Heat Wave fries Garden

Its very upsetting. You put in all this work, hour and hours of prep, planting, pruning, nursing and development....and then you get this God forsaken heat. My plants are literally melting. The plants that are melting are the ones that love heat and welcome it, but the combination of heat wave and drought have killed the flowers and made most everything uncomfortable and ugly. Here are some photos of my melted plants.

This poor baby to the left was a Crape Myrtle. These bushes tolerate heat so well, they don't start blooming until the middle of the summer. Today it looks like pink prunes. Its delicate little ruffles are now brown and sagging instead of pink and perky. It hurts just to look at it.


The butterfly bush, shown below,  is so fried it doesn't have much sustenance to offer this hungry butterfly. The butterfly searches and seeks but doesn't get much. This Spicebush Swallowtail butterfly is followed by a Frittilary butterfly further below which was just as frustrated with the condition of the bush as the first flier.

    Here's some update photos of the potted plants that met with disaster over the last couple of weeks. The heat destroyed the Petunias and Fushcias,  I wrote about them two weeks ago. The purple Wave Petunias have recovered a bit, nothing great looking, but at least they are holding in there and putting out some flowers. The Fuschia plant is simply hopeless, nothing is going to revive that plant, so I haven't included a photo. I don't even think a greenhouse could help it. The other victim was a pot containing a combination of annuals and perennials. It met its demise via deer tongue. The local deer ate it for dinner. They sheared it right across the pot, and it doesn't look any better today than it looked a week and a half ago when it happened. The photo below tells the story.   To say the least, it has been a very disappointing summer for gardening,