Midsummer Meltdown

Normal Austin rainfall by end of June: 17 inches

Last year's rainfall by end of June: 27 inches

This year: 7 inches

Ouch.

In combination with more than 20 days of 100+ temperatures since May, this kind of climactic extremity is a crucible, burning through everything from leaves to my enthusiasm for gardening.

Drought is a great teacher. Some things keel over, others do okay.

So bravo to you: Turk's Cap, hypericum, liriope, plumbago, yucca, confederate jasmine, Mexican oregano, verbena, Russian sage, silver bush germander, flame acanthus, lantana, dwarf palmetto.

And yea, for the pink indigo. It's still blooming.

The Ur-blotanical

If Gertrude Jekyll were alive today, she’d be blogging like a maniac. Apart from her instructive writing on garden design and general horticulture, she loved the rabbit-hole digression on offbeat topics—she was the Ur-blogger on gardens.

I looked to her diatribe on the naming of plant colors when I was trying to describe the Pink Indigo. Jekyll informs me that mauve is French for mallow. Of course many mallows are not pink, so mauve as a color name is flawed from the get-go. Hence, her point that naming plant colors is futile. Especially since soil and nutrients can have an effect on leaf and blossom hue.
So the color of the Indigo eludes description… not pink, not lavender, the closest I can come is strawberry ice cream that has melted.
The best news to report is that the supposedly fussy fuschia is literally suffocated with buds!



Effusive Fuschia
















Oh, and the lightning bugs are back in full force