Wander to the Wayside, Part 1 (my yard)

I've had photos piling up in my camera, but too many to put in one post. Here are some of the last remnants of my garden, and then I'll put some of the area Fall photos on another post.
(A reminder...enlarge for full effect, especially since my camera takes such mediocre photos!)

I chased this butterfly around the garden for thirty minutes trying to get a photo, and the silly thing kept flying away just as I'd start to click. They're almost all gone because we had a week of frost last week, so this one was a straggler.

There's nothing special about this, except for the banana pepper plant on the left with the last peppers of the year. We put the peppers and tomatoes in the flowerbed this year, and the peppers did well but the tomatoes got blight early on.

I let most of the echinacea go to seed this year for the finch (since the price of finch seed has skyrocketed at the stores), and they were wildly popular. This batch is new and I'll let go to seed again.

I bought a little plastic pot of wilted mums last fall at the end of the season and stuck them in the ground. Imagine my surprise when this summer they grew, and grew, and produced this mass of blooms

I had given up on geraniums because I never have luck with them. This was the absolute last time I was going to buy them! I put it in this pot that gets morning sun and afternoon shade, and it has been blooming steady for the last two months. I covered it with a towel and pillow case during the frost last week, and it's still blooming today.

This isn't the one I meant to upload, but it'll do. I thought the clematis was done, but apparently I was wrong. It was curling around a little birdhouse, so I had to stand up on the deck and shoot down at it. I covered it with a sheet during the frost, but was still totally surprised that it survived.

I'm just putting this frog on for the heck of it. When Alice was here we were going to the store and I pulled over to clean a bug splatter off the windshield. As I opened the door, something flew across in front of me and scared the crap out of both of us. It was this frog! Don't know if he'd been in the car all along or if he jumped in when I opened the door, but it was quite exciting.

We were really disappointed in our flower garden this year. We had drought early on, then too much rain. I had the most beautiful clump of black eyed susans one day, that was a pile of mush the next. The same thing happened to many of the plants. Very frustrating! Oh well, another chance next year. How did your garden do?