The Time of Surprises

 This time of year things change so quickly in the garden it can be difficult to keep up.
This volunteer poppy was not open at 6:00 this morning but the next time I looked, just before 9:30, it was fully opened. The surprise was that it was a fringed poppy! I had these two years ago but none returned last year. You can bet I will be saving these seeds and being careful with them.

The surprise here is that this hoverfly sat down on this nigella long enough for me to snap a quick picture. Most of the pollinators here seem very shy and take off as soon as they see the camera.

We made a quick trip out of town this past weekend to visit our daughter's family for our granddaughter's 6th birthday party. The dianthus went from tight buds to tons of open blooms in the 38 hours we were gone. The 90 degree temperature Sunday might have been a contributing factor!

 This is one of my new iris, purchased last year from Pleasants Valley Iris Farm, a wonderful local source of a wide variety of iris rhizomes. It is Rustic Royalty and I did not realize the inside would be so prettily colored, a nice surprise.

This surprise was a birthday gift for my granddaughter. It is a tic-tac-toe game made of rocks painted to look like bees and ladybugs,  an idea I saw on a Facebook comment linked here. It seemed to go over pretty well which was not a surprise!