Tag Archives: tropical plants in the garden

Where Did August Go?

How is it the last week in August.  Seriously?  I still have a spring to-do list and now I’m realizing the fall to-do list should have already been started and well you know how it goes.  At least the garden looks good and should look good until frost… assuming I continue to mow the lawn every other day because it seems neverending.

euphorbia marginata snow in summer

It’s a sunflower year in the front border.  The birds left a few seeds and the summer rains have brought them along and now the goldfinches are as pleased as I am.

We have been very lucky as far as rain goes, even if some would note it hasn’t been a good summer for sitting around outside due to heat and humidity and smoke and haze and clouds, and in hindsight that sounds like a terrible summer but there have been moments.

euphorbia marginata snow in summer

Annuals in general are having a decent year. I wouldn’t mind if the snow-in-summer (Euphorbia marginata) would seed around more, but it doesn’t always get an open patch in April to sprout up into.

I guess I have no complaints other than the pace at which summer flew by.  From one thing to another and it’s been an experience but it does make the days fly.  To see the late summer flowers, buds on the colchicums, and morning fogs off the river is a little discouraging, but I can convince myself it’s late summer rather than anything more ominous.  The summer  looks so nice and although unfinished projects abound, on a nice breezy afternoon I would sit for hours rather than do anything… especially if facing the reality of autumn is what’s on the next to-do list!

lilium formosanum

The last lily of the season, Lilium formosanum, is one you should grow if you can. It’s not your typical lily, it doesn’t clump up but it does seed around nicely, usually blooming in the second year from seed.

The fact is I’m a grasshopper, not an ant.  Ants are busy gathering seed, pulling weeds, and getting ready for mums, and I’m staring at a hibiscus.  I like hibiscus and find mums to be boring so let me stare away until reality hits and my garden is a mess.  Already the weeds are spreading and vines are creeping, and the tropicals are much bigger than they need to be, but in my opinion that’s excellent.  I like a summer garden that surrounds you and towers over you and even has a few vines grabbing at you.  There will be plenty of time for contemplation and starkness when cold, and hopefully some effort on the part of the gardener, clears things out.

rose of sharon ruffled satin

Dried weeds and prickly cucumber vines are exanding by the day, in this case over the blooms of ‘Ruffled Satin’ rose of sharon, one of the few rose of sharons which isn’t an overwhelming weed of a reseeder.

The tropicals will take me through to mid October and then I might just skip autumn and head right into winter.  Most of the tropicals are programmed that way, genetically they don’t even know what winter is so they just keep going and going and couldn’t care less about pumpkin spice and chrysanthemums and the grim reaper of a hard frost.

summer canna tropicanna

The waste area has become even more colorful as cannas join the zinnias in bloom.  I had to trim back most of the forest of Jimsonweed since it was overwhelming even the cannas and I do like my cannas 🙂

All the color in the garden is mostly rain, but also the graduation-party effect as I tried to weed and fertilize and plant more annual color than usual.  The graduate is now off to South Carolina but the plants remain, and I’m sad but enjoying the aftereffects of all the springtime gardening effort.

summer pelargoniums geraniums

This one bed outside the potager has terrible soil because I’ve done little to it since unearthing it after our construction project.  One day I rounded up all the sad overwintered geraniums (pelargoniums) and as many containers as I could muster and this became the geranium bed.

There is one tropical visitor who has me exceptionally excited this summer, and that’s the bananna.  The banana (‘Icecream’ I think) has been bravely overwintering as a decapitated and nearly rootless trunk for the last three winters in our mildly heated garage, and although she made me a little grumpy most of June and July, eventually I realized her anemic growth was due to a flower bud pushing up and not some other fault in my banana husbandry.  Although I expect tiny banana blooms within the next week or two, there’s zero chance they will have enough time to grow and ripen before winter descends upon this frosty Zone 6a Pennsylvania garden.  That is a tragic fact, but not one I can except, and I know there will be many bad decisions made in an attempt to get this plant through to a warm enough space where it can finish fruiting and ripen and give me a January home-grown banana for a waffle Plantness-week celebration.

icecream banana flowering pennsylvania

I shall not count my bananas before they hatch, but my fingers are crossed something cool happens.  Even just getting a bloom is more than I expected for a tropical eating banana in NE PEnnsylvania.

So while I’m considering another addition to the house to provide the sun and heat and headroom for a ten foot banana plant I guess I should mention the growing unease I feel when wandering the rest of the garden.  Weeds and decay don’t bother me, but there’s a suspicion that I’ve added some plants which need overwintering, and there’s also a perception that some of the houseplants have grown in size.  Grown in size sounds somewhat heart-warming, but when I say grown in size I mean five foot macho ferns, six foot begonias, and seven foot shefflera.  Also it’s plant cruelty to not divide and propagate things which are doing well, so one Boston fern becomes six before you know it… and for the record I didn’t start the season with just one Boston fern…

I will blame Begonia House.  Sure it sounds whimsical to paint the kids’ old playhouse garish colors and try a green roof and then surround it with summering plants from inside the winter garden, but when you take care of it and fertilize, the plants respond and if it keeps going until frost we might have to rename it Jungle House… hmm that sounds fun too, next year I could drag the house over to the potager and surround it with banannas and cannas and brugmansia and let annual vines run amock and… well first things first.

begonia house playhouse

‘Begonia House’  in the shaded side of the back garden surrounded by overwintering “houseplants”, which would never fit in a normal house, even one where the part-owner, subordinate decision-maker thinks a basement full of grow-lights is normal.

