Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for September 2017

GARDEN BLOGGERS BLOOM DAY for SEPTEMBER 2017

By AnnieinAustin for her Transplantable Rose Blog http://annieinaustin.blogspot.com/

Do you see what I see? That patch of red School House lilies means that the hours of daylight are reduced in number and the chance of a 100F day is almost zero.

Whether you call them School House Lilies, Oxblood Lilies or Rhodophiala bifida, they’re beautiful and welcome.

Only one Hurricane Lily has popped up so far – they’re planted in 6 or 7 places in my garden but they don’t bloom every year. [AKA Red Spider lilies/ Lycoris radiata.

The School House lilies and Hurricane Lilies bloom only once in late summer or early fall but other plants have kept color in the garden for months:

Alyssum, prostrate rosemary and basil keep bees happy with small white flowers in the herb troughs.

Two really deep freezes in an otherwise warm winter knocked off many container plants. Those empty pots were depressing! When guests were expected in March I picked up a few big-box store begonias as temporary replacements for frozen Calibrachoas. To  my surprise they have thrived and bloomed all summer. 

 

With hummingbirds in mind, we moved one of the obelisks from the shady back bed to the sunny triangle and planted Cypress vine at the base, where Salvia coccinea in coral and red and Salvia greggii in lavender and white already grew. Adding a punch or orange is some self-seeded milkweed.

 

A mystery plant showed up on the edge of the patio in spring – probably the seed was dropped by a bird. I watched it grow all summer, topping out at 7 feet, then forming seedheads.

At one point I thought it was Frostweed, but the tiny, fringed, flowers have no collar of petals like Frostweed. A friend made a tentative ID of Eupatorium odoratum. There is a definite pleasant fragrance so that sounds right to me. Butterflies and bees love it!

Staying low and gently spreading on the edge of the patio is Cobweb Spiderwort, once kept in a container. Last year I flipped a few broken-off stems onto the gravel and put small rocks over the ends. Tradescantia sillamontana loved the gravel, rooted and grew beautifully. When the cold weather killed most of the original plant, only the tips of this clump were damaged and it repaired itself speedily.

You won’t see much of a show today from the Blue Butterfly flower (AKA Rotheca myricoides, formerly Clerodondrum ugandense). A few bleached blooms remain on the plant in the triangle bed and the other big plant has only buds.

The daisy-shape in this little scene used to come from native perennial Blackfoot Daisies but they were barely annual here, not perennial. This year I put in the very similar looking Zinnia angustifolia. Only a few cosmos sprouted this year and I am glad to have them.

Happy Garden Bloggers Bloom Day to all of you and to Carol at May Dreams, ringmaster of this monthly floral circus. http://www.maydreamsgardens.com/2017/09/garden-bloggers-bloom-day-september-2017.html

By AnnieinAustin for her Transplantable Rose Blog http://annieinaustin.blogspot.com/

Blue Clerodendons & Pecans for November GBBD

         This post was written by Annie in Austin for her Transplantable Rose blog.

Our Austin gardens have flirted with Jack Frost a few times, in the hours just before dawn on clear dark nights, but Mr. Frost has not yet done the deed. The Forsythia Sage/Salvia madrensis still spreads her blossoms unmolested in the big front bed.

One Blue Butterfly Clerodendron cavorted with a Mutabilis rose a few weeks ago but their romance faded as the sun's angle changed and the shade from our two pecan trees deepened.

The rose stopped blooming and the Blue Butterflies float alone now. After the leaves fall the strong winter sun may tempt the rose to bloom again, but the clerodendron plant will die down once the temperatures drop below 30°F.

The pecan trees dominate the back garden year round, casting light shade when leafless, so we can grow a spring vegetable garden, but in late fall their shade is at its heaviest, casting a gothic gloom over the south end of the yard.

