Canna and Butterfly Bush Blooming Today

Butterfly Bush

Canna 'Tropicanna'.

Purple Queen (Purple Heart)

Plants I Love (AKA The Plants that Don’t Die on Me)

Below are helpful links to plants I’ve had success with in Central Florida and are growing in my garden currently.

Purple Queen (Purple Heart) – This plant is much maligned as an invasive. My honey hates it because it can get scraggily and finds its way into the pool. My parents have battled a patch growing in their yard for years. They finally laid brick over it as part of a patio and the purple shoots are poking through the cracks. But I love its deep purple foliage and how it takes the heat. Besides, there is absolutely no easier plant to propagate. Cut off a leaf with a good portion of stem, poke a hole in the ground with a pencil, stick the stem in it, and walk away. Done. Practically my definition of great plant.

• Floridata


• USDA


• Purple Queen Info

Can't Help Myself

Okay. I can't help myself. After my manifesto, I just have to take a close up of the passion flower on the trellis bench in the back corner of the butterfly garden.

My intention for this blog has always been to be a “warts and all” depiction of a garden. So many sites and magazines have lush flowers, perfectly in bloom. Their gardens have fully matured, with not a blank spot to be seen. The only bugs are beneficial and a synthetic fertilizer is completely unheard of. You never see the weeds and the compost bins, the toys and the stray beer bottles (an essential gardener’s tool) left about. These gardens aren’t perfect. They are shot at calculated angles, cropped tight on beautiful flowers at the perfect time of year. They are beautiful, but have always felt a touch empty.
I wanted a garden that immediately provided a sense of place. You’d enter my blog and feel like you entered the garden. What is going that day is what you see. I want my pictures to be broad sweeps of the garden instead of tight shots of flowers. The problem is that the big pictures of the gardens, like this one of the butterfly garden, looks so disappointing. My fence is crooked, which I had never noticed before, and very plain. I can’t see a single flower even though I know there are azaleas and passion flowers in there. The picture doesn’t convey my feeling of the garden when I’m in it. The garden is pregnant with bud, full and right to the point of bursting with color and scent. The butterfly bush in the foreground looks raggedy, but has at least a hundred buds, just waiting burst with lilac like blooms. The lilies have sprouted, completely hidden. The lantana and the pentas obscured in the background. The picture just doesn’t show what I see, a garden full of potential.

My Little Helper

Check out my little helper. The garden is finally coming alive. The banana trees and the crepe myrtle have leafed out, both cut down considerably after the frost. The bird of paradise even has new fronds.

How to Cook Impatiens

One of the dangers of the location of my job is that it is relatively close to both a Barnes and Noble and a Lowe’s. Both are excellent ways to kill $50 bucks and a lunch hour. Several days ago I had a plant craving, an obsessive/compulsive urge to go out and buy a plant that I had stuck in my head. I found some beautiful pale pink impatiens at Lowe’s, full of flowers, for an area in the front yard. I bought them, then left them in the car while I returned to work. Well apparently, impatiens are not fond of 110 degree plus heat for four hours. This was the result. All isn’t completely lost. The one on the right looked just as bad as the others, but it is coming back. The others have small little shoots coming up. Interestingly, the lantana I bought and left in the car with the impatiens wasn’t fazed at all. That’s why I love it!

End of the Depression

It is unbelievable to me that I haven't entered anything since January. This blog thing can get away from you.

Basically, after the camellia post, a hard frost did hit. I lost everything almost to the ground, including my bird of paradise. I was too depressed to even take pictures. Everything I had worked for was brown and rotting. Too depressed to take pictures, too depressed to post. I know there are others out there who are still shoveling snow, but for my spoiled Floridian butt, this was traumatic.

Fortunately, the garden is perking up. The passion vine is blooming, the bird of paradise has beautiful new stalks and even the salvia is coming back with a vengeance. In fact, everything from the butterfly garden came back and the only plants I lost were the hibiscus and begonia and then not totally all of those. The crepe myrtle even came back. It was such a big investment for me last year, and took so long leaf out, that I was really worried.

Ultimately, I felt like the countless hours dreaming up garden plans and looking up plants on the Internet paid off. Pictures will follow soon.

Camellias

I went to the American Camellia Society's Convention hosted by the Ocala Camellia Society. I'm not even sure why I went. Only three of the camellias I bought last year survived and only one of those produced a few, wholly unspectacular blooms. Perhaps I was going as one last attempt before I gave up entirely and ripped the puppies out. Perhaps I went because Dave agreed to take the munchkin for the afternoon and I was a free woman with nothing else to do. Regardless of why I went, I was glad I did. It was extremely inspiring.

I was moved by how many varieties they had. There were flowers as large and showy as hibiscus, as compact and elegant as roses and small and dainty as buttercups. I especially liked the bloom above, a japonica "Tom Kundsen". It is a vibrant pink edged in purple. Another I liked (and seemed to be quite popular) was "Black Magic", a dark magenta bloom with large yellow stamens. The most fun for me was just listening to other gardeners. Even though I was a good 20 years younger than almost anyone there, it was nice to hear people just as concerned about upcoming frosts and spider mites as I was.

The names of the flowers were interesting too. "Betty Sheffield", "Tom Kundsen", "Frank Houser", "Mona Jury", "Mary Alice Cox". It begs the question, who are these people? Are they from a nursery, college professors, little old ladies in there garden? I bought (of course) a "Prof. Sargent" camellia with small orange-red flowers, and quick search of web gave me pretty much no info on who Prof. Sargent was (or is). Perhaps I'll check the library to see if anyone has written a book about this interesting plant and the people who developed it.

Frost Tonight?

For a moment, I thought I got away with something this year. While I've gardened in this area long enough to know that a frost was inevitable, I hoped against hope that it might consider bypassing us this year. Tonight is our first real possibility of frost. At 52 degrees, it barely feels cold out right now, but the weathermen, with urgent and dramatic threats, are telling me to cover anything I have the even faintest hope of keeping.

I covered with old sheets the Bird of Paradise and Hibiscus by the pool. Both of the these plants are relatively expensive and slow to recover from a lot of frost damage. I also covered some Elephant Ears that I'm just hoping to keep because I like where they are at. Now there is nothing left to do but put do some laundry I've neglected and throw a wool blanket on the bed and try not to think about what might die in my garden tonight.