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Welcome to my zone 9a habitat garden near Houston, Texas.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - December 2012/This week in the garden - #42

I considered skipping Bloom Day this month. Frankly, after the horror of the last twenty-four hours with the murder of twenty innocent children and six of their caretakers in Connecticut, I'm not really in the mood for blogging about blossoms. But I have vented about that tragedy elsewhere so I won't burden you with further words about it here.

In fact, though, it may be at times like this that we most need our gardens. We need the consolation of the turning of the seasons, the beauty of Nature, and the belief that life will continue and that something good may come even of the deepest tragedy.

My garden is slipping into its short winter nap. We did have our first frost of the season on Monday night and our second one on Tuesday night. Since then it has gradually warmed up and temperatures are back near 80 degrees F today. But the two nights with temperatures at freezing put an end to most of the bloomers in my garden. That's okay. My garden has worked hard all year. It deserves a bit of a rest.

The day before our first frost, I noticed that one of my crinums had put out some buds. I wondered if those buds would survive the frost. Well, I needn't have wondered. Crinums are very tough plants and even though the leaves got bitten by frost, the buds survived and a couple of days later, they opened to display beautiful blooms. Maybe there is a metaphor there somewhere.

There are a few other plants still blooming in my garden - a few roses, the shrimp plant, Copper Canyon daisy, orange bulbine, even the purple lantana is still offering a few blossoms for winter butterflies to sip from - but most everything else is sleeping now and so we have to look inside for more blooms.

The ubiquitous flower of the season, poinsettias, brighten my hearth. I hope that you have blossoms to brighten your life on this Bloom Day and at this holiday season.

Remember to pay a visit to Carol at May Dreams Garden for a list of other Bloom Day participants and to see what's blooming around the world.

4 comments:

  1. Yes Dorothy, that was really tragic! We had more than a thousand bordering on 2K deaths in the strongest typhoon in Mindanao, Philippines last week, and a lot of the survivors are still homeless, foodless, and vegetation and houses totally, as in 95%, destroyed. But that is a force majeur, unlike what happened in CT. I wonder why this seems to happen often in the US. Anyway, our gardens don't sleep as yours, they are awake all the time. Merry Christmas.

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    1. I have followed the reports of the appalling devastation in the Philippines. Some days it seems that tragedy is all around us.

      Even as politics contributes to the exacerbation of global warming and the climate change and extreme weather events that result, so politics contributes to the epidemic of gun violence which we suffer from in the United States. Specifically, we have politicians who lack the courage to stand up to the big gun lobbies that are loaded with money. And so children die needlessly.

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  2. I'm interested that even there by the Gulf the gardens take a brief rest. I think that is preferable to going all year, though if it were up to me the period of rest up here would be a bit shorter.

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    1. Our "winter" generally lasts from about the middle of December through the end of January. By early February things begin to wake up again. That six weeks or so is the time in which I try to move all my plants that need to be moved - while they sleep - and put in any new beds I'm planning. So even though the garden is sleeping, the gardener is usually busy.

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