Embrace The GADS!

This post, "Embrace the GADS!", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Over at May Dreams Gardens, Carol gave some hints for living with GADS [that's Garden Attention Distraction Syndrome] while admitting that she no longer tries to overcome it but goes with the flow.

I agreed with her advice to go with the flow and commented that gardeners might do well to act "less like ants glued to a task and a trail, and more like bumblebees among the hollyhocks, appreciating every blossom." I had some ant moments today, but even without hollyhocks, it was better to Be The Bumblebee.

Friday and Saturday nights were relatively cold for Central Texas - down to 26 degrees F/minus 3.3 C. Before the freeze I hauled 4 potted roses and a few other containers inside the garage where the plumerias wait for spring.

For the Meyer's Lemon planted next to the garage I tried a method I'd heard about from several sources - one may have been horticulturalist Skip Richter on Central Texas Gardener.

In theory, the heat from mini-lights suspended under a sheet or floating row cover may be just enough to keep citrus from being killed by cold, without cooking or overheating the plant.

The air was well below freezing this morning when I ran out in my robe to pour warm water on top of the ice in the birdbaths. A few hours later the sun had warmed the patio so I buzzed out to look at the camellia - the open flowers were frozen, but there's a good chance the buds will be okay. I counted at least 2 dozen buds still unopened. The flowers look interesting - like faded fabric flowers pinned onto a real shrub.

I didn't like what I saw on the left end of that border - once again a branch on the 'Chindo' viburnum looks bad in spite of the zone 7 hardiness rating. More than half the original plant has died in the two years since it was planted, one limb at a time, always right after a dip into the twenties. This Viburnum awabuki 'Chindo' should have been a functioning member of the Green Screen team by now - maybe it's time to interview new candidates.

Back to the garage I went, staying glued to my trail, removing the sheets from lemon and palm and remembering to unplug the mini-lights. I started bringing out the roses but stopped before putting them where they belonged. As I passed the patio table I got the idea to first pull off some yellowed or black-spotted leaves, clip off dead twigs and remove dried tree leaves from the surface of the soil.

Hmmm - with the leaves gone I could see a funny sort of depression in this container - aha! A squirrel planted a pecan about 6-inches down. It had begun to split open, ready to germinate.

The other 'Champagne' rose had no pecan, but an acorn from a live oak landed in the pot, split and sent a root down. A seedling of "Coral Nymph' salvia hid in the base of the rose. With dozens of seedlings popping up in every border we're not likely to run out of 'Coral Nymph', so the Cape Cod weeder is fetched to tease this one out before it overshadows the intended inhabitant.

As I carried the roses back to their places in the Secret Garden I looked up at a scraggly crepe myrtle and remembered that mid-February is a good time for shaping them.... wasn't I supposed to look for a special pruning tool? And oh, look - there's something green next to the fence. I flew over to check it out.

I'm pretty sure these pretty, fresh-looking leaves belong to Ranunculus. Julie of the Human Flower Project wrote a compelling post about these flowers in the buttercup family. Last fall I finally remembered to buy and plant a package of Ranunculus asiaticus.

On the way back to the patio I stopped to admire more green leaves - they look similar because they're also in the Buttercup/Ranunculacea family - these leaves belong to Anemone coronaria - not the perennial anemones grown by Ki - but Windflower types sold in packages of corms in autumn.

Back at the table I took a photo of the nuts, feeling that it was a good idea to be the bumblebee today, stopping to groom the roses and admire the tiny red leaf buds. If I'd kept walking the ant-trail with those pots, instead of roses there would soon be a pecan tree growing in one pot and an oak tree in the other. Darn it - the camera shut itself off before I got a good shot - weren't there some batteries in the desk drawer?

Nope - no camera batteries in the desk drawer, but as long as I'm in the office I'll check email and oh, yeah - maybe google around and see if I can find out where to buy something called a concave cutter.

Another gardener told me this bonsai tool would be useful for the kind of shaping I'm doing on the crepe myrtles.

