Beebalm

You know you're living a somewhat sedate life when the following news is greeted with exclamations, photographs, and shouts through the house: The beebalm is blooming! The beebalm is blooming!

We first considered beebalm after visiting our friend Marsha's garden - she was bemoaning the state of her beebalm, which wasn't spreading very much, and remarked that it had done much better in our friend Renata's last garden, in Oak Park. Hmm, we thought. A plant that allegedly does well in our basic geographical area. So we bought ourselves some beebalm, and then spent a day or so shuffling the pots around in the garden. We finally settled on the spot outside the master bedroom window, because there are some red day lillies there, and we thought the colors would go well, and the amount of sun seemed right.

And now, just a month or so later, it has started to bloom! The reddish flowers are pretty, the plants seem to be doing well where we have planted them, and we learned about another of our favorite kinds of plants: they flower, and they're hard to kill.