This beautiful plant was one of the first plantings I made in my garden, along the pathway to the back garden and I can't remember its name.

I thought originally it was some kind of skullcap because I didn't know anything about plants when I bought it, but its behavior is almost identical to Texas red sage (Salvia coccinea) so I'm thinking that I planted a variety of red sage called "Coral Nymph'. Both can get quite rangy by the end of the summer, are the same height (1 1/2 to 2 feet) and have similar leaves and both like growing in the same dappled shade conditions. I thought that Salvia coccinea was more of a tender perennial treated like an annual here but this pink sage is almost four years old and has been green in winter.

Nearly every summer we pack down the house and leave for a month or two to visit friends and family abroad. Packing down the garden is becoming more and more of a challenge. I'd love to meet other fellow travelers with Texas gardens--to figure out how they manage to keep it surviving during the brutal summer months. The larger my garden grows, the harder this task becomes. It's not just the waning vegetables or annuals that need tending but even the larger "sustainable" places of my garden.

It might be too soon to say this, it being just early August and we have two more months of hot (i.e., 90s-100s) to go, but I am already able to see what of my new plants and garden are worth trying again, what needs to be moved, and what I would never plant again.

Viola 'Etain', a perennial viola in some climates, died during our three-week stay in Europe. Partially because a friend accidentally turned off the drip system in this area, but I have a feeling it would have needed daily watering anyway. I loved how much these bloomed in spring and even through the early days of June, but they do need water. I think I will pass on these again (although they have a beautiful fragrance, if you can find them!).

Time magazine did a special this week on organic gardening and my favorite local nursery, Natural Gardener. The article and video concerns the trends that are happening in the younger generation with gardening, as a part of a "New Frugality" series. This was the place that really inspired me to garden. More than just a nursery, it's a wonderful place to spend a morning with coffee in hand. There are a number of display gardens and it really shows off what one can do in the Hill Country near Austin with its rocky limestone soils and wizened junipers.

April is gorgeous and sad at the same time. Gorgeous in that all the spring flowers are in operatic bloom, sad in that they are at the moment right before they decline. Every moment in the garden is precious in that way--at any day's notice, this momentary show will start to look seedy, weedy and making way for the summer heat. My poppies are stretching for light now that all the trees have filled in so I am trying to at least capture them on film as much as I can.

The sweet peas will be the first to go in the heat; most of them are already riddled with powdery mildew...

I've not had much luck with gladiolus here. I'm wondering if I plant them too late. Most Texas gardening advice suggests planting gladiolus corms in succession during April and May, but I almost think they'd do better planted even earlier. Glads are not tender here, and don't need to be "dug and stored' as they do in other parts of the U.S. Unfortunately, most bulb sellers don't start shipping their gladiolus bulbs till April, which doesn't give me a chance to try planting them earlier. Last year I planted six different kinds of gladiolus corms in April, and most of them just became a big bunch of floppy, ragged leaves with no flowers.

The Byzantine gladiolus, however, is another kind of glad.

March is drawing to a close April is halfway over, and just by my instincts, it was one of the hottest Marches we have had since I moved to Austin, with regular temperatures in my part of town reaching the high 80s and even a few 90s. Today as I am writing it is a dreamy 78, and I wish it would stay that way, but the temperatures have been up and down, and I need to breathe in as much as I can of our fleeting spring.

Last month I finally planted my first tree, a Mexican plum. I didn't expect the tiny thing to bloom for me this spring, but a couple of weeks ago past it rewarded me with a few small fragrant flowers. (We also have a five-year-old Mexican plum in our front yard, planted by the realtor right before we bought the house, and it never bloomed until this year.) I've not yet been so daring up till this past year to plant a tree. in fact, most of my tree adventures have been about eradicating the junk trees I do have. Once...…

Today is daffodil day. In my garden, it's a moment when the very early tazettas are just past their peak and the early bloomers are in full bloom. In the fall of 2007, I went a little crazy with daffodil bulbs; I didn't understand the differences so I ordered a bunch that were recommended by Scott Ogden's Garden Bulbs for the South, and then threw in a few non-returning daffodils just for the fun of it. Pink daffodils! I had to try them! At the time, I didn't have anywhere permanent to put most of them; our property was very shaded from buildings and fences and such and the little garden bed space I had I wanted for more permanent things. So I used planters, and a lot of them, wheeling daffodils around to show off when they came in bloom and wheeling them away when they became a mess of leaves.

