Summer flowers

It's hard to walk a block without running into a stunning display of summer flowers right now. The city's talented amateur gardeners and -- I have to be honest -- wonderful gardening services and landscape designers, make many Vancouver gardens into showpieces at this time of year. Here are six of the displays I saw on an excursion within an hour's walk of my house on Friday, followed by a few others taken within the last week or two:

Airy pink lavatera bursts out of this garden, combined with grasses and other flowers in the same colour palette.

Bright flowers in a number of containers make this garden a blast of colour on the street.

Combining these white daisy-like flowers with hostas and brown grasses gives them an added  impact. 

Pink hollyhocks against a weathered board fence -- what could be prettier?

Yellow rudbeckia combined with grasses and lavender -- difficult to see, but it's out on the sidewalk -- make this display worth a second look.

Two kinds of hydrangeas in harmonizing colours planted side by side make each look more beautiful. 

The fuzz of a smokebush combined with purple-blue clematis is a showstopper.

Yellows, blues and a bit of pink in the background add colour to a community garden.

Steel-blue grasses, white hydrangeas and coneflower, with plum-coloured  foliage in the background look like the work of some well-trained landscape architect. 

This photo and the one below are different angles of a beautiful boulevard display about 20 minutes from my house. 

The combination of intense colours with neutral grasses is very effective.

No fancy combinations here; just a happy row of bright rudbeckias marking the boundary between a gravel driveway and a lawn.