The dog days of summer are definitely here. Sirius, the dog star, is reportedly in the sky July 3 – August 11 this year. Dog days last a bit longer in South Florida – through September at least. My dog, Fiona the greyhound, is enjoying baking in the sand until it gets too hot, then she looks puzzled. I am puzzled by how much she enjoys this!
I enjoy the small details in the garden that thrive in summer. Native Portulacas pop up everywhere. I keep some and pull many of them out as they are prolific reseeders. This one is called Kiss Me Quick (Portulaca pilosa)
Heliconias, true to their name, enjoy the heat. This is Heliconia psittacorum.
Our native Salvias (Salvia coccinea) flower readily with just a little water.
The Chicken Gizzard plant (Iresine herbstii) is showing its colors. I am wondering if I should cut it back.
The Zin Master Zinnias have been providing cut flowers twice a week. I have been enjoying these by the kitchen sink. Bringing the garden indoors is a Sirius pleasure.
That’s all from my garden this Saturday. To join the worldwide garden tour visit Jim at Garden Ruminations.
People do grow roses in South Florida. I just don’t have the stomach for it, imagining the black spot and fungal diseases is sufficient, thank you, no. I need plants that will beat the heat and humidity. The Zin Master Zinnias are in fine form this summer. I am cutting a few every day and admiring how long they last in a Vase. About a week.
Given the broad range of colors in the zinnias; I decided a simple treatment was best. A grey vase found at a thrift store filled with a rubber band secured bouquet of zinnias and a few sprigs of my inexhaustible supply of the invasive Asian Sword Fern.
The stars:
The zinnias definitely like to be outside more than I do!
This Saturday morning my tour brought up a few things in the garden I have mixed feelings about and a few love/hate relationships. I’m starting with love going to mixed and ending with hate. For more, likely less emotional SOS garden tours, follow this link GardenRuminations to visit our host, Jim.
I love Cattleya orchids peeking out of a tree trunk.
I love the new Dendrobium orchids establishing in my Gumbo Limbo tree. These produce flowers in spring.
Loving the ever expanding group of Rain Lilies (Zephyrantes rosea)
It’s safe to say I have mixed feelings about vines, especially this one. Meet Yellow Allamanda (Allamanda cathartica). Sure, it’s pretty, but also a rampant thug. It forms tubers like potatoes (very toxic). I may pull it out with my SUV this winter. I say that every year.
Soap Aloe (Aloe saponaria) is a nice architectural plant that grows a little too well and needs to be thinned. It’s oh, so sharp. Hmmm.
Yes, I hate these. Yellow Agama lizards. There is also a rainbow version running around the garden, red and blue. These are African lizards introduced by the exotic pet trade and they have become invasive. Up to a foot long, they eat native lizards and stake out my butterfly plants for fine dining. There are sometimes packs of them, they scuttle away on the path as I walk through the garden – like a horror movie. EEk!
I am enjoying my new crop of zinnias – ‘Zin Master’, planted in big terracotta pots. I have been cutting most of the flowers in hopes of getting actual long stemmed zinnias – something that has always eluded me, my zinnias are always very short in stature. These are the longest stems I have ever grown and have a wiry appearance that I like. I visualized this vase as a Zen Ikebanaesque arrangement with winding stems of zinnias intertwined with the Min – Miniata Bromeliads. It was not to be, the glass frog serving as a base was not up to the challenge of the weight of the flowers. I had to add rocks on top of the frog to keep everything upright. I ended up not having a very Zen flower experience at all. It is what it is. A soup bowl filled with flowers.
The Zin – ‘Zin Master’ Zinnias grown from seed started around the first of May. I am enjoying the color mix, but thought I would get some different types of zinnias. I guess these are semi-double something. I bought some Cactus Mix seeds this week to spice things up. I am not quite sure what will happen in mid July with seed starting. Always an adventure.
The Min. These are Miniata Bromeliads (Aechmea miniata). A reliable summer flowering shade perennial, if one can think of bromeliads as perennials. The tropical plants always twist my mind a bit in sorting out what they are – house plants, perennials, epiphytes, plain weird? The big green leaves in the back are from a coleus and the vase is actually a soup bowl.
That is all from South Florida this Monday. I’ll be seeking further garden Zen from Zinnias this week. Follow the link to visit Cathy at RamblingintheGarden and see what’s appearing in other vases this week. Or soup bowls.
This is the Fourth of July week and in celebration I decided to put together a red, white and blue vase with four different types of flowers. That might be too much math. It seems like something should add up to sixteen somewhere. Math was never my true calling.
July is being true to its nature. It is hot, humid and we are having frequent thunderstorms. The garden is well hydrated, I am picking mangoes daily and contemplating weeding. Not actually weeding, just thinking about it. As I was cutting flowers, I had a rather startling experience.