Better late than never, I've been wanting to get around to writing about our adventures in garden design this past year. Last summer was a long and infamously hot drought-filled summer, so much so that by the time we finished our backyard hardscaping, I was too tired (and too hot) to write. Thankfully, armed with my new SLR camera, my husband and I took hundreds of pictures.

When we first moved into our house, it was the backyard that sold me. Nothing special to some people but for this neighborhood it has a long yard, which is nearly twice the size of our house. Most of the original platted properties in this neighborhood have been divided into two lots in the last 20 years.

I was busy taking adoring photos of my sweet peas last week (and I am embarrassed to say just how many) when I noticed the flicker of a jewel color on one of them. Sometimes even flies have iridescence, and so I ignored it until the flicker kept moving. Thankfully, this beautiful little creature had patience on me, as I crept closer. I'd never seen this butterfly before, the male Purple Hairstreak, but thanks to butterfly siting galleries i was able to identify him and his nearby friend who was also resting very contentedly on a sweet pea flower. And...…

It is a rich, full-bodied whistle,
cracked ice crunching in pails,
the night that numbs the leaf,
the duel of two nightingales,

the sweet pea that has run wild,
Creation's tears in shoulder blades

--Boris Pasternak, "Definition of Poetry"

We're still in the middle of nights that have the potential to numb leaves, but my sweet peas are starting to bloom, even the smaller ones nearly a foot tall.

Oooh, I love surprises. There have been so many of them in my garden, things I never planted, or remember planting, springing up out of nowhere. Our very long driveway is lined with a patchy, weedy mess that is slowly eroding away but at one point someone had gardened there.

Blowers are a nuisance, and I'm sure many agree with me. Perhaps in the country or in the suburbs they might have a more innocuous presence but here in the city, the sound of big gas blowers is overwhelming. Worse than the garbage trucks. It ricochets for blocks.

OK, just to get this out of the way, a little Latin lesson. Some days I feel like a gardener, and others a scientist. My husband calls it my right-brain/left-brain garden. When researching wildflowers, the first problem one gets into is in the matter of names. Flowers have different common names all over the world, and the more this world piles its information online, the more confusing it can get.

Latin names help us get this confusion out of the way, but I admit they are rather boring to most people, sometimes just down right goofy. The gardening world now persists in calling Ranunculus "ranunculus" rather than its much more fitting common name "Persian Buttercup". But then, people might get Buttercup confused with Narcissus, which is what we called "Buttercups" as children where I grew up, and what others in the South call Jonquils or you call Daffodils. Ahh, never mind.

Daisy: Any of several plants of the Composite/Aster family, especially a widely naturalized Eurasian plant (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) having flower heads with a yellow center and white rays. Also called oxeye daisy, white daisy. Before 1000, known in Middle English as dayesye, and in Old English as dægesēge.

When I think of wildflowers, daisies and poppies are the first that come to mind. What fantasy wildflower meadow would be complete without either of them? The "day's eye" is especially the essence of meadow cheer, flowers that open with the sun and close at night.

Today I opened my eagerly awaited box of sweet violets, and they are among the last of my fall plantings. After researching them last fall, I found the one nursery in the U.S. that specializes in violets and since I was a little late in their fall delivery season, I waited all year to order them, for fear that a spring planting might be too hard on them. I contented myself in the meantime with experimenting with other fragrant plants I had never tried, like sweet peas and garden pinks. I have never smelled a sweet violet before, and I...…

This flower needs no introduction. During my first-ever gardening escapade, I sowed Texas wildflower seeds all over my bare back yard (in January!), and native Purple Coneflower was among them. They never came up but the next year I sowed the seeds in a prepared bed in fall. By spring it seemed like hundreds came up. I discarded many and potted many others, giving some away to friends that summer. Since the seeds germinated in spring, it would most likely be another year before they bloomed (since many perennials take about a year to reach blooming stage from seed, a...…

Since writing my discoveries about bulbs a year and a half ago, I've learned so much more about growing bulbs. In spring and fall of the last year, I've gone on massive bulb-buying sprees, trying a few that I know will succeed here and then a few that are experiments. I think one of the reasons I've gone crazy with bulbs is that you get a lot for your money. Rather than having to buy potted plants or grow from seed, a box of bulbs can fill an awful lot of space inexpensively. If you want to dive into bulbs,...…

