My sweetheart calls Azaleas ‘party girls’, because they burst into flower, divert our attention from everything around them, drop their flowers and then leave things looking a bit boring. His words, not mine! But while they last…
The first picture is part of my pictures for dreaming series.
Shared for Cee’s Flower of the Day. Her choice for today is bright orange too!
Susan Rushton 
They may be hard to find this year. These party girls like to be behind locked gates 😦
Yes – these ones are out of bounds.
😀 fun comparison and so true about the azaleas I mean 😀
He’s got a talent for comparisons.
They are beautiful. Party on!
If only they had a large mirror to dance in front of, and a knack for reworking songs.
Maybe you can work on your dance moves and parody writing skills while locked down. I can see that coming up with wall of mirrors might be a challenge for you.
I could try tin foil?
If it didn’t work for a mirror, you could make a hat out of it.
Oh what beautiful flowers for today 😀
Thanks, Cee.
Party girls! Perfect description. I feel the same way about peonies.
I’d love to see a peony party.
Absolutely gorgeous, I love the second shot 🙂
There’s a good range of colours in that one.
I agree with your sweetie’s assessment. Like all parties, fun while they last!
Good point – a year round party would be a bit much.
Beautiful party girl azaleas!
All dressed up and ready to go.
How pretty. Azaleas grow and bloom in Michigan but not like they do in the southern states.
The wild ones I’ve seen in the South are more spindly – graceful, but not as big as these ones. Either the ones we have here have been selected out or they love our climate.
None around here, sadly. But yours more than make up for my loss.
I never used to like them when I was younger. Their colours seemed a bit gaudy. As I’ve grown older, and fallen under my sweetheart’s influence, quite a few gardening things that seemed dodgy to me have become more like objects of desire. That either makes him a bad influence or a liberating one.
The path fascinates me. It evokes the dreaming because of its invitation and its mystery, and it implies order (to me), but the second photo, with its booming chaos of color, where one hardly knows where to look, is more what my dreams are like. All a-jumble and a-tumble. I need to spend more time with paths. Those azaleas do know how to party.
A path like this one rightly ends in a question mark. I don’t dream of gardens half enough – or if I do, I don’t remember those ones.
When we grew these years ago, they were surprisingly unpopular, which was weird, because the were better suited to the climate than the other azaleas and rhododendrons that we grew. It is something that I always wanted to see more of.
They perhaps suffer because people see azaleas growing wild and set a lower value on them (assuming they do grow wild where you are). I’ve never seen these colours of azaleas growing wild here, although we have loads of pink rhododendrons.
Western azalea is native nearby, but is very rare. They are actually difficult to find to get cuttings from. They do not look like they do in cultivation. Those that we grew were more compact cultivars that bloomed more prolifically. Two colleagues collected cuttings from the wild to grow into stock plants for breeding with cultivars from farther North on the Olympic Peninsula. On rare occasion, a clients wants the wild species for native landscapes.