My Cheese Was Moved!!!!

I am certainly one who doesn't like having my cheese moved....a mouse content to follow the same maze day after day for its entire life.  So, yes, my life was turned upside-down in 2011, and I sunk into a dark abyss.  Now that I'm returning to the old me, picking up the camera and the shovel again, I guess I expected the world to have remained the same.  But we've had some serious cheese tease on the Internet.  My favorite quick-edit site, Picnik.com, has closed!!!!  Shut down forever!  (Cue Silent Scream.)  Yeah, I have PhotoShop, which is great for people photos and serious stuff.  But that's a hassle for my garden-blog shots, when all I want to do is crop, pop in some text, and add a vignette.  So the past few days, I've been fumbling to find a quick-edit program out there on the net that could compare to Picnik.  Ugh.  It hasn't been easy.  The best I've found so far is Pixlr and that's what I'm using.  But navigating this new maze has not been easy.  Then there are all of the Blogger changes.  Ugh!  I feel like I have Butterfingers.  Everything is so different.  Don't move my cheese, people!  I have to admit, though, that I like some of these Blogger changes.  The "Reply" feature in the comments...Awesome!!!!

Okay, now that I have that off my chest....

I wrote recently of the demise of so many Orchids and the removal of the live ones to the outdoors under the Grandfather Oak.  Today, I will also confess that I had so neglected my other containers during the dark days, that I had no choice but to do a massive reworking of them.  It is fun, though!  I love having an excuse to create new pot plantings!  I feel like its much easier to be a garden artist with such a small canvas.

This large pot once housed a giant bird of paradise.  Post-neglect, it still lived but was in sad shape, so I just tossed it.  No great loss, as we have those coming out our ears.  The oyster plant at the bottom was still alive, but once again, no great loss.  And I was dying to do the combo you see above.  When out and about in the city a couple days ago, I saw this exact combo in a big planter.  I couldn't wait to get home and copy it...for I knew I had both plants already in the garden.  I pulled this mama-sized Neoregelia from underneath a bottlebrush and dug the pothos from underneath the oak tree. (I am constantly pulling the weedy vine that keeps finding its way to the earth from the giant stuff up in the oak.)  Anyway, I thought the combo was so striking, and I do think it looks much cheerier than that old, sickly bird.  This container is in the Orchid Room, which still waits for a new name.

This is the spillover pot by my front porch.  I blogged about this last year...it was a pot my sister gave me.  I had wanted one of these pots for soooooo long.  I had planted it last summer with coleus cuttings and some Neo 'Fireball' that I pulled from the back garden.  Well, neglect has led to the demise of the Fireballs.  No great loss, as we still have them in the garden.  The coleus looked rough, so I just snapped the tips and planted them out in the garden for a second life.  Then I went shopping at the garden center for something new.  Came home with this Alocasia 'Poly' and Coleus 'Stained Glassworks.'   Lots of color and texture keeps Floridagirl's eyes happy.

And here's another spillover pot I added...a smaller one.  I fell in love with this Corkscrew Rush I kept seeing in the garden centers, so I had to find an excuse to buy one.  Isn't it adorable?!!!

I also put some New Guinea Impatiens in some dead pots, but I will not photograph those until they take off.  They're pretty small right now.  Savin' the money. 

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