There are different types of Oregano, of which the common names can be confusing. A couple different types are called Italian Oregano, or alternately Marjoram. By far, the kind you most often find in your spice jar and the species most often used in Mediterranean cooking is Origanum vulgare, also called Greek Oregano or Wild Marjoram. Greek Oregano is said to be a little spicier than the kind I am growing, Origanum onites, which the tag called Italian Oregano and which is also commonly called Pot Marjoram. There is also the actual species Marjoram, Origanum majorana. And not to mention...…

I have so little room left for a vegetable garden at the moment but, after tearing up what was my herb bed, I've decided to use it as the "experiment bed", to try various lettuces and herbs from seed. Things have grown decently in this little bed, one of the few in my garden that receives sun all day, but it has also drowned lavender plants and even purple coneflowers. The one plant doing well was an enormous oregano which had grown in two years from a 4-inch pot two years ago into a two foot wide by 2 foot...…

Today I was reading some blogs and articles online at Sunset. It's my new favorite magazine to read about gardens and design. Although it's meant for "living in the west" which mostly means California but there are occasionally articles on landscapes in the western states like Arizona or even New Mexico. It stops just short of Texas but then so do most gardening magazines! I dig this magazine because the designs in California are just so darn free-thinking, creative, inspiring. Landscape design in Texas tends to me much more straightforward and practical and so (as I've learned) are its landscape...…

I've slowed down on keeping my garden journal, both on paper and here. What precious time I have to devote to my garden is unfortunately not in writing, but in keeping it alive. I must sound redundant now, since my last 2 posts have been about heat and storms and heat. Since May 15, we have had record-breaking temperature and little to no rain. My poor garden looks on in desperation. It is at points like this that a gardener wants to throw in the towel. The tomatoes which I had so carefully nursed from seed, pushed them under lights...…

This past week, I've been trying, in little bits and pieces, to get the garden ready for summer. Finish mulching, finish planting. I still have some potted annuals and even a few perennials lying about ready to be transplanted that I'm watering sometimes two times a day to keep them from completely drying out. This is the time of year when I start wondering why I like plants in containers at all! I really adore beautiful ceramic containers and last year added some metal feeding troughs and painted a few cheap wood and ceramic containers I got at home depot....…

The summer started out with a bang, literally. Bangs and bangs of hail. We had 3 separate hail storms within three weeks of each other, each one with progressively larger hail. It was the third storm that did me in. Or my garden, I should say. I think it was a near tornado. Two weeks ago, we were out late at night looking at a house our friends are thinking of buying, and suddenly the sky was filled with heat lightning and a strange yellowish light that seasoned weather veterans know as tornado skies.Just the night before we had...…

After a beautiful week of temperatures in the 70s, the last few days have been shooting up and from the feel of it, summer is here. Usually at this point there is no turning back; the heat is on. (Why do I hear Glenn Frey in the background singing 80s style?) The spring bloomers are all going to seed and I started collecting my first bluebonnet seeds today. Some of them even got ahead of me and started popping open and dropping their seeds. I love doing this, thinking that just a few bluebonnet plants gives me about 100 more...…

I never thought I'd be a snapdragon fan. As a child I saw them every summer in my grandmother's garden. They seemed too... familiar. When I first started gardening I was so obsessed with starting native plants that I usually ignored most of the 'annuals' table at every gardening center, but then, one autumn while I was looking for some color to fill in bare spots, I visited a gardening store I'd never been to before and they had rows and rows of snapdragons. And to my surprise, they were fragrant, so fruity and sweet. I had never remembered snapdragons...…

As I sit here writing on my front porch, the sweet candy fragrance of sweet peas is dancing in the breeze. This part of the afternoon, fragrance often dissipates in the heat, and already the heights of the afternoon sun are starting to produce the kind of heat that makes me thankful for air conditioning (or at least the very protecting cedar trees in our yard, which just started to leaf out last weekend). pinks in the herb garden Last fall, I concentrated heavily on adding more fragrant plants to my garden, and I have to say I am not...…

