I planted these flowers in a little triangular bed next to my back steps -- "Firecracker" salvia, "Wizard" coleus and red-flowered, red-leaved wax begonias. I love them. On overcast days they practically glow.
You just can't beat playing in the dirt.
7 comments:
And hummingbirds love the salvias too... Any sign of them in your area?
Beautiful. What spectacular colors!
I'll have to pic 'n' post, sometime, too. Over the past 3 or 4 years, I've gone to the local greenhouses at the end of the season, to purchase perennial shrubs and groundcovers at low cost. (Like I said, I'm lazy and don't do annuals anymore!) I now have a real interesting bunch of stuff in my gardens that bloom at various times throughout the summer - all different colors and textures and sizes and looks.
This year, I ended up planting some of my vegetables among all these things, even!
I totally agree that gardening is the best.
These are gorgeous! Makes my day...
Derek: We have quite a colony of hummingbirds here -- at least two pair. They don't play well with others, though...very territorial. I've seen one hummingbird actually knock another one right out of the air. I once read the memoir of a woman in, I think, the Northeast who rescued a hummingbird that she'd found near-comatose in her garden in October; she happened to have a sunroom in her home with a variety of flowering plants. I don't know how she got around the bureacratic red tape to pull this off -- maybe she had her rehabber's license -- but she kept the bird alive in her sunroom all winter long, helped along with a special nectar mixture that a regional zoo assisted her in obtaining. Anyhow, despite saving the hummingbird's life, he never became tame; in fact, he started treating the sunroom as his territory, and angrily dive-bombed his rescuer every time she entered.
Bls: Thank you! You'll have to post some pix of your own garden. Your plant purchases remind me of an aunt of mine, who was famous in our family for bringing moribund last-chance-sale plants back from the dead...she'd prowl around the big chain nurseries and get the plants drastically discounted, just before the manager tossed them in the Dumpster, and she'd take the pathetic things home and nurse them back to health. She landscaped her whole yard this way.
This plant combination began as a happy accident...I always used to plan my flower gardens, but a few years ago I decided to be really right-brained about the whole thing, and wound up with just a jumble of different plants. "What do I do with these?..." So I played mix and match with the little plastic plant packs, and this combo struck me as special. So I've stuck with it.
This spring I bought a flat of "Jolly Joker" pansies -- they're orange on top, purple on the bottom, very unique -- and had a lot of fun finding orange and purple flowers to complement them. I'll have to post a picture of that flower bed sometime.
Glad to hear that, Christopher!
When my mother starts murmuring about my spending money on plants, I always tell her, "Look at it this way -- I could be spending the money on whiskey and cigarettes." Sort of puts it in perspective for her.:-D And she enjoys looking at them too.
I'll have to post some up-dated pics of my garden (um, the one plot outside my study window, that the webcam will reach, that is!).
I have to admit, in some ways I envy the . . . frivolity, of the flower-gardener.
Between my poverty, my limited-time, and my own sense of do-for-self, my garden this year (only the second I've planted the past few years---or EVER, really) is exclusively vegetables. (though I honestly believe that they have a beauty all their own).
Michigan has a short summer, but it makes the growin' thangs all the more, um, lively (and lovely), eh LC? ;-D
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