Pale yellow backed by darkest burgundy! In this picture, the colors alone make me whoop with delight.
Tasteful yet intense, from the partnership (OK, at least the propinquity) of two peerlessly unusual species.
The burgundy backdrop is the foliage of Eucomis 'Sparkling Burgundy', about which I've written time and again.
The flowers, though, are brand-new to me. Literally just planted not two months ago. They are yet another flavor of the small tribe of hardy gladiolus. "Hardy" meaning reliably in Zone 6 as long as the drainage in the Winter is OK, and you mulch a lot the first year or three.
I'll post the others as they come into bloom. I've got apricot, pink, and honest red, and they've been happy for me for some years now.
This one is 'Carolina Primrose'. Like all the hardy glads, it's totally more graceful and self-reliant than the tall and tender florist varieties. (Not that I'm not easing my way into those too, no surprise.) No staking, two or three feet tall instead of five or six, and blooming (here in New England, for me) in July and August. And forming nice colonies too, so you'll have plenty for friends. Well, maybe just a grudging few, so no one takes this beauty for granted. Get them at Lazy SS Farm.

The lively chess-piece from Alice in Wonderland?

The intentionally not-lively Victorian monarch?
The too-lively and so now-dead drag star?

Of course not. We're dealing with classics in this blog, not these human ephemerals. I mean, therefore, the 'White Queen' crinum lily. It's a hybrid, one of Luther Burbank's lovliest. Crinums are the hostas of Florida; no thrill in having another one anywhere down there. But in New England, a crinum growing in-ground is a shock. A pleasant shock, a frisson, but a shock even so.
I'm not ready to risk my pair of White Queens, nicely in bud in the beds on either side of the pathway out from the back door into the garden. So my Queens are in five-gallon nursery pots sunk into the soil just for the Summer.

Here's what those impressive buds become: swooning pendant white bells. Royalty indeed.
You can get yours where I got this picture: PlantDelights.com.
As you'd conclude from their popularity in Florida, crinums love stinking Summer swelter, and don't much care about what soil they grow in as long as it's well-drained. I keep most of mine in pots year-round, and they hang out in a cool greenhouse (50 degrees tops at night) from October through May. Some crinums are hardy in-ground, easy as pie, up into Virginia. And with a little more work, some are even hardy up here in Rhode Island. Stay tuned for those posts.