Flowers, Fruit, and Pack-Along Plants

This post "Flowers, Fruit and Pack-Along Plants" was written by Annie in Austin for the Transplantable Rose.



Breaking news from Chicagoland: Do you remember seeing a peach tree in full bloom at my sister's house? It sprouted 4 years ago when my my nephew Jake and his parents planted a Harry & David peach pit. Jake is proud to announce there are real peaches hanging from those branches!
Memorial Day weekend is sometimes called the Gateway to Summer, but we in Austin passed through that gate quite a while ago. Yesterday was another hot day, reaching 99 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon, the kind of day where the birds hide and only the bugs look busy and you hope for any little movement of the air. Then with a whoosh, the wind swept in yesterday evening, tossing the trees and plunging us into the low seventies overnight, rebounding to the nineties by lunchtime.
I was sure the 'Cupani' Sweet peas would fade once the heat hit, practically writing their obituary in the May 15th Bloom Day post, but they fooled me - still hanging their rose and blue-violet flowers on the obelisk near the 'Black Knight' butterfly bush, the Tropical orange & yellow milkweed, Salvia farinacea and yellow lantana.
The Pink Entrance Garden never had its photo taken for Bloom Day - there doesn't seem to be any time of day when photos taken there are free of shadows or glare or there isn't something ugly intruding on the view. This one taken looking NW toward the street isn't too bad, once I carefully cropped the trash cans from the photo!


Facing back in the direction of the garden gate you can see that one plant of 'Purple Stars' Coneflowers have finally opened, rioting with pink gaura, heirloom petunias, some lingering larkspur, the first balloon flowers and at lower right, a fully loaded pink chrysanthemum. This spring bloom cycle of chrysanthemums seems normal to me now, but I was surprised back in 2000 to find that a plant that was a sure sign of fall in the north was both a spring and fall plant in Texas.
The 'Little Gem' magnolia is never covered in flowers, but it opens them one or two at a time, off and on once May arrives, enough so there is a light fragrance whenever I'm within 10 feet of the small tree. I caught this flower after it opened, but before pollination led to the stamens browning and dropping into the cup of the flower.
In the previous post I talked about Austin Passalong Plants - but what can we call those toted-from-one garden to another plants that we originally bought from a nursery? I think they must be Pack-Along Plants. The daylily below is 'Prairie Blue Eyes', one of the daylilies that I brought from my Illinois garden in 1999. It barely survived life on the deck at the other Austin house, dwindling down to one leaf by the time we moved to this house in July 2004. After we made the Hummingbird garden that winter I planted the tiny thing, and was pleased to see it thrive.... it has five budded stalks this year! But no matter how beautiful the flowers are, the thing that looks and smells like summer for many of us are tomatoes. We have enough room to make a 10X10-foot tomato patch at this house, but could have used a few of VDBD's Grow-Boxes at our previous house so we could have grown tomatoes on the deck instead of keeping them enclosed in a wire structure. Meems has been taunting us for weeks with the tomatoes she's harvesting from her Florida garden! Vertie in Hyde Park had lots of green tomatoes last, but was a little too busy being part of a Central Texas Gardener taping to give us the current status.

A few days ago Bonnie at Kiss of Sun showed us her vegetable garden and mentioned that the 'Brandywine' tomato wasn't doing much. We planted one of these potato-leaved heirlooms, too - and it's finally starting to make flowers.
That's the only variety without at least a few green fruits-in-progress. Philo made a new structure for the tomatoes this year, an interlocking wooden grid with the plants lightly looped up just enough to keep them off the ground. In the North many tomato growers prune excess leafage and tie the plants to stakes so they get more sun. Down here I've seen advice to use foliar feed and adequate water in order to produce lots of leaves, in order to give protection from excess sun to the developing fruit. That's what we're trying this year.


Last year's flooding was not good for tomatoes, and we still wonder whether traces of Juglone from too many pecan leaves in the garden had a negative effect. Since last fall we've added lots of cotton bur compost and also used products like John Dromgoole's Terra-Tonic for soil. It's hard to know whether what happens in a vegetable garden is actually a result of anything we've done or if it's a response to things beyond our control, like weather, but the plants do look better than in either 2006 or 2007.
Leave the fruit on the plant one minute past the pale orange stage and you can kiss it goodbye- some bird or critter will get it. The tomatoes take just a few days inside to be ready to eat. We've already eaten a dozen of the small, grape-shaped 'Juliet' tomatoes and those slightly larger 'Viva Italia' plums will soon be red. Large slicing tomatoes for sandwiches may still be a dream, but Pico de Gallo can be a reality!