Hahahaha, you made me smile if you thought I was even close to considering what to do with things and where to put them this winter.  I’m a grasshopper!  Nothing to worry about here until it’s too late and it’s still another month at least before the inkling of danger becomes an actual thought.  I’m still planting coleus cuttings like it’s May 🙂

Have a great week, nothing to see here it’s all fine.

Chanticleer (part 3 of 3)

Finally!  The last part of my Chanticleer visit.  I suspect I might have gone on a little too long over my visit, but I really did enjoy the trip and the gardens are just the type of plantings I like to see at this time of year.  Lush healthy tropical plants putting on their last big hurrah before the first frost cuts them down.  Plus I like to use this blog as a photo record of the year, and I’m sure these images will come in handy during the icy days of winter.

Here’s the last big stop of the tour, the terrace gardens surrounding the main Chanticleer house.  As usual it’s a dose of reality when I see plants from my own garden used to so much better effect.  The Japanese maple, variegated Pagoda dogwood “Golden Shadows”, blue ageratum and “limelight” four o’clock near the path…. all look a lot nicer here!

I’m sure a terrace of bluestone pathways and stone steps would help my garden design immensely, but even the bronze fennel, dahlias, and verbena bonariensis look dreamier and fresher here.  The blue of the spiky agave helps too…. hmmm I grow that as well.  It’s sitting under the deck in a broken clay pot, wishing it were at Chanticleer.

The boxwood hedge which I’ve planted around my vegetable garden still needs several years before it reaches this immaculately trimmed state.  I like a nice boxwood edging, I think it’s worth the extra work of frequent trimming, and adds a nice touch of control to a bed that might otherwise look to be on the verge of messy.

Once my own boxwoods turn into a neat hedge I might start to refer to the vegetable garden as a ‘potager’.  Sounds so much more refined 🙂 .  But I might opt out on planting the prickly ‘bed of nails plant’ (solanum quitoense) in the potager.  Although it’s a near relative of eggplants, tomatoes, peppers and potatoes, the spiny leaves might be better suited for a focal spot out front (I love the poky plants!)

‘Black Pearl’  ornamental peppers also look great right up against the hedge, and these could easily fit into my future potager.

If you’re interested in reading a little more about these plants and some of the thoughts behind the plantings, check out this link at the Hardy Plant Society.  Jonathan Wright, the horticulturalist in charge of this part of the garden, wrote a great article on this area and some of the practices used to keep it looking at its peak from March into November.

Still in the terrace garden was something new that I liked.  An area formerly kept as a cut lawn had been turned over to a flowery meadow of fluffy little red amilias, red dahlias, and violet verbena boanariensis.  I wonder if this section will hold over to next year,  the grass was boring, but it did give a bit of a calm amidst all the overflowing beds.

The area around the house is absolutely crammed with treasures and accents.  These huge baskets have more in them than most average gardens.

And of course there were plenty of seating areas surrounding the house.  A great place to stop for a needed break.

With reds and purples and bronzes dominating some of the other gardens, here the terrace garden leans towards yellows and yellow foliage.  I have a real weakness for this color lately and loved the mix.  Too bad I had no idea what half the plants were!  The best I can do is say the little vine here is probably canary creeper (Tropaeolum peregrinum) a relative of the nasturtiums.  It’s supposed to be easy from seed so maybe……

Back to red and purple.  The purplish upright dracaena is again one I have, and I will definitely copy this combo with the red leaved coleus.

I’m almost through my picture horde.

One more here for banana lovers.  I believe this is the infamous ‘Ae Ae’ variegated banana.  First found in Hawaii, it’s a little cranky to grow and therefore a little expensive to buy.  Established pups (offshoots of the mother plant) typically run $200-$300 and fraud runs rampant.  Don’t buy seeds and don’t buy from a shifty Georgia nursery is all I’ll say (not that I’ve ever considered it).  The leaves are really cool looking though and to have it flanking both sides of the main doorway…..

I’ll stick to my yellows and chartreuse.  Here’s a yellow leaved redbud, potted ‘mossy’ plants and a circle of raked gravel.  Very calming.

And so on to the exit.  No time to sit, but there was still ample color coordinated seating.

I bet someone has fun moving the seats about finding them the perfect spot, a good idea I think.  I should keep it in mind next time I’m moving stuff to bring the lawn mower through… not that my dead grass ever needs mowing.

Out the front gate.  It’s a beautiful locale and I wouldn’t mind living closer, but I have to question whether our housing budget can handle the zipcode.  A quick real estate search of Wayne, Pa shows it to be a tad out of our budget.  Even with the sale of our current house, just the down payment  for properties running in the 1-5 million range would be an issue.  I guess we could lower our expectations, but I want the hayfield too. 🙂

  Thanks for looking!