Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day: October 2010

Blooms are scarce in my garden this month, but, truth to tell, this week I've been more fascinated by leaves than by my meager blooms. We are not known for our fall leaf color here in humid Southeast Texas, but this year, we seem to be getting a little more of those conventional autumn hues than we normally do, and so those are the first "blooms" I want to mention on this Bloom Day.


The leaves are falling faster and faster and they carpet the yard everywhere that I walk.


And when I look up, I see a colorful leaf mosaic against the sky.


The leaves seem to be changing color even as I watch.


The leaves of the Japanese maple turn an ever deeper hue.


Elsewhere in the garden, the muscadine grapes will soon be changing color, too.


The gerberas had rested from blooming during several weeks of our hottest weather, but now they are celebrating the cooler temperatures by sending out more blooms.


The orange gerberas have joined the blooming frenzy.


And the orange butterflies - Gulf Fritillaries - take full advantage.


'Red Cascade' rose rested for a while, too, but now it is back, giving me bouquets of its tiny, perfect red blooms every day. This is one of my favorite roses.


In another rose bed, this blue mistflower has reseeded itself among the 'Radazz' Knockouts. I've left it alone because the butterflies love it so, and I love the butterflies.


The butterflies love these prairie asters, too. They are just beginning to open up for me. By next month, they should be in full bloom.


As for 'Radsunny', she never quits. She has given me a profusion of blooms all spring, summer, and now fall, in spite of heat and drought and neglect. This picture shows the progression of her blooms. When she first opens up, she's a butter yellow, but as she ages, she fades to a pale mellow yellow. Some gardeners find this an objectionable trait, but I rather like it. After all, we gardeners change as we age, too. Sometimes it's even for the better.


In the veggie/herb garden, the basil offers its purple blooms to the bees who swarm to it every day.


Near the front door, a pot of cheery yellow mums with 'Purple Heart' tradescantia greets visitors.


But overhead, the bright colors of autumn leaves outdo all the blooms in the garden this month.

Thanks for visiting my garden this Bloom Day. Don't forget to check in with Carol of May Dreams Gardens and see a list of all the other Bloom Day participants.

Happy gardening!

Wordless Wednesday: Autumn leaves, autumn sky

Autumn reflections

Autumn is a time for reflections - on life as well as on the garden. It's the time of year and the time of life when we are most able to look back over the year in the garden or over our lives and see what has worked out well, or where we have made mistakes and what we can do to correct those mistakes or at least to keep from making them over and over again.

As the leaves fall faster and faster around us, we are forced to think about the passage of time and how gardening is a bit like life itself. As gardeners, we experience life in its full circle every year, from planting and reproduction in spring right up through death in winter, and yet, as gardeners, we know very well that nothing - nothing - ever really disappears from the earth. The tree that disappears from the forest or from our landscape may no longer be recognizable as "tree", but it is still there. Its atoms and molecules may be changed, but Earth and its natural processes will not suffer it to be lost.

Our planet is a closed system and everything that was ever here is still here. The dinosaurs may no longer walk the earth (although some of us believe their descendants fly around it every day) but they are still here. Their molecules have been changed and have migrated into some other form, but nothing is lost. Nothing is ever wasted.

As gardeners, we amend the soil and plant. We water and fertilize and prune - yes, and water again. We are witnesses to the constant changes throughout the gardening year, and, if we take the time to think about it, we can see those changes reflected in our own lives as well. For there, too, we amend the soil and plant and water and fertilize and prune. We strive to learn and grow as human beings, to prune away bad habits and bad thoughts and to fertilize and encourage good ones. We are always seeking to make our lives blossom and to achieve that perfect form which only we can see.

One learns to garden by gardening, but, in a very real sense, one can learn to live by gardening as well. The lessons of the one translate well in facing the problems and vicissitudes of the other. Gardening as a metaphor for life seems very plausible to me on this perfect autumn afternoon of reflections.

A gardener's week - #10

Sometimes called firebush, the Hamelia patens did appear to be burning this week. It could be a symbol for my garden.

