Oceanic Wilderness

In the last week I’ve managed to spent a few hours in the garden doing a bit of weeding. It hasn’t been much but it has been enough to start trying to recover from two months of rampant and unchecked growth. Somewhere in the midst of it all there have been a few garden surprises such as this yellow lycoris. We planted the bulbs two years ago and I don’t believe they came up last year, however this year they sprung up and provided a happy surprise near the pathway and our front deck. This luna moth has been hanging out near the front window by our stairs. I saw…

I ventured outside yesterday to walk around for a few minutes. The air was warm but with a tinge of autumn to it. I missed summer, y’all. I’m a little disappointed by that, missing the growing season and seeing the garden in its peak fullness. We still have a few months left before a frost and freeze, but a lot of plants will start their trend towards dying back for the season in the coming months. I’ve missed a lot of blooms over the last few weeks but I did snap a few shots of what I could find amongst the weeds, like the African blue basil above. The brugs…

Late last week I managed to walk around the garden and check out everything in bloom. Despite the garden being overgrown and weedy, there’s quite a bit blooming. In addition, there’s a lot of wildlife flitting about in the form of bees, dragonflies, butterflies, lizards, frogs, and toads. So despite my thinking the garden horrendous, apparently the wildlife seem to appreciate the wildness. I’m quite happy with my self seeded tithonia that came up. It didn’t get nearly as tall as the plants that grew last year, which ended up falling over a few times and at least once or twice that was due to trampling by deer. I have…

This part of the garden is scary. The path is full of weeds and weeds have overtaken the some sections of the garden. Nevermind that the armadillos showed back up sometime last week and did some more jacking up of the garden. Ah, how nice it will be to bend down to pick up weeds in cooler weather. I’ll be bending down to pick up weeds, probably, before it gets cool again. We’ve had heat advisory days most days in the last week and none of those afternoon storms that get just so close end up coming over our house. August in Texas…yep, that’s where we’re at.

Sometime back in the fall or even last summer Chris’ dad brought us a banana tree from his yard that was supposed to be a golden lotus banana, a pup from one of the plants that we had given him back when we lived in Florida. In our garden in Florida we had several varieties of banana trees that we grew. Anyway, the banana died back over the winter and with the very harsh winter this year I was still surprised that it came back up in the spring when the ground warmed up. Golden lotus banana trees are typically squat and bushy so when the tree and its subsequent…