Bloom Day

Cosmos

Iceberg Rose

Rainbow Knockout

Verbena

Pink Indigo

Red Knockout

Pavonia, under double siege from the dreaded bindweed and powdery mildew

White Plumbago

Blue Daze Evolvulus, which wintered over. And oddly, the color of its foliage, previously a gray green, has now turned yellow-green. I've fed it but still it looks chlorotic. But it's growing and seems lively.

Confederate Jasmine

Shrimp Plant

Common Sunflower, the kind that grows in ditches

Finally, the fuschia plant which I thought I would surely kill, is blooming like crazy. It wants to be watered EVERY day or it wilts.

The pink caps peel back to reveal a crumple of gorgeous purple.
If Oscar de la Renta were to design a line of polyester ballgowns for K-Mart, they would look like this flower.

And you thought scent strips were bad...

Grace and Lilacs

Grace sent me a picture of her most recent oil painting, a self-portrait with lilacs, though I think she just wanted to torture me with news that the lilacs are out everywhere in Providence. This is a total fragrance sensation I've never managed to catch on my trips to Little Rhody. Meanwhile on the Smellorama front, the Washington Post reported:

NTT Communications announced it's running a ten-day trial starting April 10 of its new Mobile Fragrance Communication service (Kaori Tshshi Mobile), the mobile version of a service, which in Japan is already used in homes and movie theaters. A downloaded fragrance signal is sent from your cell phone to a base station that will emit the scent.

The story goes on to mention something called a "fragrance playlist", or what we normally refer to as "migraine trigger." Maybe the day of online scratch'n'sniff is closer than we think. File that under Be Careful What You Wish For, a folder already tediously overstuffed.

Tomato Porn

The Dream

The Reality

I don't do vegetables. In the coming apocalypse, I'm screwed; forced to reckon with the many poisonous noncomestibles I've sunk into the ground. My neighbor forced upon me a tray of tomato seedlings that another neighbor, the fabulously vital 91-year old Bertha, had in turn, forced upon her. Apparently these poor seedlings have been making their way around Austin like a couch-surfing bass player with B.O.
I decided to put them out of their misery by planting them myself; a sure death penalty. I put them in this huge plastic bucket my sister gave me, with some decent soil, to at least give them a fighting chance.
But now they're on their own.

Hail Mary

We just had an insane hailstorm. I was gathering up some marble size chunks on the deck for a photo op when all of sudden bricks started landing on the roof. The noise set off car alarms. This is our second hailstorm in two weeks; though the first was pea-sized and did no damage.

I went out and took pictures and my neighbor was snapping some with his cellphone. His truck got hit. He kindly brought over a ziplock bag full of evidence in case I need it. I'm not sure what to do. Anyone had experience with this? Should I have roofer come and inspect?
I watched in horror as a meteorite smashed down on one of my potted petunias and decapitated it. The cosmos appear also to be pretty much obliterated. My car thankfully was in the garage.

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

Speed racers, sure things, and glacial movement

It’s always fun to look at before/afters to see what’s working. Some plants just overperform despite my inept care, some things are no brainers like cosmos seed, and then other well-laid plans inch along at their own pace driving me mad with impatience.




New fence with crossvine newly planted, August 2007





Crossvine filling in, April 2008





Deck border where St. Augustine was growing, ripped up and turned into rose bed. October 2007





Deck border with Rainbow knockout roses, cosmos, verbena, and not yet blooming sunflowers, April 2008





Front before new bed was dug and edged in fall 2007. You can see the chinch bug-related grass decline. Hasta la vista, @#@!!% St. Augustine!





April 2008. This is going to take awhile before things fill in.

Envy is the most persistent weed in my garden.

An Iceberg boutonniere

Rachel came by last Sunday just as I was finishing a day of labor in the garden. She had come from a friend's house, with a gift of Moroccan mint. The mint was smuggled into the country from Morocco some years ago and they have been propagating and sharing this mint with friends ever since. It's very pungent.
I looked at the pictures on Rachel's camera of the mint smugglers' garden and went into an immediate spiral of envy, stunned by the amount of physical labor, clever design, and overarching vision.
Why do I do this? I remind myself that the style of my garden is mostly informed by my stated desire to keep this plot homespun and quiet in the mode of the house's 1941 vintage. But how much of the plan for my garden is based more on the the limitations of my age/energy, budget, etc.? Is it just a coincidence that green is the color of envy?
Let's move on. This weekend's activities:
planted white verbena in the pink bed
potted purple mini petunias in the muñequita
transplanted lambs ears, dayflower, agapanthus,and oxalis
planted the white oleander propagated from rustled cutting on Arroyo Seco

Finally, in a giant gaping space that has long baffled me in the front window bed, I planted what might be my new favorite plant: Indigofera kirilowii or Pink Indigo. From a casual glance it could be hypericum, the same pinnate leaf pattern, color, and surface touch. But more upright and shrubby in growth. It's got a spreading clump growth habit and reportedly blooms from spring to frost with its sprays of pink blooms. Nursery guy said that while it does sucker, it's easy to control. It's really sweet and old-fashioned. It makes me miss the altheas I had growing in my two previous yards. But I don't have enough room for one now.




Indigofera kirilowii