Return from trip to Wyoming to Summer garden

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine 

Butterfly Weed remnant

Seeing plants in various stages of dying, this one actually is "promising".  I set this little plant out a week before I took off for Wyoming.  It had leaves and even flowers.  I choose to believe that a Monarch butterfly caterpillar had a feast.  There are other things that could have caused this, I am opting for the caterpillar. The hopeful sign is the sprout with leaves.  I will watch this plant and see how it does.

The 2 year old Butterfly Weed beside this plant is healthy.

Other plants that may look sad and hopeless to me are the promise of things to come.

This is a seedling zinnia from SPENT blossom that I dead headed several weeks ago

 “One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

I had Four O'clock's many years
ago and thought I'd try again.
They may be my summer staple
if I continue fighting summer
heat.
They benefit from deadheading
and will likely bloom all heat
long.

 Summer has set in with its usual severity. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 Heat, ma’am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones. ~Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir

  I set out watermelon rinds a few weeks back for the butterflies. The seeds germinated and the vine(s) are huge.
I started cutting back and pulling out.
Then, I saw a bumblebee.

Plant stays!

Last but not least, 2 sweet potato vines.  These were set into the hole of concrete blocks.  Not a lot of soil, not much water....I have cut it back as it was creeping out to conquer the whole court yard.

In the end, hubby (not a gardener) would tell me when we talked on the phone that things looked so bad.
I said don't worry about it.
I came home to not a sad sight, a promise of fall and spring.