The Annual April Affair - Color Echoes

Coral honeysuckle and Lady Banks rose have a brief affair each spring, meeting on the patio arch, vine twined around cane, the yellow interior of the honeysuckle tubes finding its reflection in the yellow of each rose blossom. For a few days the Tulipa clusiana blooms echoed the yellow & coral color in the partial shade at their feet. Their affair is passionate but brief because the rose blooms once a year - like that of George and Doris in Same Time, Next Year, and like theirs- a romance you can count on to return with vigor every spring.

But the timing changes a little from year to year and this romance didn't last until the 15th - no 2010 GBBD appearance for them!
Rosa banksiae 'Lutea' became mine in early 2001, kept captive in containers at the previous Austin house and finally planted in this garden and joined by Lonicera sempervirens in October 2006. The petals fell from many of the Lady Banks over the weekend and I pruned the rose back this afternoon.

All the better to see the pearly clematis winding its way through the rose canes - clearly happy after a long cool winter and some good rains.

Snapping After Midnight

Although it didn't fall in my neighborhood, other parts of Austin got a little rain yesterday. Closer to San Antonio, Victory Gardener Pamela Price rejoiced on Twitter that 4" of precious water arrived at her garden. Send some showers in this direction! Temperatures are hovering closer to 90°F than 100°F this week. We need only one more day over 100°F to tie the all-time record and 2 to smash it. Now public wishes for one more heat spike have popped up all over Twitter. Or as MSS of Zanthan put it, "We've come this far and !#$#@* we want the record."
Couldn't have said it better myself! We do want it!


Even though some of the garden is wheat-colored, just a little hand-watering was enough to make my favorite annual combination of Moonflower vine and Blue Butterfly Pea climb to the top of the obelisk and bloom again.

I went out after midnight and snapped this photo of them entwined. In past years they've bloomed through October - always welcome, but never so much as in this year when usually dependable plants have died or have no flowers.


My daughter Lilly wondered how big the moonflowers are but the tape measure couldn't be found. I held the lovely flower in my big ol' peasant hand - the edge of the petals almost seemed to ripple in the dark, like a butterfly instead of a flower.


Did anyone else think of Patsy Cline when you read the post title? September 8th was the day she was born - here's a video clip of her singing "Walking After Midnight". I'll be humming that tune next time the camera and I take a midnight stroll.

A Garden Blogger's Bird Day

This post, "A Garden Blogger's Bird Day", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

Okay, it's not really one day... it took a couple of weeks. And there aren't that many birds, but if I wait any longer to add photos the leaves will be falling.

In the middle of July a very striking rusty orange & black bird began appearing at the fountain - but I had no camera. He kept appearing while we borrowed a camera, purchased one, returned it and bought another and I kept trying to catch my pretty bird visitor with no success. Then a couple of weeks ago our son was standing at the window with the new camera, experimenting with the settings, when the small bird appeared and posed. Showing us not only the rusty orange front but the striped feathers, too. Using links from local blogger Mikael at Birding on Broadmeade, I've tentatively identified the bird as an Orchard Oriole. The photos of the female at the link resembled a bird I'd been seeing, but thought was a female Lesser Goldfinch. I'm still not sure, but this bird has a beak more like an oriole than a goldfinch, so I think it's the female Orchard Oriole. I delayed posting the photos my son took, hoping for a chance to show the pair. Both male and female appear off and on and I finally took a couple of not-so-hot photos of what might be his missus through the window. Unfortunately that window is double pane glass and it's got moisture trapped between the panes. - replacing the windows is on our "must be done" list!

Both birds have been around this week, too. Since these sightings were spread out over three months, I think there must be some source of the fruit and pollens that they need nearby. The hummingbirds remain elusive - instantly leaving the yard if I so much as peek out any door. So I'm trying to entice them closer to the window. A month ago I used twine to make an arch from the crook of a shepherd hook near the fountain up to a large 'S'-shaped hanger attached under the eaves outside the breakfast room window. Then I trained the cypress vine along it - knowing how much those hummingbirds like the little red trumpets. Maybe some day I'll get lucky. And yes... I do know there will be a million cypress vine seedlings next spring. These were some of the million seedlings from this spring!
The Blue Jays pose so often that they're on my blog banner and in this photo from May. But most of the birds I see all day long - sparrows, wrens, housefinches and White-Winged Doves - are so common, and at the same time so jumpy - that I seldom attempt to photograph them.

Iris at Society Garlic once mentioned that she wasn't even sure what a White-winged dove looked like so yesterday I stalked them. They're Baby Huey birds - nervous and clumsy when landing next to each other and scattering if a leaf falls off a tree. This dove landed on the old bird bath, far enough away from the back door that it let me take a photo. I've read that twenty years ago these White Winged Doves were rather rare birds in the Austin area, found mainly in the Rio Grande Valley. We never saw them around our previous Austin house, less than 2 miles from here, but our present neighborhood is thick with these birds and their cooing call of "Who cooks for you?" Another common bird soars high overhead, too far away for good photographs - My new camera takes such large photos that I can clip that tiny dot and enlarge it into something that's at least recognizable as a vulture.

Cooing is one way that birds talk to each other...twittering is another. Look in the left sidebar and you'll see that I'm trying out Twitter as a way to communicate. It took Hurricane Ike to convince me to join after wavering for months. With Houston area friends in danger, I could read Twitter updates to follow the storm and then felt enormously relieved when bloggers sent messages via Twitter. There was a comfort in that connection! And tweets are faster than making posts if you have a quick thing to say.

The Moonflower vine in the last post got so many compliments that I may have to include a different photo of it every post! FaireFrances has been having fun photographing her moonflowers, too.

