Gardening, anyone?

ooh pretty Teka

Adorable Jazzy

Bulbs are in the fridge and sweet pea, larkspur, stock, snapdragon seeds, Icelandic poppies and ranunculuses arrived in the mail yesterday. I have today and tomorrow off and plan to start prepping beds. I'm 6 weeks out from exchange surgery so am going to have to be creative with shovel and soil bags. Supposedly I can plant all of these this fall and have bloom during the winter. My goal is to have something to cut from my garden year round. I'm down to roses (here when I got here) at this point. Next year I'm going to do two rounds of zinnias and cosmos because the year before last at my rental I started them later and had them till the first frost. This year they were spent by late August. I'm hoping to be able to use my Christmas bonus to buy more flowering bushes to fill out my back hedge some more. This spring I planted an early camelia, lilac, peony, two hydrangeas, flowering quince and princess flowering bush. I'm hoping to have a wall of flowers all the way around the back garden. I bought the place one year ago and then got this DX. Plans are moving slower than expected but its so nice to know I'm hopefully (God willing) going to be able to watch this garden mature over the next 20 years. The sooner I get the bigger stuff in the sooner it will establish itself. I plan to fill in the shady side with a scented white rhododendron, a late blooming camelia and possibly an azalea I don't like most of them. On the sunny part I plan to put in a Lantana, a geranium I rooted taken from a neighbor's yard (with permission) hibiscus, potato bush. and probably a few more roses. The fence could have some vines too but that's down the road. DH has said I can have some of his lawn to triple our vegetable area in the spring. Tomatoes and peppers all summer has inspired him to let go of a section. When we moved in he would hear no part of it. I had giant plans for the front with fruit trees and a full on rose garden but that's just going to have to go in another year from now. My great aunt Joan lived in London in a brown stone on the edge of Kensington Gardens. Her back gate opened up into the public garden and she would leave it open to show off hers. It was a typical English garden with a square of lawn, a flowering hedge around the three sides and Roman urns on each side of the steps onto the lawn. There were articles and even a book with her garden featured. I'm using some of the same flowers she used. She had a wild pet crow. I need one.

GMA- so pretty and very artistic too!

Something hopeful about putting bulbs in the ground as the days are closing down.

Very nice. What is the green shrub in the background?

Yes, I have to large rosemary bushes in the background. They grow wild here too. I am getting ready to prune these back, they get huge every summer and have some lovely purple blooms spring and fall.

The common milkweed seed pods in our backyard.

Monarch butterfly caterpillars feed exclusively on milkweed.

Another gardener who is getting better at not killing stuff. We recently planted a herb garden, but everything seems to be taking except the coriander (cilantro). It was growing well, then started flowering and dying. We've tried many times to get it going. Any tips?

We have huge gardenia shrubs and jasmine which I love!

This site is a healing balm to soul and body. I hope to post some meager attempts of trying to provide monarch habitat of milk weed here in coastal Texas.

Best wishes for New Year 2019!

My desk sits in front of a window to my garden. Today, I glimpsed these flowers on the trellis. I stop often while I'm working at my desk to gaze out the window, and more often while I was doing taxes! What a treat to see roses in bloom in January! But who knows what climate change will bring. The winds have been so strong I thought it was March!

It was a good day to work in the garden today.

Best wishes to all as always,

Marilyn

Agree, Melissa. In my experience cilantro is kind of like lettuce. It grows great in early summer and then bolts in the hot weather.

You southerners and southern hemisphere peeps will have to keep us northerners going till spring. Oh and apparently Oregon is stillblooming! I got nothing to show except indoor plants.