Maybe there's a source at the Austin Bonsai Society and ....oh look - here's a dealer in Pflugerville, not close but not a bad drive...and the shop is open now.

Philo is interested enough in bonsai to go for a ride - just has to turn a pot of turkey soup down to simmer first.

We find MBP Bonsai Studio without getting lost - and meet the owner of this charming place. Mike and Candy Hansen have studied bonsai for 35 years, first enjoying it as a hobby, then establishing their first bonsai studio 25 years ago.

I buy just one tool, but notice wonderful pots, books and decorative items. I also notice Philo examining the array of tools and looking out at the plant nursery. He has "that look" - and I know we'll be back for another visit.

Embracing the GADS enabled us to find this new tool, oust unwanted trees, meet a fellow gardener, discover an interesting place, and we bumblebees even remembered to buy batteries on the way home.

This post, "Embrace the GADS!", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day for January

This post, "Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day for January", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.


It was lucky for me that Carol of May Dreams Garden hadn’t invented Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day last January - all of Austin was encased in ice in the 15th of that month! This winter has brought repeated freezes – but it's also been very dry – and no water means no ice. The cold was deep enough to freeze the iris buds and send even sturdy pink skullcaps into a sulk.

The Angel Trumpet had one flower and a couple of buds on the 15th of last month but then cold weather killed the leaves and made my poor Brug into a brown stalk. Will it be able to sprout from the base in spring? I hope that being close to the south wall will keep the roots alive.

The Pineapple sage and Hummingbird salvia froze to the ground, along with the five cupheas. The clematis looks dormant and we've raked up the leaves on pecan and crepe myrtle trees. What you see clinging to the pecan branches are the open husks left after the nuts fell to the ground. We've never seen this happen before - in previous years the squirrels took all the husks while they were green.

Some of you may suspect you’re being set up with this parade of brown, wintery photos – this is the blog belonging to one of those sub-tropical Austin gardeners, after all!

Well, maybe I have been teasing you a little – the landscape may not be lush, and the blooms are small, but if you look closely there are definitely flowers here at Circus~Cercis, even after repeated dips into the mid-twenties [ that’s minus 2-to-3 degrees Celsius].


To have pansies in bloom here isn’t a surprise – it’s the norm. On Saturday morning we Divas of the Dirt held our annual planning breakfast and a couple of us stopped off at Shoal Creek Nursery for a few plants. I picked up some small starts of alyssum, and have been tucking them into the containers with the pansies. With a little luck the small plants can stay alive until early spring transforms them into scented sprigs of white.


Four hanging baskets of pansies line up along the veranda. They can tolerate most cold snaps without too much damage, but growth is very slow.



The ‘Julia Child’ and ‘Mutabilis’ roses have green leaves and no flowers, as do two of the ‘Champagne’ mini-roses and a pale pink mini-rose from my daughter. And every rose in the garden shows some sign of blackspot. But one of the ‘Champagne’ roses has a couple of buds, and Carol’s rules say buds count!


The small plant of Scabiosa ‘Butterfly Blue’ doesn’t mind what we call winter here. Faded flowers and new buds surround one open bloom.


The Camellia sasanqua ‘Shishi Gashira’ holds onto one last hot pink flower.

The light red Camellia japonica ‘Pius X’ started its show this past week. I took this photo through yet another basket of pansies. Then I held petals of the two camellias together for a color comparison.


The sasanqua petals at the bottom are a rosier pink, while the ‘Pius X’ tends toward sour cherry color – less pink and more red.



Austin gardeners force paperrwhite narcissus bulbs for indoor bloom but I ignore the usual advice to discard the bulbs after bloom, choosing to plug the bloomed-out bulbs into a borders and let them rebuild. The tiny daffodils may flower outdoors in subsequent winters. This clump came in kit form a few years ago and has bloomed three years in a row.


A plant of the purple oxalis blooms in a sheltered spot near the house wall.