This post "Flowers, Fruit and Pack-Along Plants" was written by Annie in Austin for the Transplantable Rose.

Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)

This post, "Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

A year ago I sang farewell to an Arizona Ash tree on YouTube ~ today's song is a musical tribute to the beautiful, deer-resistant flowers in the genus Salvia.

Welcome to Annie's virtual piano bar ~ find a cozy table and spend two minutes in Austin, the Live-Music Capital of the World. We tried to make it sound live by using a simple mic connected to the built-in recorder on a laptop.

Philo and I had five years to learn about gardening with deer at our last Austin house. I wrote "Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)" while we still lived there - it's part of an unfinished musical play called Roots in Austin. This plea came straight from the heart!

Our present garden doesn't seem to need deer-resistant plants so our Salvias don't have to work for us - they can just be beautiful.

This post, "Salvia, Salvia, Save Me (from the deer)", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Autumn Wears Her Red Dress

We're still enjoying temperatures in the nineties each day, but the plants show signs that it is fall. One proof - the hummingbird garden has gone completely Red.
Tall white hardy Hibiscus, Shasta daisies and blue salvias dominate this area from May to September. I saw a few Texas Star Hibiscus flowers in summer along with the off-and-on red of the short-lived Hummingbird sage - probably Salvia coccinea. It blooms, sets seed, the original plant dies, and another pops up nearby.
The largest red-bloomer hasn't done much since last fall, but look what's happened to the Pineapple sage, Salvia elegans in the last few days:

Its flowers appear when the days and nights are close in length. This can happen in a mild spring when the plant is not frozen back, but is more usual in fall. Most salvias are useful in deer-resistent gardens, but not our deliciously-scented Pineapple Sage! We kept it in deck containers at our previous house.




The Chili pequin [Capsicum annuum, according to the Wildflower Center] still has lots of tiny peppers. Philo hasn't tried it yet, but one of the Divas told me her husband Warren pickles large quantities of the fiery little fruit each year.



Autumn wears a purple hat with her red dress in the photo above. 'Bat-faced' Cuphea llaevea has produced red/purple flowers since early summer.

A few purple berries remain uneaten by mockingbirds on the Callicarpa americana/Beautyberry below.


My attempts to make vines bloom in a crepe myrtle has had mixed results - no new Passionflowers to photograph, and the Hyacinth bean/Dolichos lab-lab is all pods now, dangling ten feet up in the tree.
One of the surest signs of autumn in my garden is the flowering of Barleria cristata, the Philippine Violet. Some sites say this is a native of India, not the Philippines, and not in the violet family, but belonging to Acanthus.The plant below started out as a 3-inch rooted cutting in March, and it's now about two-feet tall in partial shade. The flowering seems to be triggered by the shortening of the days as the Autumnal Equinox approaches.



Those of who garden in the Northern Hemisphere celebrated the autumnal equinox on September 23rd-- and now our blogs record and share what happens as fall arrives. It might mean cooler, shorter days, changing leaves and that slanting, autumn light.

In my mind the term autumnal equinox meant that the days and nights were of equal length, so it surprised me when Philo pointed out that here in Austin, our day & night actually became equal on the 27th, and our descent into winter didn't really begin until the 28th.

I'd already noticed the startling variation in the longest days of summer for the different places friends and family lived - just one of those things that color our individual relationship with our spot on the globe. Philo used Naval Observatory tables to chart a few US cities for me, arranged by latitude, North to South, so we can see how things change as you move toward the equator. He adjusted to Daylight time for summer and this data is for 2007.

This may be the point where you jump ship, but I enjoy mildly geeky statistics and bet some of you do, too:

The days and nights in Anchorage, Alaska reached equal length on September 25th. Seattle, Washington also had equal days and nights on September 25th.

San Francisco, California took another day to even up its days and nights as did
Chicago, Illinois - both had equal days and nights on the 26th.
Austin, Texas and Miami, Florida waited until September 27th.

