Korean mint). They’ll at least try everything else; hostas are effectively a salad bar.
The squirrels went after our tuberous begonias when I had them out on the back deck. They’d rip into the flowers as though they were angry at them but I suspect they were just sloppy eaters (as the flowers IIRC are edible for humans, so I guess the same goes for squirrels). I moved them to hanging pots underneath the eaves on the front porch & they never bothered them again (but sometimes we’ll get birds nesting in them, & then I can’t or won’t water them).
Also synonymous with “salad bar.”
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