Blooming Tuesday

It has been raining quite a bit for the past two days, so I have not been able to show you my blue paint project.  We stained the deck flooring two days ago, but with all the rain, we have not been able to get my project back where it  belongs.  For those of you dying to know ( :) ) , at the end of my Blooming Tuesday post, you will get a clue as to what I painted.  I will show you more later.

I am having ambivalent feeling about these linky parties.  I really don't understand how they work. I have been to a lot of  blogs where the authors have a separate page for the dozens of linky parties they participate in.  There was no link to the current party as there should be; just a link to the main blog of the host.    Is this acceptable?  I can  sure see that it would be a lot of time to link to 12 different parties in one post -- so much easier if you just make one page  to list the linkies, but that is not the way I understood it should be. I thought each post had to link to the current week's party so if I wander on to the post three months from now I can just click and find the whole list of participants.  However, I have not seen any linky author delete anybody who uses a separate page.  With multiple parties, it would  be quite a pain to wait for all the hosts to post their linky so you can link up.   Jean, please let me know how this works! You are about the only linky party I do here right now. 
I have some creeping phlox that just began to bloom.  I removed most of it from the Arbor Gardens last year, but I did leave a couple of small areas, like this one:

I also bought a flat of orange impatiens and planted it along the walkway.  I wonder how it is going to look when the short pink lilies begin to bloom!  I was planning to buy white impatiens, but decided that was way too boring.

Back in the rockwall garden I have some tulips blooming. I have decided to use this area as a cutting garden for flower bouquets.  I have not even started to clean up this garden. It is full of fallen branches, etc.

I noticed a nice group of purple peony tulips and some very small Princess Irene orange tulips in bloom. I cut them all down and decided to make a centerpiece bouquet from them.

I added a few other bloomers, like this ajuga...

I ended up with this purple/orange bouquet:

I just love it!

You can see what I used that bouquet for if you click here.

Happy Blooming Tuesday! Click here to visit the other participants.