Kona, Hawaii was a day later than the others, on the 28th.


That's pretty interesting, but this is the part that really gets me - day length variation:


In Anchorage [latitude N61º 13'] on the shortest day in winter, the sun rises at 10:14 AM and sets at 3:41 PM. On the longest day in summer, the sun rises at 4:20 in the morning, and stays up until 11:42 PM - so the difference in the shortest day and longest day is a whopping 13 hours and 55 minutes.


Seattle [latitude N47º 38'] sees sunrise on the shortest day of winter at 7:55 AM, with sunset at 4:20 in the afternoon; go to the opposite season and the sun rises at 5:11 in the morning, setting at 9:11 at night... what a nice long day for gardening, and the glow at twilight makes it seem even longer. Seattle has a difference of 7 hours 35 minutes between the longest and shortest days.

Chicago [latitude N41º 51'] has a 6 hour, 6 minute variation from longest to shortest days, with winter sunrise at 7:15 AM, winter sunset 4:23 PM, summer sunrise 5:16 AM, summer sunset 8:30 PM.


San Francisco [latitude N37º 46'] comes next, with a 5 hour, 14 minute variation from summer to winter; the sun rises at the winter solstice at 7:21 AM, sets at 4:54 PM. The sun rises on the longest day at 5:48 AM and sets at 8:35 PM that evening.

Day length in Austin [latitude N30º 17'] varies only 3 hours and 54 minutes from shortest day of winter to longest day of summer. Our winter sun rises at 7:23 in the morning, setting at 5:35 that night, not so bad for school buses. At the summer solstice, the sun rises at 6:29 AM, setting at 8:36.


Miami [latitude N25º 47'] daylength varies even less - only 3 hours and 13 minutes separate longest and shortest days. The sun comes up at 7:03 AM in winter, setting at 5:35 PM on the winter solstice. In summer the sun appears only a half-hour earlier, rising at 6:30 AM and setting at 8:15 PM.


If you're in the city of Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, [latitude N21º 19'] there isn't a lot of difference in winter and summer: only 2 hours and 36 minutes. This part of Hawaii has sunrise on the shortest day at 7: 04 AM, and the sun sets at 5:55 PM. The sun will rise only a quarter of an hour earlier on the longest day, at 6:50 AM, and the residents will get the extra 2+ hours at the end of their longest day - with sunset at 8:16 PM.


While these numbers were interesting in themselves, since we read blogs by people who garden in different places we might think about how day length affects humans and their gardens.


Back in Illinois the crows started cawing as the sun began to glow - waking us at 5 in the morning. Northern friends could rise early and fit in an hour on a vegetable plot before dressing for work. When we moved to Austin it was a surprise when it was still quite dark at 6 AM in midsummer, and we were often awake before the birds made a sound. [It was also a surprise to see Turkey vultures rather than crows!]


The people in the North get earlier frosts and shorter summers, but they also get used to having many more hours of daylight during the summer. Kona, Hawaii may miss out on the pleasant glow of long summer evenings, but those folks won't need headlights at 4 PM in December.

Do you think the variation in your shortest and longest daylength affects you?

Passion Playing

Since my passionvine does not look like the photos of Passiflora 'Incense' from other sites like Tom Spencer's, it was apparently mismarked when I bought it a few years ago. I've been scrolling through a bunch of sites and think it may be either 'Amethyst' or 'Lavender Lady'... apparently they look quite similar, but 'Amethyst' can set fruit if pollinated by another passionflower.

Did you know there's an entire Passiflora Forum at GardenWeb? That forum sent me off to other sites. The sites don't agree with one another, of course, and only some of the photos look like each other. Before I started forum-hopping I'd taken closeups to see if any readers knew the name, while playing with the camera to see how it photographed the blues and purples.


I may have gone a little overboard with this! All photos were taken in afternoon so they're a bit washed out. All were cropped and reformatted for size, but that's all - no brightening, contrast, color balance, or sharpening. I took the photo above while the flower was still attached to the vine.

Then I popped off the flower and poked the stem into the passionvine to show the bud, leaf and flower.

Hmmm, let's see how it looks over here in the shade with the Buddleja lindleyana...