This time of year is when I realize I need to organize my fertilizers and all the garden care products that little my garden shed. Some of my sweet peas and native phlox have powdery mildew, and this year I want to be more organized and simplified about this stuff.From the very beginning of my gardening adventures, I wanted to learn about how to care for my garden organically. Not because I necessarily have issue with synthetics or chemicals but it was so much easier to learn from organic solutions. I wanted to learn about why plants and soil need...…

grandprimo.jpg
grandprimo2.jpg

This past fall I went on a bit of a daffodil buying craze. Daffodils were amongst the first flowers to bloom when we bought this house--pretty little creamy flowers that I knew as 'buttercups' when I was a kid. I later discovered that the particular kind I have growing in odd places, along the driveway, hidden behind our shed, were remnants from an old time, when our property was probably connected by family to the neighbor's property, as the daffodils seem to have been planted in places that had no regard for property lines. My 'buttercups' are known as 'Grand...…

Traditionally, I've learned, fall is the best time in Texas to plant all spring-blooming annual flowers and almost anything perennial, whether herbs or flowers, or shrubs like roses. This is so plants get a good time to root themselves in over the winter in order to have stronger growth in spring before the heat sets in. It's when I sow all my wildflowers as well. I've learned the hard way that I don't live in a climate where I can sow many seeds outdoors after frost, as most seed packets inform you to do. Spring here is just too short, and by the time a plant starts germinating it won't have a change to bloom. My first year of gardening I tried this with several poppies, and they grew all right and started shooting out leaves but at the first hot day most of them began to choke.

If I could offer one piece of advice to a new Texas gardener, it would be to sow most of your seeds in fall, so that plants have a change to grow or settle in by November. October has been the best month for me to do this. This of course doesn't include all seeds, such as summer-blooming annuals which are not winter-hardy: zinnias, cosmos, and some others.

The most difficult job, however, of this past fall, has not been all the planting and the new landscaping--it was the total lack of rain. We had about 2 good days of rain between September and November. And since Thanksgiving it's probably rained once. I picked one of the hottest and drought-iest falls to start a foundational garden.

In spite of all this work, I've tried my best to keep up with my own projects, and even on this website am starting to list all the flowers, vegetables and shrubs I've planted in the "plantopia" section. Here is a small album of some of my recent blooms and projects:

Yesterday I made my long-awaited first visit to the Antique Rose Emporium in Independence, Texas. Last fall it first dawned on me that I too could grow roses, where my gardening had previously been limited to wildflowers, a few native plants here and there, and other seemingly low-impact, low-maintenance gardening. Then I decided to buy a rose for my birthday and in my trying to pick one, I ended up with two, and a week later, a third. Roses had previously seemed to me the haute couture of the gardening world, rarefied and unattainable and perhaps not worth even looking...…

After a month and a half of no rain, temperatures constantly above 90, including one last gasp of summer on Thursday--in which my local temperature rose to almost 100--fall has finally come. Overnight intense 50 mile-an-hour winds hit, knocking down limbs, chairs, the rest of the pecans, and dumping with them about 4 inches of rain. From drought to drench, you never know in Texas how the weather will shift, and when it does it is never subtle. It arrives with great gusto, no gradual adjustment: one big dump of heavy rains or winds and it says, "There ya go:...…

I am so excited to begin my second full year of wildflower sowing. I had to pull many plants out over the summer before they went to seed because they were just growing in odd areas--like the 7-foot sunflower that grew right in the middle of the backyard. That was definitely not planned... I attribute it to one of the 'wildflower mixes' that i threw out in the summer before I knew what I was doing. I was sad to see it go because I never got to see it flower. It was nice, but a bit of an obstacle...…

At some point in history, probably not too far back, people didn't have the ridiculous range of choices from all kinds of nurseries in terms of ready-to-plant flowers and vegetables. They started it all on their own. My grandmother loved bulbs of all kinds, and she always had a massive carpet of wildly arranged snapdragons underneath her grand oak trees all summer long. I'm sure she planted those snapdragons herself from seed. She didn't have some big set-up. She might have had a little glasshouse, but no lights and expensive seedstarting flats. No exact recipe to her soil. No polymers...…

Going on my successful wildflower seed planting last fall, I've decided to try my hand at other flower seeds... and vegetables, and herb seeds. In fact, I have so many seeds I'm embarrassed to admit how much of my refrigerator they are starting to fill up. (I bought this cool tupperware-like seed storage bin at Kew Gardens in London last spring; it was made for beginner seed-collectors and includes stuff for drying seeds.) I'm sure all beginners (and experts) go crazy with seeds. I mean, how can you not stop at the seed rack and think, 'ooh I should try...…

And weeding. And cutting back the bajillion chinaberry trees, suckers and seedlings everywhere. I think the chinaberries (and their seeds) dug the rain and heat more than anything else, which stinks because last spring I already started plotting how to destroy them all. They are incredibly invasive. I'm also out to hunt and destroy all trumpet vines.