This white oxalis blooms in a bowl on the veranda


Cold has darkened the leaves on a trailing white lantana but the tiny flowers are undaunted.


Under the house eaves, one expanding bud from the unnamed pink climbing rose is rather startling to see.


Inside the house the Thanksgiving cactus are almost done, and at least one of them is making a new seedpod.



The peach-colored Thanksgiving cactus, the red cyclamen and the faithful coral pelargonium/geranium bloom on the windowsill ...


while the Mother of Thousands seen in the January 3rd post continues to open buds near the breakfast room window.

The temperatures were in the sixties today, not tropical, but quite pleasant in the sun. Actually, taking the photos was difficult because the sun was too strong. Nine years ago Philo and I were spending sleepless nights as we tried to decide whether to move to Austin. Pioneer garden blogger MSS of Zanthan Garden hadn't started her blog yet and we knew little about Austin plants. I now wonder - would seeing photos of an Austin January on someone's blog have made our decision easier?

See what's blooming in other gardens at January Garden Blogger's Bloom Day.

This post, "Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day for January", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

It's A Blooming Mystery

Flowers bloom on their own time, a fact that seldom bothers me in my daily life as an Austin slacker. But now that I’ve become a Garden Blogger [note those capital letters!], I occasionally need blooms on my plants for a certain date – like last week's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day on May 15th. Nothing makes me drag my feet more than a direct order to hustle, and my garden behaves no less stubbornly. That must be why the Rose of Sharon refused to open one single bud for the 15th, but opened a dozen flowers on the 17th, instead. Should I call it the "Roses of Sharon" since this is more than one shrub in a clump?

There were buds on the Hemerocallis ‘Prairie Blue Eyes’ by the 15th, but none opened until today. It’s not a fancy daylily by today’s standards, but I’ve loved it for a decade, bringing it to Texas from Illinois.

We Garden Bloggers have another scheduled event coming up - the Garden Bloggers book club is due by the end of May. Writing about the book, Passalong Plants, is easy – heck, I’ve even met one of the authors - Felder Rushing - but it’s not so easy to get flowers to open on time. I absolutely need photos of some passalong plants from my own garden to use as illustrations for this post, but will they get their act together and bloom within the next 11 days?

There’s no schedule involved for this next group of plants – just a hope that one of these days they’ll flower for me –

The Pineapple Guava above should bloom in spring – my friend Diane’s shrub was covered in its oddly beautiful flowers just a couple of weeks ago – but this young plant had a rough winter and was frozen back before it had a chance to make any blossoms. The botanical name is Feijoa sellowiana, so it is not actually a guava. Although it would be interesting to taste the fruit, described as Pineapple mixed with strawberry, I’m more interested in seeing the flowers.

Since this pomegranate has leafed out and I like the way the leaves and branches look, is it greedy to want delectable orange flowers, too? I’ll give this young tree one more year in this spot, but if it doesn’t bloom next spring – it will be transplant time the following fall.

Next we have a pair of non-blooming plants. The amarcrinum at right may take a few years to settle in and I’m not worried about it at all… but that perfect weed of a Brugmansia? Angel Trumpets are supposed to love water, sun and organic fertilizer, growing so quickly that even when cut to the ground over winter, they bulk up and hang long, fragrant bells. This one has been treated like a queen for a couple of seasons, given everything it wants, and if it was labeled correctly, someday the bells will be yellow.

I’ll ignore these poky plants, and pay attention to the ones in flower now – a couple of daylilies, annual moss roses, and the last of the larkspur; yellow Achillea, white and gold lantanas and the "Roses" of Sharon; short annual violet Verbenas and tall Verbena bonariensis, a sea of Salvias, budding Cannas and a Butterfly bush in bloom. The view from the back door is just fine today.