To me the color of the petals looks purple, with guard filaments that look blue. Let's put it in sun next to a true blue flower - the Blue Butterfly Pea. That blue makes the passionflower tendrils look deep violet, I think.


Okay, let's go back in the shade - will it still look blue next to Salvia guaranitica?

Now for dark purple contrast - the 'Black Prince' buddleya davidia. Oh, dear, the flower has been handled and dropped so many times by now!

A final portrait in the shade with light blue Plumbago auriculata. I love the way these flowers look together... maybe some plumbago needs to grow near the passionvine.

Total immersion in purple passion works for me! I hope you enjoyed it too. Maybe I should just call this one 'Probably Lavender Lady'. Pam from Digging commented that she just bought an 'Incense' - I'll bet hers will match the label.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day for September

Do you remember July? Many of the plants seen on July's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day haven't forgotten it: A new stalk of Amarcrinum 'Fred Howard' suddenly shot up next to a pink cuphea full of bees. The pink gaura never stops, the balloon flowers keep opening as long as I pop off the old buds, and there are a few mini-roses, too.


The container plants like impatiens and this lantana-and evolvolus combo may not stop until Halloween. The blossoms continue on Oxalis, butterfly bush, orange cuphea and Batfaced cuphea, dianthus, Turkscap, Rock Rose/Pavonia, Salvia greggii and Zinnia linearis. One or two buds appear biweekly on the 'Little Gem' magnolias. The Russian sage plants all look ratty and the phlox does, too, but I'll count their few florets as blooms. When mealy bugs attacked the 'Black & Blue' salvia and the Salvia guaranitica I cut them down to ground level.



Do you remember August? September doesn't look much different here, still decorated with one open stalk of Hedychium coronarium/White Ginger, the delicate Cypress Vine, Coral Honeysuckle, Plumeria/Frangipani, Bengal Tiger canna, night-blooming jasmine and blue plumbago.




Looking out the back door I see the obelisk concealed beneath moon vines and blue pea vines. At right, nearer the fence, the Blue River II white hibiscus is balanced by the white 'Acoma' crepe myrtles at left. My neighbors on the left and at the back grow tall pink crepe myrtles which loom overhead. Something tall & yellow is missing - the native Sunflower is just a browned stalk now.




Once again the passionflowers have buds, with no new caterpillars in evidence. I hope they get the chance to open.




All the yellow trumpets turned white and fell from the Brugmansia/Angels Trumpet, leaving buds as promissory notes for next week. I feel a little guilty about this, since gardeners like Kate in Saskatchewan have already had to cover plants at night.

The most exciting September openers were a gift from MSS at Zanthan Gardens, the Oxblood lilies/Rhodophiala bifidia seen in the last post. I planted the bulbs in small clumps in six parts of the yard, and they've opened one after another [ perhaps in response to sun exposure?] then faded. This bouquet opened just in time.




Two large plants of Pineapple sage/Salvia elegans are barely budded, opening only one flower. I love the smell of the crushed leaves and have read they can be used in fruit salad, teas, and jelled desserts. Last winter knocked my plants back to the ground but in gentler years flowers also form in spring so they're here to greet the hummingbirds upon their return. I'm not sure if the salvia will open fully before our hummingbirds leave this fall.






The annual portulaca sulked during the rainy part of summer. It's a chunkier cousin to moss rose which never grew much, but I like that coral color.




This summer's odd weather also delayed the blooming of the tropical milkweed/Asclepias curassavica - I haven't seen any Monarch caterpillars as yet. Several generations of larvae grew on last year's plants and these flowers are ready if the Monarchs return.




Two of the three plants of Blue Skyflower/Duranta erecta finally deigned to bloom. The flowers on both are in the blue-purple range, but this one has white edges that reflect light in an interesting way - all I did to the photo was to resize it.



Oh - here's another new blossom. My friend Ellen, giver of the gorgeous grape-scented iris, also gave me a start of an unusual kind of Butterfly bush. We're pretty sure it's Buddleia lindleyana. Unlike butterfly bushes such as 'Black Prince'. this one is not upright but weeps, dangling long droopy flowers that don't start until late summer.




Okay, May Dreams Carol! Here's the final flower for September Bloom Day - I can't leave without posting this night photo with flash, celebrating the fragrant flowers on the Moon vine.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for July

Lady Bird always loved the wild flowers

She wanted us to love them, too.

