wild dagga
There is no shortage of beautiful volunteer sunflowers all over my garden, for the most part I let them grow where they sprout, at varying sizes.
A yearly favorite, 12 foot sunflower loom overhead.
Leonotis (Wild Dagga)
Bulbine frutescens – they open and close with the daylight.
Fuchsia boliviana — Red Bolivian Fuchsia. Added bonus they produce a tasty fruit similar to a grape.
Rose amongst a tree lupin. Perfect!
Hibiscus tree is starting to flower again. Excellent!
Rhodochiton atrosanguineum, so strange.
Abutilon pictum Thompsonii (Varigated Flowering Maple)
White Guara flowers all August
Alcea ‘Peaches and Dreams. This is it’s second year and it’s really gone overboard. Fighting for the tallest thing in my garden, this hollyhock is neck and neck with my jerusalem artichoke. 12+ feet and counting. Non stop blooms, like a slow motion firework.
Simply Amazing…
The very first cyclamen flower of the season. Just when you start to miss them again, they appear.
Chilean Glory Vine – Eccremocarpus scaber
Thalictrum delavayi ‘Hewitt’s Double’ – a late flowering minature thalictrum!
Anigozanthos flavidus (Kangaroo Paw)
Impatiens Congo Cockatoo
Orange Daylily, perhaps Hemerocallis ‘Kwanso’. The last bloom on the stalk…
Echeveria glauca
One of many different shades of gladiolus
I hope this satisfies your need for plant eye candy.. Months of work put into a 35 second photo spread. Calms the mind, feeds the soul.
So a couple weeks back we had a pretty intense freeze, snow out of nowhere and record breaking lows. I think we were seeing -10 weather which in contrast with last winter is pretty unbelievable. I suppose I was being optimistic when I decided my house could hold no more and I left my aeoniums and a number of other succulents to risk their life in my unheated greenhouse. Mr weather called my bluff and ZAP, there goes a summer of propagating echeverias and aeoniums. I suppose having never had the audacity to see what these succulents could really withstand, I had to see it for my own eyes. Low and behold, my aeoniums were rock solid in the midst of the storm, a week later when everything thawed out, they were mere bags of water, slumped and melting.
When I made the call to store them in that questionably safe environment I left them on the dry side since late september, yet this was not enough.
Jades that I couldn’t find homes for, poor little guys didn’t even see it coming.
A little snow with your aeonium?
A well rooted aeonium from a friend, was looking great last week…. hum..
A silly mistake on this one, my mother plant, grown in the spring, totally frozen solid.
(Hopefully it’s roots are still alive and it sends up a baby when things melt…
On the bright side?
Both of my agaves, contrary to the cold and being frozen solid, seem to have survived. As well as many of the thicker leaved echeverias/succulents. The thinner the leaf the more damaged they appeared to be.
Drastic times call for drastic measures.
After the freeze had finished having it’s way with my garden ( damn you winter, you win this round) I naturally got my head out of rear and brought in some of the succulents that still showed signs of life. From there I put them on a heating pad, took off the death and dusted them with fungicide. So far nothing much has changed, but one can hope.
The rule of the day, don’t take chances with tender plants during cold winters, DUH! There’s always room for a couple more, somewhere, right? At the very least, give them away, instead of leaving them for the firing squad.
One last Sad tale from the frost.
My leonotis, which is new to my collection as of mid august, was also willingly left to chance fate to see if it could handle our winter. I Don’t think mr leonotis appreciated the weather all too much, as it got hit pretty bad by the cold. A litle tug still shows some hope via the roots but only time will tell.
Photo taken nov 20th
Photo taken sept 09 *sigh*