My next big project is to really finish making and planting bed on the side of the house, which is going to be largely roses and a few plants under them. Right now it is full of lantana and a dense stand of ruellia which never blooms because there's too much shade. (From the chinaberries, of course.) Must cut back more chinaberries so roses will bloom, too.

I've discovered that gardening is as much of a science experiment as it is an artistic expression for me. I like to watch things through every stage and make small adjustments. I'm the kind of person, I suppose, that was made for seed-starting. So I have already started on what is bound to be a house and yard full of seed-starting flats. I like reading all the labels, giving them the exact thing they need, pulling them inside and out. I'm completely a beginner at seed-starting but have already learned how to make my own soil and filled our laundry room with seedstarting supplies. I'm going to outgrow it soon enough, I can tell.

Anyway, here's to fall and to the far-too-many-projects-that-I-have-time-for-but-pretending-I-do. If all goes well, by November I'll have a new back patio, rose bed, new lawn in the bare spots on the back yard, rock bed, bed for fragrant plants, and maybe even a greenhouse to boot. Hee hee.

The one thing that should bring me out of the period of silence on this blog is my discovery today that Lady Bird Johnson passed away 2 weeks ago. I wondered if I would get the chance to meet her some day (on earth at least); she was and is an inspiration to the dream garden I see when I close my eyes. In this garden, there are beautiful flowers, elegant and regal but with a delicate and wild balance that arrange themselves in sometimes indiscernible patterns. My first visit to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center came at a...…

At last, the 100+ temperatures are here in Texas. It was the rainiest spring since I've lived here, but at least the rain kept the summer away, at least the kind of summer we know and dread here. My theory is that the season's intensity is less about the heat than it is about the sun, which becomes unbearably glare-y in the late afternoons during the summer. However, it being my second summer of having a garden, I can't complain--since all the rain helped establish some of my newer plants... whatever croaks this summer (hopefully) will be annual flowers or...…

Too much rain! It created: 1. mud everywhere in our driveway, which 2. washed and eroded much dirt off of the already struggling slope that edges our lawn and once which was covered with St. Augustine and now is a few straggling runners, and 3. large 6-inch deep puddles that took a day to evaporate in our dog run. Which reminded me again how much drainage trouble my hard clay has. In spite of the problems it caused, as usual everything responds to rain like crazy. My purple passionflower vine is about to explode. There are buds everywhere, just waiting...…

I don't know much about columbines, other than that they are now famous for Colorado. But when I started hunting for seeds, I suddenly saw the name everywhere. In spring many nurseries were carrying small starter plants of columbines and I had no idea what the flower even looked like. I asked my favorite nurseryman about them and he said he'd always had trouble with columbines so this made me think right away that they were fussy plants from another part of the country, or the world. I was pleased to discover there are a few kinds that are native...…

Anyhow, back to my topic. I've read enough around to know that bulbs can be cheeky in Texas. They may or may not come back, especially if they were made to grow in northern climates or at least the information about them is specific to more northerly places, as many Dutch bulbs are. But most of the heirloom sites I've found, whether they be in Connecticut or Michigan, seem attentive to the fact that gardeners in the South want to grow their flowers and so often have some advice for people way down here.

bag with canna tuber (growing roots in the bag), freesia alba corms, gladiolus corms

Take, for instance, hyacinths. That lovely sweet "grape juice" smell that wafts across your whole backyard when spring first awakens--that is a smell I remember from childhood. And a local store was selling these bulbs last fall. So I bought some. But I am still not sure what happens to them. Will they return, do I dig them up? If so when? I can't seem to figure it out. Bulbs are a mystery, little things in the ground whose upstairs' growth completely disappears from view for part of the year but have an entire life inside of them waiting to return.

But here are some basic things I learned doing bulb research, especially all those terms--and my own definitions (so they are far from authoritative, as I knew nothing about bulbs 8 months ago):

"Heirloom" bulbs, plants: means different things to different people, but usually seems to refer to plants that were introduced long ago but fell out of trade. Some are very rare. They may be 500 or 30 years old. Often refers to the variety of a plant or flower when it first appeared in trade but has since been hybridized, updated, or supplanted by new trends. Many heirloom companies are bringing back old-fashioned flowers that were in vogue in Victorian times, for example.

