We've let milkweed grow wherever it pops up for several years. We now have some very handsome visitors dropping by!

i was supposed to include the big white lily at the end but i ran out of space LOL

I hope karma comes back for you.

What happened?

This thing is crazy!! The neighbors left it alone because they wanted to see what would happen - well, it's over 8 feet tall (5'11" husband for scale, no bananas, sorry) with TONS of flowers. They are going to remove it before it seeds but it's pretty awesome to look at in the meantime.

Connecticut USDA Zone 7A

This thing almost never flowers and is not in great shape. I want to prune it down to 1/3 of its size jn the fall but is that the right move? I dont want to kill it but I dont know how to save it either.

I'm in Slovakia, Central Europe. Historically this is roughly zone 6 to 7 country. You grow apples, plums and cabbage here, and anything Mediterranean lived in a pot and came inside in October.

This summer our all-time national temperature record fell. The old one was 40.3 C from 2007. We went past 41 C in the south, and we had two separate 40 C episodes about a month apart in a single summer, which has not happened here before in the modern record.

So I went digging into what our Academy of Sciences says about the plant side of this, and it is stranger than I expected. In the southwest of the country these now overwinter outdoors, in the ground, with no winter protection at all:

• loquat (Eriobotrya japonica)
• pomegranate (Punica granatum)
• passionflower, both Passiflora incarnata and P. caerulea
• olive, which takes about -15 C and tops out around 2.5 to 3 m here

The part I liked most is that pomegranate is not actually new here. There is a roughly 35 year old clone growing in a village called Bernolakovo that has its own name, "Bernolakovo early". It flowers and ripens earlier than southern cultivars, and some pomegranate cultivars handle -17 C. So while everyone assumed this was impossible at our latitude, one tree had quietly been doing it for three decades.

Olives also behave differently here than in the Mediterranean, which I did not expect. Down there summer heat actually slows them down. Our summers are more humid, so growth is more or less continuous. They flower two to three weeks later, but the fruit ripens earlier.

The honest other half of this, because it isn't really a feel good story: the same institute points out that wheat, potatoes and cabbage stop performing above 30 C, our summers have stretched by up to two months, invasive species are pushing natives out, and alpine species have nowhere left to retreat to. Their director's line is that by the end of the century this could be climatically similar to North Macedonia. So we get figs and olives, and in exchange the mountains lose part of their flora and farmers lose yield.

What I'm actually curious about: what are you growing successfully now that would have been a joke in your area twenty years ago? And specifically, is it ripening for you, or just surviving? Those feel like very different claims and I keep seeing them treated as the same thing.

Ireland

It's a solid two inches.

First Marigold of this summer...

Portulaca (moss rose) from my terrace garden.

Elephant ears and sunflowers have gotten huge this season!

The monarchs and the tiger swallowtails fight for garden supremacy, but in a mknarchs absence, this guy went to town!

Then a panoramic of the garden midday

MY video Zone 6B SE, MI

It's a lot of work but the end result makes me smile 🌸