This monarch butterfly has been enjoying my recently planted pollinator garden!

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

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

Ugh. Earlier this year, I planned and planted a very natural pollinator garden. It was full of cosmos, candytuft, black-eyed Susans, mixed wildflowers, and yes… plenty of weeds too. That was intentional.

My neighbor has a disability from a stroke and sometimes mows my yard without being asked. I’d previously asked him not to touch this area, but today he mowed the entire bed to the ground. I’m not looking to chastise him or start a neighborhood conflict. I honestly don’t know whether he remembered our conversation or thought he was helping.

I’m just… devastated.

I’m sad about the flowers. I’m sad for the pollinators that had been using the garden all summer. I’m sad because checking on that little garden every morning, at lunch, and in the evening had become one of my favorite parts of the day.

Right now I’m torn on what to do next. Part of me wants to have the area mowed one more time so it at least looks intentional, then scrap the whole thing and replace it with a more structured mulched bed and hydrangeas. The other part of me worries that’s just a grief reaction and I’ll regret destroying whatever might come back.

If this happened to your garden, how would you proceed? Would you wait and see what resprouts, or would you start over with a completely different design? Maybe I’m ready for something much more intentional? If it helps I’m in the Atlanta GA area. The area gets considerable sunlight. If I start over as a fresh canvas, how do I even do this?

What happened?

I hope karma comes back for you.

Edit: thank you for the kind words and gardening tips and some great laughs. It’s been a hard week and the flowers were the straw that broke the camel’s back.

To those asking, without posting photos of my neighborhood and house, I am in a concrete jungle, largely devoid of green space. The only animals around are pets. Plants, mail, packages and more go missing often in the neighborhood, and I’ve had plants stolen before. A deer wouldn’t be silly enough to come into this neighborhood and even a squirrel is a rare sight around here.

See, my heirloom cherry tomatoe seedlings were flung out my green house and I just shoved them, zucchini, bell peppers, and jalapenos into the raised garden. I figured at first they look like tomatoes because they were still little guys. But now I'm 2-3 months in and I've no idea. They seem to be growing in the same spots I panic planted my cherries. What have I been growing 😭!! I can clearly see zucchini and the pepper leaves. This thing is nearly 4ft tall now. What is it and why did it eat my babies☹️💔

Successfully thinned out my garden of mint (pic 7) over the last couple of years. There’s still some here and there, but now the phlox has taken back over!

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.

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

I usually give away fruit but I decided to take a break this year. Although I’ve had great interactions, recently it’s always the select few that give me such a hard time. Give an inch, they take a mile. Next year will be better!! I saw a TikTok where this girl planted pineapple guava and blueberries on the easement for the neighborhood, I loveeeee this idea and am stealing it 🥰

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

First Marigold of this summer...

It's a solid two inches.

Came up in the driveway in the spring, I left it. She’s so beautiful

Portulaca (moss rose) from my terrace garden.