Garden Bloggers Bloom Day June 2010

The 'Blue River II' Hibiscus was the star of my first blog post on June 7, 2006. This year the ground warmed up slowly so there were no hibiscus flowers on June 7, 2010, but my Movealong plant came through for GBBD.
Four years ago I posted about two white 'Acoma' crepe myrtles that had been planted to soften a fence after 5 years of stressful living on a hot deck in terracotta containers. The left one looked like this in June 2006
And the right one looked so pitiful in 2006 that I wasn't sure it could ever turn from a scraggly shrub into a treeBut now they stand tall and in full bloom - so lovely that the recently murdered pink crepe on the other side of the fence barely impacts my garden
Back in 2006 I tried in vain to snap a photos of the hummingbirds on salvias - now the 'Provence' lavender brings them closer to the window
It's been a hot, buggy May & June, with enough rain for green grass and swarms of mosquitoes. Bird poop caterpillars (larvae of a Giant Swallowtail) reappeared on the Meyer's lemon - this one is full grown but there are new eggs for the next generation.
Does anyone know how to ID swallowtail butterflies? Is this adult Swallowtail on the Purple coneflowers the right kind to have laid the eggs on the lemon tree?
Still-blooming Burgundy oxalis and just-starting Blue Plumbago cuddle up with a tropical milkweed seedling that blew in from last year's plant. It's a little too close to the sidewalk but I'll let it stay here just in case Monarch butterflies show up.The cannas show buds just as daylily season winds down -
Flowers open daily on some the large daylilies but they'll run out of buds soon. Perovskia adds blue to Hemerocallis citrina, Hibiscus 'Blue River II' and 'Hot Lips' Salvia. I wonder if goldfinches can recognize the self-sown Sunflowers as the source of future treats. Can you see that bag of pecan caterpillars hanging to the lower left of the sunflower? How I wish for an archer to shoot an arrow through the webby stuff. Once the bag was opened wasps could have caterpillars as treats!
'Julia Child' made a few more butter-color roses under the white crepe myrtles. 'Belinda's Dream' made flowers, too- but they look way too ratty for photos.
In front a bluebonnet lurks in a patch of Blackfoot daisies, refusing to cry uncle to summer's heat.
In back an Orange Cosmos (maybe Cosmos sulphurea?) towers over a Texas Paintbrush in another patch of Blackfoot Daisies. Some of what grows in this garden came from a nursery or garden center. The plants that came from family and friends are called Passalong plants and those hauled from previous gardens could be called Movealong plants. But the cosmos falls in a different category. Last fall I saw enormous beds of these flowers in every stage of bud, bloom and gone-to-seed, growing outside of our favorite Korean Restaurant. A few seeds just happened to fall into my pocket and then I just happened to save them and just happened to plant them a few months ago. Can I call it a Snitchalong plant?

For the round-up of Garden Blogs see head Blogger-wrangler Carol at May Dreams Gardens.
To see the botanical name of every single thing I can find in bloom check the list at Annie's Addendum.

An Autumn Critter Post

Yesterday the sun shone on the soil yard at The Natural Gardener, and the 87°F/30.5ºC air was ripe with the scent of manure as we filled bags of compost and rose soil. This morning the wind gusted merrily, knocking over potted plants and the thermometer read 53°F/11.6ºC - much more like fall.


Some of the small creatures around our garden tend to disappear once cool weather arrives and my chances for better photos of them are disappearing, too. So these pictures are not art but witness - a reminder to me of some creatures who shared our space in 2008.


Our first Meyer's Lemon tree did well in a container and back in 2006 I debated planting it in the ground but worried about hardiness. Christopher (then in Hawaii but now Outside Clyde in North Carolina) encouraged me to quit dithering and buy a second tree. After I took his advice and planted a second lemon near the house wall in 2007, the tree survived winter, has made a handful of lemons and is now about 5-feet tall.


Lately some of the leaves looked chomped but I didn't know what was eating them. Then a couple of days ago I saw what to the unassisted eye almost looked like a bird dropping on a leaf - perhaps 3/4 inch in length.

But do bird droppings turn their heads when a flash goes off?


This seems to be the caterpillar of a Giant Swallowtail Butterfly - found fairly easily by searching for Bird Poop + caterpillars. A few eaten leaves won't matter on this larger tree so I'll leave it alone and hope for butterflies. The cat even looked a little bigger this morning. If a bird poop caterpillar appears on the other Meyer's Lemon, which still grows in a container and comes inside the house for winter, it will be relocated to the in-ground plant! I want that potted Meyer's Lemon to hold onto its leaves and give me flowers and fruit, but wish the tropical milkweed looked less pristine. I enjoy the flowers but the reason I grow two large plants of this Asclepias is so they can be eaten by Monarch butterfly larvae. This fall I've only seen two Monarchs and not a single caterpillar. I fell like a hostess who sent out invitations for dinner and had no one show up.



How long will the geckos stick around? They're always high up on the veranda walls, catching insects that swarm to the porch lights. None seem to be native - guess this one is a
Mediterranean gecko Hemidactylus turcicus

I've also read that another introduced gecko is found around Austin, so wonder if this pink one on the brick could be a House gecko, Hemidactylus frenatus. Doesn't it look a little like a newly hatched bird before it fledges?There are some interesting other species described here: GeckoWeb Profiles.


Another non-native critter appears on the sidewalk outside the back door when we get rain - small snails. I rarely see snails that look like the ones in cartoons - with a round high-top shell.
Ours are conical brown snails - predators of the round top types. They're used as a natural control in citrus groves. Decollate Snails

Earlier in summer my son noticed an odd insect - it looked as if parts of other insects like a moth, grasshopper and a praying mantis had been glued together. Because one of its legs was missing it was easy to gently place it on the windowsill for a photo before we released it back into one of the big containers where we'd found it. A search found more about our Mantidfly

The large critters are getting bolder! Last year I spent hours trying to sneak up on the squirrels and would have been happy to have a photo like this.

This year I took the first photo, then kept moving closer, and the squirrel held its ground for a close-up. I didn't have any trouble sneaking up on this last creature - because only the name is animal. My friend Ellen gave me a start of a toadlily in early spring and although the leaves show the stress of the hot, dry summer, the flowers still opened. They're about the size of a quarter and don't look impressive at a distance but sure are fascinating when you move in really close.