This is a good, non venomous snake. I am not sure if it is a Black Racer or an Indigo snake. Both eat all kinds of bad things including venomous snakes. I usually see them scurrying away. This is a first – one hanging out in the shrubs and waiting around long enough for me to get a picture. I am hoping he or she was eating invasive lizards.
The red in the arrangement is from the seasonally appropriate Firecracker Plant (Russelia equisetiformis); White flowers are from Bridal Bouquet Plumeria (Plumeria pudica).
Blue spike flowers are Mystic Blue Salvia and the white spikes are Tropical Red Salvia (Salvia coccinea). The airy flower buds and varigated foliage are from Dianella tasmanica or New Zealand Flax. A trimmed palm frond is in the back of the vase. The vase is a florist orphan.
Happy Monday from steamy South Florida. Visit Cathy at RamblingintheGarden to visit less steamy gardens and see what has been plucked and plonked into a vase this week.
The title would make one think I had been eating seafood while imbibing in red wine. Oh, how crass! I have not. I am not a big fan of red wine and drink white regardless. I have probably now surpassed crass.
The shrimp in the vase are Red Shrimp Plant and the Zin, Zin Master Zinnias. The zinnias are supposed to be a mixture of cactus and other types of zinnias, so far they all look like these, disappointingly regular zinnias. For some reason, these are the best looking Zinnia plants I have ever grown – so, maybe the other flowers will be more spectacular. I think I have twelve or so in big terracotta pots under planted with Blue Scaveola and chartreuse coleus. Hopefully another garden miracle in the making. Seed mixes are like a box of chocolates – you never know what you are going to get. Paraphrasing Forrest Gump.
Red Shrimp Plants (Justicia brandegeana) are a sort of pass along perennial in Florida. A neighbor gave me one about ten years ago. I regularly forget about it and it just keeps on going and flowering without a care in the world. It occurred to me I should root some for other areas of the garden I tend to forget about. It also makes a great cut flower.
A closer view:
The ‘Zin Master Zinnias with a little Red Shrimp below and some Licorice plant (Helichryseum) tendrils above.
Firebush (Hamelia patens var patens) are the tubular orange flowers in the arrangement. The vase is a bromeliad leaf wrapped pickle jar from a couple of weeks ago. I left it as I was wondering if it would dry into something attractive. It is looking a bit like wood now, not quite dried out.
This Monday the garden is in similar shape to the vase, not quite dried out. We have been getting regular downpours and the plants are very happy. Of course, all the weeds are ecstatic. Summer fun.
To see more vases from Cathy’s international entourage of gardeners; visit Rambling in the Garden and follow the links in the comments.
It’s Saturday morning, as I was finishing my coffee hatching plans for my SOS post it started pouring down rain! After checking my trusty (ha!) weather app on my phone, it was suggested this was going on for quite a while. So, this Saturday we have views of what can be seen in my garden from the front and back porch without getting too wet.
The kitchen seemed like a good place to start. This is my first Thai dessert mango of the year (Nam Doc Mai). It is not quite ripe. It should have a fully developed peach color and floral fragrance before peeling and eating. I am finding it is a bit of a trick to pick and ripen the perfect mango. Sometimes they fall off the tree and it is okay, sometimes not. If picked too soon they don’t ripen at all.
Mango blueberry upside down cakes (pineapple as well) These are made with Glenn mangos from my other tree.
I am still at work on the Coleus tree. I pruned it back again this week. I think it might need a harder prune to develop a nicer top.
Turkey Tangle Frog Fruit (Phlya nodiflora) lawn is finally growing in. ‘Bossa Nova’ Neoregelia bromeliads in the foreground.
I have been waiting for this flower. Grown from seed. This is a Zin Master Zinnia. I thought it was going to be bigger! The plants are just huge and beautiful.
King of Siam Croton (Codieum varigatum). A new addition to the garden this spring, finally showing its coral spots.
That is my Six for this Saturday. Visit Jim at Garden Ruminations to see more SOS posts. I will be in the kitchen contemplating more mango desserts.
I put this vase together on Father’s Day, so it was very appropriate to use one of my parents wedding gifts as a vase this week. My parents married in 1950, I think these teapots must have been popular at the time. I remember this teapot sitting on the kitchen counter very frequently as my mother used it to brew tea for iced tea year round. A pink plastic pitcher of iced tea was a constant presence in my childhood. If you grew up in the Deep South, iced tea is the beverage of choice for lunch and dinner (or if you are really Southern, lunch is called dinner and dinner is supper)
The flowers in this vase wouldn’t make a tasty brew. I am fairly certain the Tropical Gardenias are toxic, but it might smell pretty good.