"Species": species roses, species tulips, species gladiolus. What's up with species? It seems like it means--original. The original, in-the-wild plant, before it was discovered by Europeans and hybridized into all manner of forms. Species seems also to be a catch-word for "hardy"--either hardy to cold, hardy to heat, hardy to lack of treatment because, after all, they existed naturally without fertilizers special soil or human intervention. And many species flowers looks so different from what we think they might look, sometimes more exotic and or more delicate than their descendants.

"Naturalizing": basically means, a type of bulb that has adapted to its environment and learned how to take care of itself and multiply as if it was native to that landscape--with little care or intervention.

Fall-planted, spring-planted. Some bulbs are planted in fall, some in spring. Fall bulbs need cold and like cold to grow--and flower during winter and early spring months. Spring bulbs like heat and need heat to grow, and flower during summer and fall months. It's good to do research on this, as just with other flowers, there are many types of each species and some flower earlier than others. So, for example, gladiolus are usually spring-planted bulbs, but some flower so early that some say it's best to plant them in late fall or early winter. The only trouble with this is, many places don't sell them in fall so you best get them from a Texas-based supplier.

Bulbs, corms, tubers, rhizomes. Just types of storage systems. You can get more technical than that, but I'll just call them all bulbs.

Here are some bulbs I've planted in the last year:

IN THE FALL
Narcissus. I already have clumps of white daffodils growing in various parts front and back, which are surely as old as the house. I ordered bunches more of the from the Southern Bulb Company last fall. The two kinds I ordered are "Grand Primo" (Narcissus tazetta), with white blossoms, which are very close to if not the same as the old daffodils around the house, and "Campernelle" (Narcissus x odorus), a yellow narcissus which is often called a "jonquil".

Hyacinth. I think I still have the bag I'm not sure where these are from, what country, what name. From pictures I researched they are Dutch Hyacinths, but there are lots of varieties and even heirloom kinds, which you can bet I'll order in fall. They were so beautiful when they emerged in March, big purply grapey smelling blooms. They might be fussy but isn't all gardening?

IN THE SPRING:
Gladiolus. Me and my search for tall spiky plants continues. In comes gladiolus, which are spiky, tall and just beautiful with many forms. I planted two kinds in April, both of which are known as "species" gladiolus: Gladiolus byzantinus. These are heirloom bulbs from 1629 with reddish magenta flowers, and I know from researching are known to naturalize in Texas. I interplanted them with Gladiolus calianthus, also called Abyssinian Gladiolus. These, too are heirloom, and first introduced circa 1896, and were originally from Ethiopia. My corms are just beginning to sprout and from the photos I've seen should have white flowers with maroon center. Abyssinian and Byzantine: just sound ancient, don't they?

Tuberose. Polianthes tuberosa "The Pearl". I found this at an heirloom company, and read that it was a Victorian favorite, and has a Mexican origin. Even better it seems like if kept protected from any extreme cold snaps in winter will come back each summer, since they are what is called a "tender perennial", and Austin is right at the funky borderline of where things can potentially get hurt from frost. Pinky white (yes, pearly) blooms... since I planted these so late in spring, they may not appear until late fall, but perhaps that's when they bloom here anyway.

Regal Lily. Lilium regale. This lily, I read, was discovered in China in the early 1900s and became the parent of many trumpet lilies. This is sensitive to frosts as well, and also sensitive to high heats, both of which happen in Austin. We'll see.

Canna. For lack of space, I bought an already potted bright yellow canna and put it in a large container planting on my deck. It bloomed but then started getting munched on by something. I'm slow to kill bugs so I released a bunch of ladybugs on it in hopes that they might munch on whatever was munching. I just hope I can keep it moist enough during the summer. The canna bulbs I bought, however, were much subtler--palest yellow with apricot blooms, and more of an heirloom variety.

Calla. Zantedeschia. I planted both white and yellow calla bulbs last spring, they grew and bloomed within 2 months. Right now the leaves are still growing. I've seen other callas blooming now, so perhaps I have a late blooming variety? Don't remember the exact kind I planted but I think I picked at least one mini-variety, one of which was named "Crystal Blush". It lived up to its name last year.

yellow calla lilies in April

Except for the wide swath of oxblood lilies down my driveway, and the rainlilies that grow out in my front yard, which I've watched come and go a few times now, the bulbs above are all a big "we'll see". Yes, we'll see. My motto. At least to see some of these flowers once will let me know if I want to see them again.