This picture is a genuine "point and shoot"... the point of the metal obelisk is 7 and 1/2 feet tall, and I'm about 5' 6". So I couldn't focus and aim...all I could do was hold the camera way over my head and point it at the flower while pressing the shutter button.


Before leaving bird day let's look at this close-up of a Stapelia flower. My collection comes from one plant given to me by my aunt Phyll long ago. A small descendant of that first plant bloomed in the laundry room this week, pressing its flower against the window as it developed, deforming the edges. I'd hoped the heart of the Starfish Flower would resemble one of the flower Mandalas that Healing Magic Hands finds everywhere. But I'm not sure this heart qualifies as a Mandala ... it looks as if belongs to zoology rather than botany. Am I the only one who instead of feeling centered, had a sudden mental image of Robin Williams?


This post, "A Garden Blogger's Bird Day", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.

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.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, April 2008

This post, "Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, April 2008", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.


In the 'other' world April 15th is Tax Day, but in the world of Garden Blogging it's Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. You may owe money no matter which day you choose to celebrate, but Blooming Day is sure prettier!


The vines are in the center ring this month at Circus~Cercis. I don't have names for these two varieties of clematis, one white and one reddish-purple. They came planted in one pot, tagged as a pink clematis. The white one is planted at the base of the Lady Banks rose. The rose is already fading as the clematis opens.


The reddish purple clematis is on the back wall, getting morning sun and afternoon shade. At its feet are a cream-colored Salvia greggii, Plumbago and Purple oxalis. This is a big flower - some are over 6 inches tip-to-tip.

Last summer I saw 'Ramona' in a small pot for $2 - she's in a larger pot now, happy and blooming, while she waits for a permanent home.


The Coral honeysuckle bloomed early, shared the spotlight with Lady Banks, and keeps right on blooming now that the rose is done.


In the Secret Garden, the passionvine that bloomed late last summer is full of buds and blooms already! Instead of coaxing it to grow along the fence, I wound it around a repurposed coat rack near the brick wall - the vine stayed green all winter and was ready to bloom months earlier than last year.


Near the steps to the veranda twines a Star Jasmine, Trachelospermum jasminoides - it's flowers are not that showy but the scent is strong.


April is also a month when herbs go to flower - like this culinary sage in a trough near the stone fountain.


My camera couldn't capture the chives, but did pretty well with these Rosemary flowers.


The Cilantro/Coriander is going to seed in a few places - sometimes I let it stay, sometimes I pull it up.







We use a lot for Salsa but the extras get to bloom just because they look so pretty.


The pale peach iris 'Amethyst Flame' iris and old-fashioned white iris are gone, but Ellen's grapey-scented purple iris are in full bloom in the pink Entrance garden, along with pink gaura, spiraea, weigela, petunias and the new 'Belinda's Dream' rose.

An unnamed Siberian iris grows in back - a passalong from my friend Barbara in Illinois. I was happy to see one flower stalk last year, and am amazed to see 10 stalks this year. It's gone through drought and flood and is situated in morning sun with some afternoon shade.


A medium height violet larkspur seeded itself near the ranunculus from a few posts back. At the other end of the bed a tall double lilac larkspur is just starting to open. I throw the seeds around each year and hope for the best.









The potted 'Meyer's Improved' lemon has had several flushes of bloom and now has tiny lemons. We planted another of these lemons on the back wall. It survived winter, is growing and made a few fragrant flowers but no fruit has set.


All the climbing pink roses from the last post have shattered, so it didn't earn a photograph. I still see some rose buds in development.


The shrub of 'Julia Child' rose appeared in the previous post - here's a closeup. A dozen flowers have opened and then fallen apart, more than a dozen are open now, and at least 20 more are still small and green.

The air actually seems green under the 12-foot tall mockorange growing on both our side and the neighbors's side of the back fence. The individual flowers are large but I miss the traditional Mock orange scent. I think this is Philadelphus inodorus, sometimes called English Dogwood, but it's nothing like the real dogwood that Frances/Faire Garden grows!


The blue-violet petunias planted last fall are pretty happy with our relatively cool weather- some 'Moonshine' Achillea is budding next to the petunias. Look in the center right and you'll see why tree-seedling removal has been one of my most tedious tasks this spring... another pecan planted by the squirrels has sprouted. I pull up a few more every day, in every border and container.



The tall Salvias have no flowers yet but the Salvia greggii is blooming in several colors, including this solid red form from Diva Mindy. When the Divas of the Dirt worked on her entrance beds last year she potted up seedlings for the other Divas - this one is the perfect color for the Hummingbird bed.

Also in bloom are the two new plants of Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips'. The photo of this salvia in last week's post showed red flowers with a little white, but this week's very cool nights trigger pinker flowers with red splotches.





In this wider shot, a 'Mutabilis' rose grows in the container at left with a couple of 'Hot Lips' in the right pot. Across the lawn that hint of violet is the clump of Siberian iris and the Michelia figo shown in the previous post is the evergreen at center back.

A few more bulbs are blooming - here is a red Anemone with an old Christmas amaryllis/ Hippeastrum on the left side of the bulb bed.

On the opposite side the pink ranunculus keeps making new buds, another holiday Amaryllis is making a stalk and the purple oxalis adds to the scene. Maybe this would be enough contrast for Blackswamp Kim.


One more bulb continues blooming on the veranda - it's a pot of cyclamen given to me by Dawn/Suburban Wildlife Garden several months ago. It was languishing inside, but once tucked next to the railing under the overhang, new flowers appeared to remind me of my garden blogging friend.


Last month there were 72 comments when May Dream's Carol made her official Bloom Day post - and that was only March. I wonder how long it will take us to visit everyone in April!

This post, "Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, April 2008", was written for my blogspot blog called The Transplantable Rose by Annie in Austin.