Savannah Garden Diary

This is an amazingly bad photo of a crested egret fishing in the bog garden this morning. It caught at least one goldfish. It is hard to photograph because when I open a window, it flies away and it is too cold to leave the window open.

We have had great blue herons fishing in the pond before now, but this is the first egret I’ve seen. One glorious afternoon, I came home and found 2 great blues displaying at each other on our small back lawn. The winner hung around for a few days and caught a few fish, but eventually it went away and didn’t come back.

We’ve been in Ithaca for Christmas, where the weather is exactly as it is here today–gray and chilly.

Everyone thinks we’re in the middle of a drought, what with dear Sonny praying for rain and all. But here on the coast, we’ve had plenty of rain. I just looked it up in the paper. Normal precipitation year to date is 48.65″ and this year we have had 48.93″. Including about 4″ while we were away, which is excellent. In fact, it’s a damp December. I need to plant the pimientos de Padrón this afternoon.

Despite good average rainfall for the year, however, we have had long periods with no rain and I have lost several plants. My longleaf pine is dead, as well as 3 camellias I planted last March. Of course you should never plant anything in March in Savannah if you don’t have irrigation. Which means you have to buy camellias when they are not in flower. Better, however, to have to rip out a perfectly healthy camellia you don’t like than to have 3 that you do like die on you.