Savannah Garden Diary

I’m abandoning this blog because we are moving to a farm in upstate New York to grow a little food. It seems like the most useful contribution a gardener can make to this economic meltdown. If time permits, I’ll be starting a web site for the farm.

I shall miss this garden very much. It is especially hard to leave just as the Carolina jasmine and Prunus mume are beginning to flower.

It has been great fun getting to know fellow garden bloggers at events like the Austin Spring Fling. I hope we shall all meet again one of these days.

The muhly grass is so lovely now with the morning sun behind it.

There’s no saying which species this is. It’s a native one that blazes on the sand dunes in fall, but there are 500 or so species and nobody knows them all. It is also the “sweet grass,” used to make sweetgrass baskets, which is becoming rare in the wild.

The butterfly gingers are still in flower on the right. (We’ve had a mild fall with only one non-killing frost.) Agapanthus in front. To the left is the baby Tung oil tree (Aleurites fordii) which is just beginning to lose its leaves.

We’re selling the house and I am so happy that it is going to a very enthusiastic gardener. I was unhappy at the thought of someone bulldozing all my treasures!

Oh horror! We’ve just got back from a month away. Someone’s been mowing the lawn while we were gone, but we’ve had quite a bit of rain and the temp has been high, so the beds are a JUNGLE. Many thanks to the nice people who have commented while I’ve been gone. I shall rejoin the human race when I get just slightly caught up with the weeds.

The lotuses have burst out all over (Nelumbo lutea). They are bigger and more beautiful this year. You can even see the seed pods clearly. They are impossible to photograph because you need an aerial view. Thom says I can borrow the 17′ ladder.

I am slightly concerned that the lotuses are taking over the pond. They were supposed to stay in the deep end and leave the shallow end to water lilies. But I have had only 2 water lily flowers this year and there are lotuses in most of the pond. I shall have to get rid of some of them. They are native, and obviously happy. I believe there is also a more yellow version, but I like this creamy one.

And in the lawn by the compost piles, the ground orchid Spiranthes vernalis. I am so happy to see it. We had it at our old house, but this is the first time I have seen it here. That’s what you get when you seldom mow the lawn. (The wildflower book calls it “Spring Ladies’-tresses.” I don’t think much of that for a common name.)

May Dreams‘ notion of “Bloom Day” is really impossible at this time of year. There is too much in flower to document it all. I strolled round the garden yesterday and found more than 30 things in flower.

Here’s a last look at the Easter lilies. They have been truly spectacular this year, but they are beginning to wilt in the heat.

This is native Canna flaccida in the bog, looking beautiful for the first and only time this year. Mary Waitzmann yanked this, or its ancestor, from a ditch near Darien. I love cannas, with their fine flowers and decorative leaves, but in this area they become riddled with pests, from leaf rollers to things that eat the flowers, so you just have to plant them where they can be admired from a great distance.

I picked up this Stokesia a couple of years ago for its really magnificent purple color. It is flourishing.

Here’s ‘Mutabilis,’ which is so tangled up in a Verbena bonariensis that it is hard to photograph. While weeding the other day, I discovered that V. bonariensis has seeded itself all over the place. I don’t remember it doing that in my previous garden.

I bought some Salvia greggii after admiring it on Pam/Digging’s blog. I had no idea it was so sprawly. I think I rather like it, as a change from all the very vertical salvias.

I am becoming very fond of ‘Ducher.’ It flowers a lot. I really like white flowers, and, at least so far, it has a fairly compact form.

The ruckus the frogs have been making every night is bearing offspring. There are tadpoles in the pond!

Easter lilies are out. In a surprising twist for 2008, they haven’t yet all fallen over. Do they lack calcium in their diet of something that they are usually so weak-kneed?

This is really just me fiddling around with my new camera. It’s going to take a lot of work. Never can remember the various effects of aperture and exposure.

I’ve seen some criticism of Zephirine Drouhin among the blogs, but I am still enamored of the spectacular color and her classic rose form. I’m not really smitten by most single roses (except Rosa laevigata). And the fragrance is lovely.

