June blooming lilies

The month of June continued giving us a variety of colors and plants in our yard. Here are my favorite photos of our lilies, all located in the front yard. Below, you can see among the daylilies that I also have a few calla lilies. I love calla lilies although the flowers are too short-lived. But they do stand out among the other more colorful daylilies.

Here is a view of the daylilies as they encircle our crape myrtle tree. The smaller looking flowers in the foreground happen to be our white trailing lantana.

And my Easter lilies surround the birdbath.

Lilies in May

The month of May we experienced a multitude of color from most of our plants. Here are some of my daylilies I was quite pleased with. For years I had all of my lilies in pots, but finally, last year we put them in the ground. We planted all the daylilies around our crepe myrtle tree, and they apparently love their location. Here are a few photos I took during the last half of May.

If you look closely you will see a spider inside the calla lily blossom.

And here is a big bee getting into one of the Stella d'oro daylilies. These daylilies are planted in the parking strip. The purple blossoms in the background is the wooly thyme at the peak of its blossoms.

Front yard design

When we first moved to this house there used to be a lawn with two large trees competing with each other. The one partially seen below is some sort of elm and is part of the parking strip like most single dwelling homes we have here in California. The types of trees vary. When we lived in another town a few miles away, we had a camphor tree. Those are nice, they are not necessarily deciduous. They tend to lose their leaves a little at a time. But the street we live on now were originally planted with elms. Since this is an older neighborhood (homes are 50+ years old), a few of the trees have succumbed to disease. A few neighbors have replanted with other types of trees. The other tree we had in our front yard was an ash tree, but it was diseased. So when we landscaped the front yard we took that tree down and replaced it with a crepe myrtle.

When we redesigned the front yard we repositioned the front walkway and converted the driveway from plain old ugly concrete to paving stones. Another big change in our front yard was getting rid of the lawn and designing for more native type plants. This has been a work in progress for the past 5+ years. As you can see in the photo above we have woolly thyme and a few sea pinks and a little sedum planted as ground cover. We also added Stella d'oro daylilies for more color. This is the time of year when our woolly thyme blooms, and it is so attractive when one walks or drives by. I wish it would bloom all spring and summer long.
Last year we wanted to add some height in the middle of our front yard. So we thought we would try planting a clematis. It looked good for the first couple of months, but then it was another plant that seemed to say "sayonara." We decided to pull out the plant once we knew it was dead, and still have not figured out what will do well in that spot. Our front yard faces south, but we are competing with the next door neighbors' palm tree which shades much of that part of the front yard. But what to my wondering eyes should appear about two months ago, a "new" growth coming up. My husband and I decided to just let it grow to see what it would be, and then only a week ago (when the temps were extraordinarily hot) we noticed that this plant was going to put out some blossoms. Well, once it did, I realized it was a clematis. We're not sure, but we think the plant may have come up via seeds that were dropped from last year's blossoms. Is that possible?

Below are more photos of the Stella d'oro daylilies. Note the woolly thyme around the daylilies. Well, we may still have a lot of work to do in the front yard, but we think our parking strip is looking good. Is anyone else redesigning their yards or doing new landscaping this year? I'd love to hear some of your ideas.