I first sang to the trees in public in March 2007 when the demise of an Arizona Ash called for a music video. That was nearly six years ago! The pecans are even more important in our little garden world so they should have a turn, too. Last weekend my husband Philo and I turned my "For A Tree That Keeps On Giving, Plant Pecan!" song into a music video, intended to amuse anyone who has ever lived with a very large, very messy tree:

I hope you'll soon be singing along ..."for a Tree that keeps on giving "Plant Pecan!"
A collection of our garden songs and videos are at our Roots in Austin YouTube station


Since so many of the plants in bloom right now are the same flowers that have been in bloom for months, they'll go in a Garden Bloggers Bloom Day List (with more photos and my best shot at the botanical names) over on my companion blog Annie's Addendum.  That way the rest of this page can be filled with photos of the Blue Butterflies still whirling while old Jack F. lurks in the shadows with his ice-crystal knife.


I'm not sure what name will on the tag if you buy this plant in a nursery... it could say Blue Butterfly Clerodendron or Blue Cat Whiskers, Clerodendrum ugandense, Clerodendrum myricoides 'Ugandense' or perhaps Rotheca myricoides 'Ugandense'. The zone 9 plant is marginally hardy here in Austin - a couple of my plants have lived through winters with temperatures around 18°F, but even with heavy mulching they died back hard and were slow to recover the next spring. I've tried to hedge my bets by keeping at least one plant in a container in the garage over winter.

Here's the plant that was in the garage last year, now on the patio





The Blue Butterfly plant is so lovely that I wanted more! I've had some luck getting cuttings to root in potting soil lightened by the addition of perlite. (Don't be shocked when the not-lovely scent of the cut or crushed foliage reaches your nose... it stinks!) Some of the cuttings failed but a few plants made it. They were very slow to get going, but two were finally robust enough to go to friends this spring. A third was planted here near the Meyer's lemon on the back housewall. This bed is my magic spot, with a faucet nearby, the area bathed in morning sun but protected from hot west sun and north winds, the soil regularly composted and the plants tenderly mulched. No wonder the Clerodendron is More than Happy!





Since the winter months of January and February 2012 were relatively mild, the original passalong plant from my friend Ellen had an early start in the triangle bed. Now it's more than 5-feet tall and still blooming, with wide spread branches. I took this photo this afternoon and decided to make it into a poster.






Happy Garden Blogger's Bloom Day from Annie & Philo in Austin! Please visit Carol at May Dreams Gardens to see her roundup of garden bloom posts from all over the world.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day January 2012

Repeated freezes have edited the garden, removing the warm-weather annuals and sending perennials into dormancy. But the temperatures haven't dipped below 25°F (that sometimes magic number) while late fall rains fell softly, letting enough water sink down to soften the ground so we can dig in the earth once more.

That relatively mild weather has allowed the loquats to bloom for two months and has given the Camellia sasanqua 'Shishi Gashira' its longest flowering season ever-
Lack of deep freezes has encouraged flowers for over a month to pop out along the arching branches of the Loropetalum, sometimes called Chinese Witch Hazel

The shrimp plants remain unblackened


Strong winter sun can make even a cool day pleasant enough for coffee on the patio, the cups sharing table space with yellow snapdragons and blue pansies.
A few feet away the Four-nerve daisies continue flowering

and near the back door the burgundy-leaved oxalis feels secure enough to flower.
It's very odd to see a bluebonnet in January! My guess is that seedlings sprouted too late to bloom last spring and then the reseeding orange cosmos plants swiftly made a canopy over them. After the first freeze took out the cosmos, the bluebonnets were given a turn in the sun.
The winter sun is just as strong in the front garden but up there cold winds usually sweep and scour, sending most plants into dormancy. It's unusual to have January blooms from the purple lantana plants and even more unusual to see flowers on the creeping phlox.
Scorching afternoon sun combined with harsh winds were too much for the three previous shrubs I tried in the front window bed, but this grape holly, probably Mahonia bealei, is not only alive but in bloom.
Purple oxalis in flower in the hypertufa near the front door wasn't too surprising, but why did a flowering stem of fragrant stock suddenly pop up? I'd set out a few stock plants last spring but the heat withered the tops and there was no sign of them by late summer. Did the roots live through the Summer of Hell and send up shoots? Or did seeds drop, sprout & bloom?
Soon after we moved here in 2004 I planted a small, white-flowering groundcover from the spiderwort family under a live oak. Every leaf disappeared during the heat and drought & I wondered whether it was dead or dormant. Rains in December coaxed new growth from some roots that survived, and January flowers followed
Paperwhite daffodils and Narcissus 'Grand Primo' grow side-by-side near the steps to the veranda. The paperwhites are almost at the end of their bloom cycle for 2012 - and a rather wimpy display it was, too! The paperwhites in back didn't make a single flower.
But even though the 'Grand Primo' daffodils had their buds frozen off last winter and were baked & broiled all summer, they're now showing us why they come so highly recommended by experts like Scott Ogden and the people at Central Texas Gardener.
One last little bloom is sweet rather than showy, and the shrub is barely larger than when I first planted it. When my mother gave me this 'Champagne' mini-rose neither she nor I knew it would be the last birthday gift she would ever give me. Any time it blooms makes it a special Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for me!