I really love this tradescantia with purple flowers and chartreuse leaves. I can’t remember where I found it. And whatever filter I’ve got on this camera really does do a better job on blue/purple shades than the old one.

My favorite Lobelia, ‘Crystal Palace.’ Unfortunately, it won’t take the heat of our summers, so it is with us only briefly.

The bog has turned from yellow to blue because the Iris pseudacorus is over and the purple pickerelweed (Pontaderia cordata) is in full bloom. It’s not really purple. It’s a clear blue. A few deep blue Siberian iris add to the blueness.

And the bees love it.

Verbena bonariensis in full blow. It will soon get untidy and need trimming. It’s a pity more of the California poppies behind it are not still out. That’s a pretty spectacular combination.

Sweet peas in full flower. And they are VAST–about 10 foot tall. I don’t think I have ever seen them as tall as this. It must be the cow manure I dumped on the veg garden last fall.

We had our first feed of beans last night. Haricots verts, I suppose if you want to be fancy, but they tasted like green beans to me.

The sweet peas on the fence behind the beans are finally beginning to flower as they should. After a month of boring pink and white, other varieties are finally in flower. I never realized what a gap there could be between flowering times. They were all planted together in January.

The bean tepee is constructed, for the first time, of home grown bamboo. We once lived in a house with invasive bamboo along the back fence, which worried me because it was starting to stray into the neighbor’s garden. Round-Up merely made it fork. Then I read about a Maryland man who was suing his neighbor over invasive bamboo. Shortly after that, we moved.

This bamboo comes from Connie’s house, and I have known it for 20 years. In that time, it has spread hardly at all, so I thought it was safe to take a clump. So far, so good.

The veg garden hasn’t changed much since I moved it to the east side of the garden about 3 years ago. (I’ve moved the lilies out of it.) I now realize I need more space. This summer, I have beans, potatoes, various tomatoes, and the pimientos. There isn’t nearly enough space between things. It makes picking the beans very awkward. I’m not sure where to expand to. I suppose for the moment, I’ll just gain a foot or two on the south and east sides.

Here are the pimientos de Padron. I was afraid I’d lost them since I didn’t plant them last year, and they are always balky about germinating, but here they are.

For 2 years, I have been using newspaper and pine straw mulch, but I’m now switching to composted wood chips from the county dump. It’s a wonderful mulch and it’s free, but I still haven’t figured out the ideal way of getting it from mulch pile into pickup. I’m sure a hay fork would be better than the shovel I’ve been using, but I feel there should be something better. I keep hoping I’ll be at the dump when the guy with the frontloader is turning the pile, so that he can just give me a scoop, but so far that hasn’t happened.

On a completely different topic, I am strongly tempted to remove from my blogroll all those blogs that have horrid little comment boxes and catchcas, or whatever they’re called. They are so irritating to use and so completely unnecessary. I’ve never had a spam comment sneak through in 6 years of blogging.

I finally finished this over the weekend. This dragon guards the entrance to the vegetable garden. It was once much bigger and it was once a fountain (long story). Now, it merely guards the water feature. (What do you call one of these overflowing pots with a reservoir under the gravel?) I’m not sure whether the colored aquarium gravel tastefully echoes the color of the dragon or is merely tacky. There a still a few bits and pieces I need to tidy up.

Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’ will fade to a fairly ordinary green by midsummer, but it is a lovely color at the moment.

The first water lily blooms in the pond, surrounded by white nymphoides. It’s a bit early this year. We don’t count on water lilies until June.

Pontaderia has burst into flower in the last week. As usual, the blue color is washed out compared withe the original. I also have a few white pickerelweeds. The bog is supposed to be full of purple irises–Siberian irises and Iris pallida. I think, however, that I. pallida doesn’t like to be as wet as that. It doesn’t look happy, so I have hauled it out of the bog and planted it as a marginal and we’ll see how it looks next year.

‘Souvenir de la Malmaison.’ This is my idea of what a REAL rose should look like. All those cabbagey overlapping petals.

I simply love this chartreuse variety of Tradescantia, which I acquired over the winter. I don’t remember the cultivar. It looks particularly good with the turquoise cinder blocks of the yaupon holly planter! This photo doesn’t do justice to the very deep purple of the flower.