The Southside Garden

So I've been away from the blog for a while.....

But that ol' camera has still been in my hands.  I am a bit upset that I will not have this record of my late spring garden, but that's life.  Anyway, here are a few shots of the lovely blooms gracing my garden right now:

In Celebration of Spring

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of the singing of birds is come,

and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,

and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

~Song of Solomon 2:11-13a (KJV) 

Sunny Weekend + Evil Foreboding

So here it is....  It's official. My little spot o' Florida is under a freeze watch for Monday and Tuesday nights.  I am truly almost speechless.  With five full winters under our belt, I can honestly say this garden has ne'er seen a December freeze.  What does this mean for the rest of winter?

Not Quite Paradise

A wiser, older gardening friend/neighbor once told me, when she observed the tropical garden I had planted, "We get a hard freeze about once every ten years...but don't you worry.  When that happens, you can just dig up those tropical plants and start over." 

November Stars

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  In this little piece of Florida in which I live, November is prime garden time!  So is December.  I understand from weather records, that it has frosted this time of the year before, but I've yet to witness it (knock on wood!).  The great thing about year's end is that all of the tropicals have been rebounding from last winter's frost all year, and are at their biggest, fullest, and bloomiest right now.  : )   So here it is, my recap of November faves:

November Notes and Frosty Fears

Just for the record...

I'm doing something a little uncharacteristic of me on my blog today.  I'm posting a few wide views of the garden, mainly just for the record, as winter will be upon us in January, before we know it, and after these last two winters, I have no faith that we shall ever have a frostproof winter again.  Never mind that there is a town literally named Frostproof not so many miles down the road from us.  From what I understand, that name was chosen long ago to attract citrus growers to the area, but it does indeed suffer the same risk of cold as we do...not frostproof at all.  ; ) 

Burning Questions

I am taking you on a walkthrough of my garden this morning, but I'd like to send out a few probes to other bloggers/photographers while we're walkin'.  Any help in answering these burning questions would be appreciated.

My Favorites...This Month! (October 2010)

Oh, glorious month of October!  Such a month of ambivalent feelings for me.  I am always quite saddened to see the crapes shedding leaves, and caladiums and curcumas slipping into the ground for winter's rest.  Yet I am thrilled to see those special blooms of autumn reveal their beautiful faces!  It's almost like having a second spring.  So today, I share my favorites for October, the splendid month of autumn:

A Positive Spin on a New Day

You know, sometimes, I'm just in need of a pick-me-upper.  Yes, I had a Melancholy Monday.  But I rose early this Tuesday morning and got my hands on as much positive reading material I could to put a proper spin on things.  Sometimes a little positive thinking and peaceful meditation is what we need to start a new day.  I have a nature that struggles a bit more than most with that concept of optimism.  My post today is hardly original, as I've gone a little quote-crazed, but I just wanted to share some of the inspiration I found this morning from some of history's great minds. 

Learning Curves and Growing Pains

I know many of my blog readers are experienced gardeners of the master sort.  I can tell from viewing your garden photos, which are always from the long view, by the way.  You know who you are.  Back a long, long time ago, in my early gardening days, I read in a magazine article that it takes about five years for a garden to reach anything near maturity.  Period.  It just takes that long for one to figure out sun rotations, soil idiosyncrasies, weather patterns, and that mysterious thing known as "microclimates."  And of course, it takes time for perennials to clump, for trees to stretch upward, and shrubs to attain some girth.  So every time I've moved into a new home and planted that new garden, I've worked and worked and waited and waited patiently for that elusive five-year anniversary to come.  (Leave it to me to take things so literally.)

My Favorites...This Month! (September 2010)

Susan of Simply Susan! asks us to share our current favorites each month, but I've found the further we travel from winter, the harder this task becomes.  I do think there must be hundreds of plant species in my garden.  Some day, I will have to catalog the lot of them.  It is unbelievable how many plant babies I can cram in this tiny space.  Problem is, nearly everything looks great right now, and of course, I love 'em all, so it's hard to narrow the faves down to a reasonable number.  Well, I'll give it a go anyway:

Of Order, Diversity, and Madness

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am no garden planner and that I cannot seem to bring myself to plant in large groupings.  I write on the sidebar over there that my garden style is "cram-as-many-plants-as-possible-into-a-half-acre-lot."  Well, that is about as true a statement as I can make.  I don't believe in putting on airs that aren't there.  This garden is what it is: a reflection of a botanically obsessed, compulsive plant collector.  It is not a garden that will appeal to everyone.  It is a far cry from the self-control of landscape design with its perfectly trimmed shrubs, ideally spaced trees, and huge groupings of colorful annuals.

Distractions

I wasn't planning to post today, but yesterday, there was such a flurry of activity about the firebushes that I marched out there with camera in hand determined to capture a shot.  Literally, there must have been twenty or so hummingbirds flitting in and out of the area, perching in the bottlebrush now, then in the bunya-bunya, and later in a crape myrtle.  What a delight to watch!  Much fighting seemed to be going on among the males, yes, those beautiful males with their flaming throats.  Then the lot of them would flit off into the nearby oak trees.  And back again!  There I stood, for easily an hour, hidden behind a couple of huge Florida cracker roses, trying to get that blasted camera to focus and shoot. 

Come, walk with me.

Come, walk with me.

August Rush!

I am in love with August!  Our peaceful garden has enjoyed weeks now of heavy rains, luscious growth, and bounteous bloom.  The tropicals in particular are flourishing in the torrid heat and humidity.  I have to say it works for me too, as cold weather does a number on these old bones and dry air wreaks havoc on my skin.  I hear many people wishing summer away, but I wish it would stay.  At least in Florida, we have a couple more months left.  : )

The Orange and the Blue

Can you guess my inspiration for garden photography this morning?

Everywhere I look there's ORANGE and BLUE today.

My Favorites...This Month! (June 2010)

I am joining in with Simply Susan! to post my favorite plants...this month anyway.  It was pretty hard making the selection, as usual...harder really, since we have so many more blooms this month than any since the Great Florida Freeze of 2010.

MGB-June 2010: Independence Bouquet

It's time for the June Monthly Garden Bouquet (actually, I'm a little late to the party), hosted by Noelle of Ramblings from a Desert Garden.  This is a fun meme and a great way to encourage hesitant gardeners to cut those stems.  (I personally find it very hard to take the scissors to my flowers.)

Purty things revisited

I don't really have anything exciting or new to report in the garden today.  But there are a lot of purty things I saw on my garden walk.  Things I have probably posted to death, but I think they're purty enough to revisit again.

Summer Superlatives

This morning, as I walked through the garden, my thoughts kept running to those "Senior Superlatives" in high school yearbooks.  I don't know why; guess it's all the graduations of late.  Or maybe it's that very significant high school anniversary that occurred this year.  Anyway, it was a big deal to make that section of the yearbook, wasn't it?  Didn't we all long to be voted "Most Likely to Succeed" or "Most Athletic" or "Best Dressed"?