Notes:
A very good article about Narcissus types, planting and naturalizing in Texas or the South.

A glossary that helped me.

What I wanted was wildflowers. I had no idea what it took to do something from seed, but I sowed them in January, then in March. No wildflowers came up. But I kept researching. And finally last fall, I decided to do what all the advice said, and that was to sow wildflowers in fall.

Some I sowed intentionally into beds. Others I tossed around the dirt that was trying to become a buffalograss lawn (still not exactly a lawn but I'm not giving up). Some, the ones I knew I absolutely wanted and would just hate to see not germinate, I bought as plants. (These included bluebonnets, California poppies, pink evening primrose and winecups.) But just for good measure I sowed seeds of those as well.

How excited it was when in February I started noticing green things start germinating. I wasn't sure what was weeds and what was wildflowers. But as March arrived, I saw that not only had I succeeded but more flowers had germinated than I suspected. Late March my bluebonnet plants bloomed, and also many came up from seed, some in total shade. Then came the Indian Blankets, which have just started blooming this month. Three days ago, the scarlet sage bloomed for the first time. I had forgotten I sowed these at all.

indian blanket

The planted pink evening primrose started blooming last month, but now the seeded ones are starting to bloom as well. The flowers are random, oddly placed and definitely going to need rethinking next year. Some are taller than I expected. I have one Indian Blanket plant that is nearly up to my chest. It looks quite odd right in the middle of the yard.

Purple coneflower were one of the plants I desperately wanted and although I could buy plants at the store, really wanted the native kind. I had a huge bag of these. During my research it seemed like they needed all these finicky conditions to germinate, but these had the most success. The purple coneflower seed, which I put in my herb bed and kept somewhat moist throughout the winter, poked its first little green leaves up in March, and the plants are now about 6" tall. I had to keep thinning them out (in other words, picking some of them out and throwing them away, which I think is probably one of the hardest things to do in gardening--all that work! all those seeds!--but a job that needs to be done or else other plants won't live).

As equally surprising were the Maximilian Sunflowers. I had a particular spot I really wanted them. I did nothing special to the soil, but scattered the seeds around and tried my best to keep them moist during the winter. They were among the first to germinate. Now I am worried that they are too big, too much for that spot. They are nearly 4 feet tall and have at least another foot or so to go.

What didn't germinate? Maybe because of wet soil conditions, or simply being crowded out by others:
White Prickly Poppy
Gayfeather
California poppies (the only non-native-to-Texas wildflower did germinate and started growing by Christmas but did not like the really wet soil I had them in)
Purple Prairie Clover
Obedient Plant
Blue Flax

Although oddly placed and, well, wild, the wildflowers have already turned my backyard into a bird and butterfly sanctuary. I'd love to say all the birds are welcome but the grackles decided to build a nest in our cedar tree and are now training all their little chicks how to swoop down and drink water and eat worms in my yard (and poop all over my deck). Wild is good but next year I'm going to tame things down.

For both the zinnias and cosmos, it has been about 8-10 weeks since I first sowed them into their pots to flower. It took about 1 week for both to germinate, another week to show the "first set of leaves". I put them outside about 4 weeks later, and then they spent about 2 weeks in their trays outdoors until I planted them sometime early April. Now I know why all that seed packet information is so important. I'm considering getting a book with information on times from sowing to germination to bloom, so that I have a bit more foresight on when to plant what.

I thought I could wait until fall to start my seed adventures again but boosted by my success, I put about 3 new trays outdoors with summer-heat loving plants: gomphrena, echinacea and moonflower. All 3 have already germinated in a week. (The echinacea seeds were in the refrigerator for over a month, which I read would help start the germination process, and apparently it worked, as many of the seeds are germinating.)

As for the others which I started, the foxgloves came outside last week for the first time. It has been incredibly humid and I am not sure if they will be able to survive it. However, I planted them two days ago and they seem to be doing fine. I know they will probably not flower this year but I do hope they survive the summer and come back in the spring. The foxglove seedlings are approximately 11 weeks old and have about 3 sets of leaves.