Another week without rain. Another week of manning (womanning?) the sprinklers and hoses and trying to make sure that nothing actually dies of thirst.

In spite of the very dry conditions, progress continued on the fall vegetable garden. So far, I have planted:

- 'Russian banana' fingerling potatoes
- Red cabbage plants
- Spinach plants
- Broccoli plants
- 'Sugar Daddy' sugar snap pea seeds
- 'Cherry Belle' radish seeds
- Collard plants
- Mesclun mix plants and seeds
- 'Mizuna' mustard seed
- Multiplying onion plants

I still have seeds for beets, carrots, turnips, and chard to plant. Plus my wild card seeds for fall - parsnips! I've never planted parsnips before and I have no idea how they will do. Gardening is such an adventure, isn't it?

The fall tomatoes that I planted back in summer are finally looking like they might actually do something and the peppers from spring just keep going and going.


Today's harvest of "spring" peppers.


The chili pequin is also producing its share of fiery little fruits but I leave those for the birds.

Around the garden this week, butterflies are still somewhat scarce. I haven't seen any more Monarchs, but I did have a Tawny Emperor on a stand of blue mistflower on Thursday and I have seen Spicebush Swallowtails and Pipe-vine Swallowtails in addition to the Giant Swallowtails that I've had pretty much constantly since spring. There's also been a slight uptick in the number of Gulf Fritillaries and Cloudless Sulphurs, as well as little skippers too numerous to name, but all in all, I have to say that it continues to be a pretty disappointing year for butterflies in my garden.

In other news of fliers in the garden, the hummingbirds are dwindling. I have at least one left in the backyard but I haven't seen any in the front yard since I snapped this picture on a chilly Wednesday morning.



He was sitting on the feeder hook just outside my study window, waiting for the sun to warm him. He was all fluffed out and looked like he was wearing an overcoat.

I recently showed you my butterfly ginger that had finally bloomed after three years. Now I feel I must give equal time and space to my delinquent bougainvillea.



'Barbara Karst' hasn't bloomed in three years and is taking up valuable space in my garden. I was determined to rip her out this winter if she didn't bloom this year, so now she is grudgingly giving me a FEW blossoms. I'm not sure it is going to be enough to save her.

I don't often get the blues in my garden - either the emotion or the color. October brings two good blues, the aforementioned blue mistflower, which butterflies love, and the blue plumbago.


This plumbago sprawls by the fence offering its blue blossoms to the passing Cloudless Sulphurs that seem to favor it. Perhaps they know how pretty they look with their yellow wings complementing the blue of the flowers they sip.

No, I don't often get the blues in my garden, but I may just catch them soon if it doesn't rain.

I hope your garden is getting sufficient rain and that you and it have a good week.

Wordless Wednesday: Brazilian Skipper on Turk's cap

Future Queens

Wandering through the garden early this morning, checking the status of some recently planted plants, my eye was caught by something colorful against the green stem of a milkweed plant.


No, it wasn't the Monarch caterpillar that I've been hoping might turn up, but it was the next best thing - a Queen caterpillar. As you can see, they are marked very similarly to the Monarchs, even as the butterflies themselves are, but the Queen caterpillar has three matched sets of fleshy tentacles protruding from the body.


You can see those tentacles - and their shadows - even more clearly in this shot of one of the caterpillars that had crawled off the milkweed and onto the nearby fence. Most likely looking for a likely resting spot for a chrysalis.

I'll keep hoping that one of my early morning walks around the garden will turn up Monarch larvae someday soon, but, in the meantime, these beautiful future Queens made my day.


~*~*~*~


The Monarch migration continues. You can report your sightings, as I reported my first sighting of the fall last week, at Journey South. Be a part of this important Citizen Science project.

A gardener's week - #9

Ah, September, we hardly knew ye! Your thirty short days went by in a blur. Hardly had we begun to recover from the insufferable heat of August when sweet October was peeking over the windowsill. Where did you go, September, and what was accomplished during your tenure?

