I've had a decent (too big for my climate?) Agave collection for a few years, ever since several were gifted to me by a downsizing gardener. This is the first year that I've really been blown away by one though.
My planned post for today was thwarted by weather, with rain making it impossible to get the final "after" photo needed after a little digging project -- maybe my first of the year? Anyway, I instead noticed that a couple of potted plants have quietly become gorgeous, but they share a problem. First, the beautiful part...
With a hard freeze a day away, it's time to take some drastic steps. This hurts every year I do it, but this year less than usual since it's so late.
With the first hard freeze expected Saturday evening, I thought give you one last look at the stars of my late-season garden: the castor beans (Ricinus communis).
I started out this morning intending to just take a few photos of the Persicaria bloomss that were just being hit by the right type of morning light...
My friend Loree over at Danger Garden has been encouraging her readers to choose a favorite plant from their gardens every week. She does this in her "favorite plant of the week..." posts, and although I'm not organized enough to pick a favorite every week and post about it, sometimes a plant really shines and I take notice.
As noted in yesterday's post I visited my friend Mike's garden again this weekend. On the way back I drove by a garden display which I've seen every time I visited him for the last two years, at the St. Louis Community College Meramec campus.
Some days I just walk around the garden and enjoy. See what I can find. Something interesting. Something inspiring, beautiful.
Stems, stalks, trunks, pseudostems, culms.
Yesterday I wrote about saving some water plants, growing them inside the house under lights. Those were small plants -- today I tackle the big one: the papyrus. I actually had three large plantings of papyrus 'KingTut' this year because I was able to successfully overwinter a few plants last year. With that experience I'm going to experiment a little and should end up with lots of papyrus for next year -- plenty to share with neighbors.
Even though I've only recently completed my pond and haven't done any planting around or in it, I already have several water or bog plants. In fact I've had water plants for a few years, growing them in pots or in the ground -- most water plants do fine in regular garden soil as long as they get enough water. The problem is that most of the water plants I have are not cold-hardy enough to survive our winters, so I need to overwinter them in the garage or the house.
From the title of this post you might guess it's going to be about some spring flowers emerging, or perennials waking up from their winter dormancy, or dozens of bamboo shoots breaking through the soil. Those are all good guesses, but they're wrong. I'm talking about the emergence of my potted plants from the garage. We had abnormally cold weather very early, which forced me to move many of the still-not-dormant tropicals into the garage to protect them from the hard freeze.
It seems like just a day or two ago, but ten days ago I divided my 'King Tut' papyrus. It had been in the garage for a couple of months, and I was afraid that I had waited too long to bring a division inside under the lights.
This weekend I finally tackled a little project that I should have done two months ago. It's my 'King Tut' Papyrus, one of my favorite plants. It's been sitting in the garage since I moved it there in early November -- it's not cold-hardy so I need to protect it during the winter.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a local garden center to see if they had any large pots in the recycling bin that I could grab, and I decided to take a quick look at the new plant stock.
My posts about:
© Blogger template Shush by Ourblogtemplates.com 2009
Back to TOP