NURSERY NEWS
Many of us were dismayed to find that Kimas Tejas Nursery, southeast of Austin in the Bastrop area, had closed its doors last fall. But it wasn’t permanent – I had this news via email from the nursery:
Kimas Tejas has reopened on a seasonal basis. For the months of March, April, May and June, Kimas Tejas will be open Wednesday through Saturday, closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
The nursery will be closed for the months of July and August, then will reopen for the fall planting season in September, October and November. Then close for December, January and February.

THE NAMESAKE
One of these days I’m going to buy the DVD of Monsoon Wedding. Did anyone of you also see it? Have you had a special fondness for orange marigolds ever since? The director Mira Nair has a new movie in the theaters, which Philo and I enjoyed this week.
You might like it, too – The Namesake has some wonderful actors with memorable faces, is full of humor, intelligence and sadness, touching on the immigrant experience and Indian customs, separations and reunions, focusing on a coming-of-age story and several becoming-in-love stories. Mira Nair looks at things we’ve seen elsewhere, but from a different perspective. How many times have you seen the Taj Mahal in movies? A dozen times? Usually it looks like a postcard, but this time, it’s seen as the total of many designs and many parts, making us somehow recognize that individual people made those parts.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for May

It's the fifteenth of the month - time for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day.

The Salvias, Buddleja, Achillea, and Verbena bonariensis seen in the last few posts are still blooming, while many other plants are just forming buds. At Country Girl & Apple’s garden blog, Apple says she feels as if her garden is in a time warp, lagging behind other nearby gardens. In a similar way, it seems that my garden lags behind the other Austin Garden Bloggers - Purple Coneflowers glow on their pages, but my coneflowers are still covered in green promises.
A few flowers started their bloom cycles this week – here are some favorite Daylilies, opening apricot, diamond-dusted flowers every morning:

Good old Malva zebrina, a short-lived plant but one that reseeds easily, has appeared and bloomed under the white crepe myrtles. A Southern nickname for them is French Hollyhocks.

Since the word Southern has come up, here’s my Southern indulgence from last summer, a bit larger in size, covered in buds and bloom and smelling like Heaven – this Gardenia was the subject of one of my favorite posts from last summer

The original Meyer’s lemon is still doing well in its patio pot. Christopher C in Hawaii convinced us to buy a second one to plant in the ground near a wall that should provide a microclimate. The new lemon tree is covered in tiny lemons and oh-so-fragrant flowers.

The Shasta daisies have just started to open, backed with Salvia farinacea.

There aren’t many stars in the garden now, but a few character actors are making an appearance. Several 6-feet tall Abelias grow along the south fence. The white flowers are small and not showy as individuals, but are very pleasing when massed, and attractive to butterflies.


The May 4th post featured a cherry pink native plant called Scutellaria suffrutescens, Pink Skullcap. Here is a blue cousin, Scutellaria wrightii, its beauty somewhat dimmed by the litter of the pecan flowers.


The female pecan flowers have been fertilized, and the nuts are forming. We won’t get to eat any pecans, but the squirrels will be happy.

Under the canopy of the two large pecan trees the male flowers are falling, turning everything mustard brown. I’ve seen tinsel on Christmas trees that looked less deliberately placed than these flowers strewn over a crepe myrtle.

Another new flower is the yellow umbrella on the fennel, accessorized with Swallowtail Cats for Baby V.

When one of the caterpillars objected to the camera he inflated his osmateria – the yellow-orange ‘horns’ with which he’s trying to frighten us away, and Philo snapped this photo. A disturbed caterpillar also emits a strong and rather unpleasant odor to show the predator that he’ll taste as bad as he smells.Since we want the caterpillars to turn into butterflies, we're glad they have some defenses against whatever wants to eat them. The Mouse and Trowel Awards were announced yesterday – congratulations to all the deserving winners, and a special shout-out to my friend Pam/Digging and the legendary Tom Spencer/Soul of the Garden. Both Tom and Pam were born elsewhere, coming to Austin as adults. Recognizing them seems appropriate for today's Bloom Day post – they may have been transplanted, but both now bloom here.