For a complete list with some pretty good guesses at the botanical names go to my companion blog, Annie's Addendum.
To see a round-up of what's in bloom at garden blogs from many places go to May Dreams Gardens.


This post was written by Annie in Austin for her Transplantable Rose Blog.

November Bloom Day - Expected and Unexpected

Written by Annie in Austin for her Transplantable Rose blog

There's a complete list of blooms for November 15th (along with more photos) over at my Annie's Addendum blog. Please take a look! I did my best with the botanical names but I'm not a botanist - let me know if you think something is wrong.

Spot watering/hand watering has kept quite a few things alive in spite of drought and heat. The almost-3 inches of rain that fell on October 9 helped the shrubs and the cooler weather has helped everything - including the gardeners.

A few weeks ago the Abelias began blooming and suddenly Monarch butterflies appeared. Now the Monarchs have moved on and the A-Bee-Lias bloom for another kind of winged insect

Their flowers are lovely whenever they appear but that bees will love them is expected.

Another lovely thing is the Loquat tree, mostly recovered from bad freeze damage last winter, and just beginning to open its fragrant flowers.
That scent now says Thanksgiving to me, so it's not unexpected in November but after the hailstorms, flood, deep cold, extreme heat and unprecedented drought it's experienced in the last couple of years, I'm grateful that the scent of the loquat still floats on the air.

What is unexpected is to see bluebonnets with buds in November. Apparently some seeds had sprouted in late winter or early spring but were immediately overshadowed by the nearby seedlings of Cosmos. The bluebonnets lurked underneath the jungle of tall orange cosmos leaves and stems, only revealing themselves when that generation of cosmos died off so a new crop could start. My neighborhood has only had a light frost so far - it will be interesting to see whether this flower will be able to bloom blue or if it will freeze.
The usual milkweed grown in Illinois was the orange perennial Asclepias tuberosa. I've tried that here with no luck. So a few years ago I planted the tropical milkweed, Asclepias curassavica , and now it is a reseeding annual in my garden. Seeds often sprout in inconvenient places so some are pulled up, but I always let a handful grow on to bloom with colorful yellow petals & red-orange sepals. This month there are many flowers on four plants but there seems to be something unusual about the sepals. Although I can't remember them being anything but solid red-orange in previous years, this year all four plants display white blotches on some of the sepals.

Darned if I know why... they seem to be opening solid first and then the white streak shows up. Has anyone else seen these white marks on tropical milkweed? Does anyone know why it happens?
After you've checked out the list on the Addendum you can find more than 125 gardens linked to May Dreams Carol for November Garden Bloggers Bloom Day.

Bloom Day & Genealogy

WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE??
Maybe you recognized that line as a riff on the recent family history series "Who Do You Think You Are?" It was fun to see Twitter-friend Megan Smolenyak on the show, helping celebrities find out answers to mysteries of their family's past. My time and brain cells have been devoted more to genealogy than to gardening lately - and until last night's blessed 2-inches of rain fell, the gardening mostly consisted of watering.
Somehow old records suddenly appeared, solving some puzzles while sprinkling new question marks all over the charts.

Some of the findings are fun: A previously unknown great-grand-aunt appeared out of thin air on the Zoelle branch! Researching this name has produced such variations as Zolle, Zolla, Zoller, Zello, Seller & Colley.

