I love my Gaucho OTs (Oriental-Trumpet hybrid) - they smell lovely and look a lot like my star gazers, only bigger! This is the 2nd summer - I planted 6 bulbs in spring of 2023 and have several more that sprouted from those bulbs 🥰

I've had this stuck in my head all weekend, and hope someone else out there enjoys it too!

Shown are some pink and (what I think of as) orange sherbet colored lilies that it seems like all the scales in 3 bulbs for each color came up, and some new (last year they didn't bloom) daylilies "Night Beacon" which had a lot more red on the petals and much less of the yellow throat on the packaging than in my picture...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is what it looked like a couple of days ago. It's been in the 90's and rainy - so pretty miserable, but at least the rain keeps the plants happy!

In the lower left there are a couple of lilies that are slightly different - deep orange with a maroon or deep red throat:

I promise you, most of the red/pink/raspberry lilies - the most prominent color in the picture - were actually like the two-tone orange and red ones when we planted them last year! What is up with that? lol

So here I have a bunch of the row open - I counted something like 12 flowers open and at least 25 more to go just in this row! I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to expand my lily garden at the end of the season.

The whole row:

🥰

Just the one so far, but I'm glad any made it this far!

What the deer has been eating instead:

As I was taking this picture of my lilies that are showing some reds, a deer ran from the side yard of my house, and through the back yard, and out the fence in the back! I was actually out there to check damages from the deer that was out there 3 hours before!

I'm getting a little tired of them eating my pansies, but at least they've been leaving the lilies alone. So far. And it helps a little that a mama deer brought her baby to the yard and they didn't eat the lilies, just the Jacob's ladders and sand cherry tree's um… cherries?

The following was all included in the prompt, with some other things set up in the background kind of obfuscated from the view I end up with. Fairly randomized chunks of prompt are fed to an llm which then adds to it:

Scientific Beauty of Liquid Metals ≈====================≈

Prompt: A beautiful scientific rendering of mixtures of undulating liquid metal,, , Amethyst Purple, Emerald Green, Burnished Bronze Clear

Golden Amber, Liquid Copper, Liquid Silver, Iridescent Sheen, Crystal Blue, Shimmering Opal, Fiery Red, Aquamarine, Molten Metal, Reflective Surface, Neon Pink, Radiant Yellow, Ethereal, Shifting Hues, Lava Flow, Platinum, Radiant Orange, Nebula, Prismatic, Fluorescent, Stained Glass, Opalescent, Prism, Optical Illusion, Aurora, Glittering, Glimmering, Dazzling, Radiant, Rivulets, Sparkling, Glittering, Glowing, Glassy, Metallic, Rainbow, Refracted Light, Lustrous, Glossy, Radiant, Luminous

Can anyone tell me how old they think this guy is? Milk crate for scale.

Finally! After taking a bit of time away from crafting at all last year, this guy is finished!

(Pattern from Ravelry: [Sally the Sloth](https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sally-the-sloth by Cuddly Stitches Craft)

Basically a trail cam to see who visits (and eats) my flowers. These guys tend to eat what the birds drop onto the deck instead.

Saw a bunch of these crop up in our front yard and they look so delicate! I guess they came with the house and I hadn't noticed them before.