I didn't mention this in my other posts but I also sowed the same foxglove seeds directly into a garden bed last fall. They germinated in the fall and stayed quite small but lived through the winter. Now they are about 1 inch tall and each have about 1 or 2 extra set of leaves--smaller than what I started indoors so I know now that I can get much better results sowing them indoors and nurturing them over the winter.

My final ongoing experiment, the oriental poppies, have survived their apparent drowning and I have about 25 growing seedlings and they are still indoors. I have seen other more mature poppies in the nurseries wilting in the humidity and I am sure these little guys would have a lesser chance. They are alive but quite small and from their looks could be at least 3-4 weeks before they flowered. I know if I do poppies again I will sow them much earlier, perhaps in the fall, so that they could be planted in late winter or very early spring.

All this seed adventuring has definitely gotten me scouring seed racks at nurseries. There are far more seeds available than live plants, and very little to lose in case something fails. Now I know why people love greenhouses! It's not too far into my future!

seedstarting part 1, seedstarting part 2

deadbougainvillea.jpg

L1040175web.jpg

L1040159web.jpg

seedstart.jpg

grass_thinning2.jpg

ruellia.jpg

Now that I've seen what the grass looks like fully grown, I can decide how much of it I want in the yard. I know that fall is one of the best times to plant, so I want to use those months to outline the basic garden design that I can stick with when planting later. Many savvy gardeners here use a lot of decomposed granite to make walkways and then create beds and plantings around them--making more of a 'grassless' landscaping design. Which is great and useful and saves water. This gives a kind of reddish desert Texas feel with its emphasis on stones. However, as much as I love the southwest aesthetic, and the native look here, I still want something more of a prairie wild feel to permeate my back yard. Have edges less defined, worn-looking grassy paths that lead subtly toward places. Laced with wildflowers. This is the design that suits me best. So I am trying to find right balance between red (or white) rock and grass/plants.

The sun here is so white yellow and declarative, and the more Texas-y garden aesthetic tends toward ashy warm colors. I get a bit overloaded with all the warm and want some cools--some deep deep cools--jewel-toned teals and deep blues. I picked a type of buffalo grass that leans more toward a cool than a warm green. That way there is some relief to the eyes and contrast with the warm sun.

This is what I love best about English gardens.... they sky is so blue and wet, and looks even bluer and wetter against rows of warm brick housing. English gardens feel so bright under their sky. It is a luscious look. Of course I do not want an English garden here--but the principle of drawing out contrast.

classic English cottage garden style (and actually, a picture of a garden in Alaska

There is a way to do it--how to keep your own identity as well as the identity of the place in which you are gardening. I want to draw out the best in what is truly Austin and work with it, while also making something that feels like Amy (who does have parts of the whole world in her) and her internal garden.

KIF_1874web.jpg

I was told by a gardening friend to start with something like an orchid. "They're hard to kill," he said. My first one-bloom orchid is now living with a friend and has grown to a beautiful multi-flowering lady. But I killed the next 3 orchids I bought, or so I thought. Finally, what I've discovered this year is that most plants tend to do this--they tend to shift in character from the gorgeous thing sitting on the table in the nursery to something a little more finicky. They've grown up in this warm cozy environment, getting pampered by perfect temperatures, humidity, grown from seeds in the most sterile, greenhouse-controlled environment, fed regular meals of (sometimes chemical) green-inducing vitamins. And then you bring them home into your regular 'ole place with normal everyday humidity and just watering. And of course, they react.

It doesn't mean they're dying! This came as such a great revelation to me this week, when I watched my careful efforts nurse a seemingly ailing bougainvillea back to life. I brought this lovely plant home from a nursery two months ago and slowly it lost all its blooms and the leaves turned yellow. I had read that bougainvillas like to be slightly dry and lots of sun so I had given them that, but still they kept losing, and losing. So finally I went out and bought some organic fertilizer for flowering bushes, watered a little of that in, gave it a good bath, trimmed the branches back a bit... and two weeks later--voila--something started to come back to life. This is what 'acclimation' means.

(the bouga picture at top is not mine, but it won't be long till I get her looking like this...!)

We have a front yard that is mostly covered with a grass called St. Augustine. It seems to have been cared for very well--it looks nice, grows nice, except for a few bare spots here and there, especially in places where we stomp on all the time. In our last house, most of our yard got a little green in early spring until about mid-summer, when the crushing heat of Texas wilted and killed all growing things. Now mostly the reason for this, I've realized in retrospect, is that what I considered a yard, a lawn, was mostly weeds, nice...…