Well, actually quite a lot was accomplished in September now that I am looking back, and a lot of it was done within the last week or ten days of the month when suddenly the weather turned quite pleasant. A lot of fall cleanup was completed and much of the fall veggie garden was planted. In fact, things are beginning to look more like a garden than a wilderness in my yard. Now I just have to try to keep up the momentum.

So, this week in the garden, the challenge was to refrain from just sitting down and looking around with a foolish grin while glorying in the gorgeous fall weather and my recent accomplishments, but to actually keep slogging along, making a little progress every day. That and keeping the hoses moving around the yard to sustain my plants until the autumn rains finally begin. (They are coming, aren't they, Mother Nature?)

One of the fun things about this week and most weeks in the garden has been observing the critters that come and go here. I've already written about my first Monarch butterfly sighting of the fall, but here are some of the other critters with whom I've shared my garden this week.


Little Sammy, the baby Eastern Box Turtle, has been back looking for a meal of kibble. He's very shy and shuts up tight as soon as he sees me and my camera, so it is almost impossible to get a picture of him with head and limbs out of his shell. I love the pristine, shiny quality of his shell. Most of the adult box turtles that I see have worn and damaged shells.

On Thursday, I was doing some pruning and deadheading around the garden and I decided to "limb up" my lemon tree which is now close to four feet tall and had several bushy limbs around its base. As I started to snip one of the limbs, the base of the limb twitched!


I nearly dropped my pruning shears when I realized I had almost cut a Giant Swallowtail caterpillar! Funny thing is, I've had lots of Giant Swallowtails around the garden recently and I had just checked the lemon tree and the Satsuma a couple of days before to see if there were larvae or eggs there. I didn't find anything, but obviously this guy had been there for quite a while, for he was about ready to pupate.

Only a day before, when I was watering my bronze fennel, I had found a cache of Black Swallowtail larvae of all sizes. I had not even seen any Black Swallowtail butterflies around the yard lately, but they had been here and had left me some presents.


This was the largest of the group and I only found one of his size. Like the Giant Swallowtail caterpillar, he was about at the end of his life as a larva and ready to move on to the next phase of metamorphosis.


The caterpillar on the left was about two-thirds the size of the one above, but the one on the right was very young indeed. There were several of his size scattered over the plants.


There were other interesting tiny critters around the yard this week, including all the baby anoles, toads and frogs that seem to be super-abundant this year, but I would rank katydids right up there with the rest of them.


Not a critter, but named for a critter is this butterfly ginger (Hedychium) from which I've been waiting for a bloom for three loooong years.


No waiting was necessary for this red ruellia which was all too anxious to bloom. And bloom. And bloom.


Same goes for this salvia 'Otahal' which seems to bloom continuously spring to fall, with maybe just a short rest during the hottest days of August.


In fact, as many Gulf Coast gardeners have learned, there are few more dependable bloomers or more useful plants in our gardens than the many varieties of sages and salvias, including the beautiful and prolifically blooming 'Mystic Spires'.


Even the Texas sage (Cenizo) has favored me with a few blooms recently. I had watered the xeric bed where it lives a few days before and apparently it triggered a bloom cycle.


I've been disappointed in my oxblood lilies this year. I had dreamed of a nice, lush display of blooms when I planted them. Instead, they have come up one by one by one and bloomed. The effect is very sparse, not at all what I had hoped for. I thought about possible reasons for this and finally realized that these blooms too are triggered by rains, and my rains have been extremely spotty to nonexistent ever since July. Also, these little bulbs live in a bed where I don't routinely supply supplemental water, but next year (if I can remember) if we are not getting rain, I will try to start watering that bed in August in hopes of getting better blooms.


The spring-blooming redbud is now full of seed pods that show its relationship to the legume family of plants.


This banana is showing neither blooms nor "seeds" so far. Last year it began its bloom in mid-October, so I'm keeping my eye on it.


And, finally, this, surely, is the very last of the blossoms from the milk-and-wine lilies. These tough old Southern beauties have bloomed repeatedly and often unexpectedly throughout the summer and at the end of September offered the "last of the summer wine".

I hope your week in the garden was a good one and that next week will be even better.