On the wings of a first season

What a debut! Our backyard butterfly bush has certainly turned out to be a success in its first year in the ground after we brought it home from favorite local nursery Ballantyne Gardens. Each step of its process makes my more and more thrilled.

Behold the multi-colored butterfly bush

The last of our big three butterfly bushes pushed out its blooms. Behold, to the right, the multi-colored beauty. We loved the completed trifecta in the triangle garden in the backyard of the cherished Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. Yeah, I love the look back there, for sure. No question about…

Here come the butterfly bush blossoms

It’s August. The butterfly bush blossoms are pushing out in the triangle garden in the backyard of the Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwoood. In the two of the four, anyway. The tall one has purple flowers showing. And the white one has the biggest cone-shaped blossoms out for the world to…

We have a butterfly bush blossom … but no hydrangea

In this slow season for the backyard butterfly garden behind the Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood, we have finally two purple blossoms to photograph out of the four bushes. I’m still blaming the cold spell and snow cover that did not melt from the first of the year until April. Over…

3 pretty bushes all in a row

In the last week, my three sturdy backyard garden butterfly bushes have changed personality a bit. The white, in fact, became the loudest of the bunch, with blooms so big, so long, so wide, they threatened to drown out their neighbors. But the pink indeed morphed chameleon-like into the multi-colored beauty of seasons past, and…

In the butterfly garden, blossoms at last

It took long enough in this summer of 2014. But at long last, on this slightly gray Sunday morning of Aug. 3, I finally felt it was time to grab the iPad Air and take these shots of the backyard butterfly garden in the Eastwood neighborhood of the Syracuse city home of my dear wife…

This time Good Neighbor Tim’s got the butterfly

By mid-July, I’d hoped to be able to proudly show you the purple blossoms on my most mature of butterfly bushes in the backyard garden of my dear wife Karen and I at our home in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. Yes, I can, but not in the striking manner in years past. Here’s…

At this huge nursery, it’s easy to welcome spring

Last Saturday my dear wife Karen and I walked the aisles of Chuck Hafner’s Garden Center in North Syracuse for more than an hour, and I was a lot closer to getting bushed than I was to getting bored. Every year we take the drive from our Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood to North Syracuse…

A butterfly bush sends lone purple blossom high into the Syracuse autumn sky

Our butterfly bushes have always been the late bloomers. Slowly but surely in this backyard garden in Syracuse, N.Y., these babies become big achievers, too. The purple-blooming bush has always stood tallest as the growing season progresses. As autumn falls deeply at last upon this city neighborhood of Eastwood, one single branch has taken its…