Here in the city where her wildflowers grew,

We bid our Lady Bird adieu.

The flag flies at half-mast for Lady Bird Johnson in a new garden fitted within the footprint where the Arizona Ash used to stand. I planted wildflowers like Eupatorium greggii - Gregg's Mistflower, Anisicanthus wrightii, also called Hummingbird Bush, and a plain old calico-colored Lantana, adding Salvias guaranitica and 'Black & Blue', a 'Bengal Tiger' canna and Verbena bonariensis. They're growing near the birdbath in a mixture of clay, compost and the ground-up stump of the large Ash tree. These plants are just beginning to flower, bringing an occasional butterfly, bee, or hummingbird to see if it's worth stopping here.


Malvaviscus is another flower planted to please the hummingbirds. It grows in light shade near one of the two remaining Arizona Ash trees and is sometimes called wax mallow or Turk's cap.


More wildflowers - a pink selection of Gaura lindheimerii and Echinacea purpurea 'Purple Stars'.

These Balloonflowers - probably Platycodon grandiflora - were brought along as seedlings from Illinois; planted in fall of 2004, they're now looking settled in their second Texas home.

Buds and flowers keep appearing on this 'Champagne' mini-rose, which was a mid-winter gift from my mother and sisters.

The first Amarcrinum flowers of 2007 opened yesterday. The variety is possibly 'Fred Howard'. If you're interested in amarcrinum, you can read more about it in this older post. Crinum-type lilies are not always fragrant, but this one is!

The White crepe myrtles, Lagerstroemia 'Acoma', are having a fine summer. They were twisted and curled by too many years in deck containers before we moved here and it's taken several more years to train them into tree-form again - this year they've finally grown taller than the privacy fence.

Near the corner of the veranda you can see a Pink crepe myrtle, the boxwood hedge, and hanging baskets with impatiens, ornamental sweet potato vines, oxalis and Evolvulus 'Blue Daze'. I've used only impatiens and torenia in other years, but with the Ash gone, the sun is stronger on this end of the veranda so I'm experimenting with the 'Blue Daze'.

Our 'Julia Child' rose, bought in early spring, is having a third bloom cycle! She's backed by a white coneflower and Mexican Oregano.

The Buddleja 'Black Prince' above right has been in bloom for months; the yellow lantana seems happier now that the weather has turned hot.

Perovskia - called 'Russian sage' with a true sage in the background, Salvia guaranitica.


Three cupheas are in bloom now. This orange cuphea is probably Cuphea ignea, also called cigar plant. It dies back in the cold, then grows into a shrub by the end of the summer. It's planted near another chunk of 'Bengal Tiger' canna and one of the the 'Acoma' crepes.

Above is a close-up of the orange cuphea. You can decide for yourself if it looks like a cigar!

The red and purple flowers of Cuphea llavea, nicknamed Batfaced cuphea, aren't very big, but hummingbirds always find them.

This pink cuphea also has that 'Bat-faced' look, but its growth pattern is more like the orange one - each winter it dies back to a few inches tall. It sits like an undecided lump for a few months, but with sun, warmth and water, decides that Austin is not so bad after all, and by August it's turned into a three-foot tall shrub again, covered in bees and trying to smother its neighbors.

Here's a list of some other plants showing floral action. The sunflower is just starting, plants like the coreopsis are full of buds and blossoms while others like the larkspur are almost done. Dependable workhorse plants like Abelia, Salvias and the honeysuckle have produced flowers month after month.

Abelia

Salvia 'Coral Nymph'

Liriope

Tomatoes

Peppers

Cannas

Coreopsis 'Creme Brulee'

Chrysanthemums

Petunias

Dianthus

Salvia greggii in several colors.

Pavonia lasiopetala, a native Rock Rose

Blue plumbago

Fennel

A few apricot daylilies

Larkspur

Purple leaved oxalis

'Blue River II' hardy Hibiscus

Sunflower

Vitex agnus castus

Coral honeysuckle

'Little Gem' Magnolia

Scuttelaria - skullcap

Zinnia linnearis

Happy Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, organized by Carol of May Dreams Garden.

I hope you're all having a blooming July in your own garden. We're spending time at other gardens this weekend on the annual Austin Pond Society Tour.