Some of the findings are disturbing: so many death certificates had forms of tuberculosis as the cause of death that I started reading about its effects on Chicago in the late 1800's-early 1900's. Now I'm feeling emotionally overwhelmed with sympathy for my poor immigrant ancestors, many of them born before TB was recognized as infectious rather than an inherited tendency. Logic and reason remind me this happened so long ago that they'd all be dead by now... even without consumption to carry them off...how is it possible to mourn for and with people you never knew?


Enough of Family Trees for now! It's Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, begun by May Dreams Carol. Even in that relationship genealogy comes into play... I first found Carol in a web search- not through her garden blog, but at her Grandmother's Diary.



In other months my GBBD posts may feature plants that will only grow where winters are comparatively mild - Texas mountain laurel, Carolina jessamine, White ginger or bluebonnets.But sometimes a vignette like this one looks quite similar to some place 1200 miles away and a dozen years ago.


This little reblooming daylily, a recross of 'Stella d'Oro' called 'Vi's Apricot', used to flower in Illinois -
But it bloomed in July rather than May, and never at the feet of a 'Meyer's Improved' lemon tree!
Tomato blossoms are beautiful no matter where or when they bloom.

Calibrachoa and green beans are pretty universal, aren't they?

The so-called Ditch Lily (Hemerocallis fulva) really did grow in roadside drainage ditches in Illinois. It was so common that I didn't bother to bring a piece with me to Texas. It's been nearly 11 years since I saw one blooming but thanks to Good and Evil Lori this Wisconsin-born orange daylily opened flowers today.
And thanks to the inspiration of MSS of Zanthan Gardens, the daylilies opened with a cloud of 'Royal Wedding' sweet peas above them

In Illinois the yellow rose would have been 'Graham Thomas' instead of 'Julia Child', the pine was a dwarf Mugho Pine instead of an Italian Stone Pine and the pale purple bells of Mexican Oregano would never survive winter, but the vine in the background would be the same -a Clematis 'Ramona' eventually shows up in all my gardens, no matter where we live.

So does the light yellow daylily, Hemerocallis 'Happy Returns' - here with other old favorites blue larkspur, yarrow Achillea 'Moonshine', yellow snapdragons and Salvia farinacea. The main difference in this scene versus one in Illinois is that the rocks are free in Texas!

If I see a beloved plant from the past on the distressed/sale table there's a good chance I'll try to grow it here. This Oakleaf Hydrangea followed me home from Countryside Nursery last winter



But before anyone calls the Reality Police and tells them to stage an intervention, here is proof that I really do know where I am. This is Austin, Texas, where Salvia 'Black & Blue' grows like a weed

Where exotic fruits like Pineapple Guava are used as garden shrubs


And tender fruit trees like 'Wonderful' Pomegranate live through the winter and bloom

Where 'Celeste' figs grow uncovered and unprotected as landscape elements

Where a fragrant double yellow Oleander from Plant Delights
Combines with fragrant white Confederate jasmine

And a fragrant white 'Little Gem' magnolia to scent the air and make one feel like a superannuated Scarlet O'Hara

Austin is a place where odd lilies like Eucomis copy pineapples
A Justicia pretends to be a Shrimp

And Cuphea llaevea mimics a Bat's face

Where Pam's passalong Aloe can survive hail and cold in the shelter of a holly tree to bloom in the shade

Where wildflowers like Texas Paintbrush can be picked up at local nurseries to grow as container plants on the patio (last year's plants even seeded in the front lawn!)
And where the tender Rosa Mutabilis that I once sighed over in out-of-zone gardening books elbows out every other plant in the front border
Here's one more look at the 'Royal Wedding' Sweet peas, caught a few days ago as the sun came through their petals in early morning light. The seeds came from the Natural Gardener - a little gift when we bought our second rainbarrel last winter.


Happy Blooming Day! Celebrate by checking out the gardens linked to the GBBD post at May Dreams Gardens. Soon I'll get a list together of everything in bloom with botanical names at Annie's Addendum.

(The GBBD List is now up)