A closer view:
I have accepted a few (guffaw) wild grape vines as a fact of life in my garden. These are muscadines (Vitis rotundifolia) I think it would take a small thermonuclear device to get rid of all of them and then I would have to start over. Not happening. So I cut a few here and there, add some to a vase, make a wreath and feed wildlife. The Gardenias are Tropical or Florida Gardenias (Tabernaemontana diviricata); our massive rain event this week produced a wonderful flush of flowers.
Pink flowers in the vase are the bitter end of the winter annual Giant Dianthus. I am puzzling over what to do with it. Put it in a shady place and hope for a miracle or consign it to the compost heap? It is a dilemma. Light blue flowers are Blue Plumbago (Plumbago auriculata); deep blue spikes are Mystic Blue Salvia, the spikes are oddly shorter due to dry weather earlier in the summer. A few sprigs of chartreuse coleus and fuzzy grey Licorice Plant (Helichrysum) add color.
Thanks to Cathy at RamblingintheGarden for hosting this weekly event. Follow the link and find more vase enthusiasts from around the world.
South Florida has been featured in the news this week for its first tropical weather of the season. Miami and environs received 20 inches of rain in some areas and are still drying out. More rain is expected this weekend. I live in the far north of South Florida and realized I had left a bucket out in the front garden before the deluge started. After checking it out I found we had almost nine inches of rain this week. The first thing to pop are the weeds and mosquitoes!
The garden greedily gobbled up the water and the plants are a new shade of green this Saturday, some of the more tropical plants started flowering and setting buds. We have had a very dry spring so the rain was welcome. It is too bad there is no means to adjust the water flow from above.
Coontie Palms (Zamia integrifolia) recovering from butterfly hosting duties. The rare Atala butterfly lays eggs and grows caterpillars on this plant almost exclusively. These were eaten to the ground during the spring and have recovered nicely. Super Fireball Neoregelias in front of the photo are a bit scorched from the dry spring, they are usually red or green. I hope they recover. Fortunately, there are a zillion of these lurking in the back garden. The varigated shrubs in the background are Java White Copper leaf (Acalphya wilkesiana). Grassy plants are Rain Lilies.
Alcantarea odorata bromeliad gaining its glaucous foliage. This is a big, full sun bromeliad that eventually reaches 3 feet wide and tall, they are sage green and look like they have been dusted in confectioners sugar. A statement plant if you are into that lingo. I am trying to decide about underplanting it with purple verbena or orange groundcover orchids. A friend sent me an offset two or three years ago and it is finally taking off.
More bromeliads, this is a big mixed container. The purple foliage is Neoregelia ‘Luca’; the grey foliage with a bud coming on is Silver Urn (Aechmea fasciata)
Mexican Bush Honeysuckle (Justicia spicigera) is a reliable summer bloomer. This is the first flush.
Coral Plant (Jatropha multifida) starting its summer season.
Gopher tortoise visiting my front porch for a vegetarian snack. Any plant that hangs over the side is fair game. It took me a while to figure out what was eating the basil. This guy must not be Italian as he leaves the oregano alone.
That is all from South Florida this Saturday. For a worldwide SOS garden tour follow this link http://garden ruminations.co.uk to visit Jim’s blog.
I looked back to last year and noted my first mango! was picked on June 2. We are a few days behind this year, but I am thrilled to introduce the first victim of my serrate knife – to be chopped, pureed and made into a Mango Key Lime pie this afternoon! This is a Glenn mango, flavor profile sweet and peachy with hints of citrus. Ha! just like wine speak, I think they taste coconutty.
The indestructible Red Shrimp Plant (Justicia brandegeana) is starting back up. This is another amazing plant, dump it in sugar sand, forget about it, and it still keeps going.
Another great summer red (not wine again) is the Petunia exserta. These are sort of viney and meandering through the White Flame Salvia.
The orchids I placed in trees are establishing nicely and loving the humidity (unlike me). This is an unnamed Dendrobium in a Catalina (or Cuban) Avocado.
I tried a new mix of open pollinated Zinnia seeds for summer. These are called Zin Master Mix and I am more than curious about what I am going to get here. The plants are gorgeous (I thought they were going to die) I have a bunch of these plants and was planning to try some in the ground, but we have been overrun by Marsh Rabbits this year and they find the Zinnias to be an extreme delicacy. Another gardening dilemma. These rabbits are so confident they build nests inside the fence with a greyhound! These are in a big pot with a chartreuse Coleus and under planted with Blue Scaveola. No idea what color Zinnias are. Hope it works.
The Marsh Rabbit – looking for Zinnias in all the wrong places.
That is all from my garden this Saturday morning. To tour other SOS gardens, visit Jim’s blog, GardenRuminations and follow the links in the comments. I will be hopping into the kitchen to bake.
The Shrub Queen 