Show us your Bloomers #2

actually, i didn't photograph too much today - i got home too late.
Here is what's left of my summer dreams cosmos (sigh), some other cosmos, lavender and dianthus...

*thanks*
☺

These are the plants that I rounded up last week. Well I can say they are no more. We had a killer frost that same night, and then a cover of snow last night. :0(

Amethystsm, you've got some beautys still flowering for you there! great photos, too :0) why don't you like your mums?

patti, girl you are amazing!! I can't imagine taking on a project like that myself, even when I was younger (yes, I remember being younger). it is going to be gorgeous. can't wait to see it finished. I am EXTREMELY jealous. I don't even have a place to build something beautiful like that. ROTFLMBO on the 'plant your DH' comment

Hi, burn! nice to welcome someone from out-of-town! we just had our first 'hard' frost, too.

Not bad, Amy!

Very pretty!

grampapa, Thanks, I couldn't lay the liner without his help so he is still above ground. I plan on using some of his help with the big rocks too. The last big rocks he helped with were in helping to pay for my new bridges in the back of my mouth. I told the dentist I could have had a very nice barely used car or a ring that would be big enough for the Bruins to skate on with what they cost. I could have given up meat and nuts and just eaten yogurt and pasta and spent that money on something pretty. Off to get two tons of round stone. I think I will take the pain meds now. Thanks again for the encouragement. Patti

Thanks! i don't like the poofy kind of mums - i like the daisy kind.

i get so jealous when i see and hear all the great - and BIG - places many of y'all garden - with your own land and all.

i have a space behind our apartments, next to a university parking lot. The wall i garden along is made of cinder blocks, located between 2 dumpsters and their blue recycle bins - part of it has a transformer box in front of it, surrounded by yellow painted asphalt and big white posts so no one will drive into it. Then there's the telephone pole with its cabling.
You never see wide shots because i am too embarrassed to show them to people with so much space and independence. (Every time i border anything with pretty rocks i've dug up, they disappear within a few days. My groundhog deterring pinwheels too. I've lost more plants to the landlords pulling things - even when marked with wire fences - or spraying round up randomly, and their hired mowers and weed whackers, than any disease or pest.)

So compared to y'all, i sometimes feel like a fake - not a real gardener at all.

But i was delighted to find i might have one little advantage in this un-idyllic locale, because we are surrounded by parking lots, driveways, and asphalt - maybe they hold a little more heat in, and let me get blooms for a little longer than people in better places... So, i guess i was being a snot after i heard that lots of people had lost most of their blooms in the frost.

Sorry for being childish. People here have been nothing but generous with me, sharing so many plants, advice, and kind words.

Not sure if i feel better or worse to have confessed my inadequacy.


amy
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(edited for inadequate spelling!)

This message was edited Oct 31, 2007 5:59 PM

Wow - and what kind of relationship did you have with your Mom??!! Just kidding. No need for explanations and certainly no reason to feel inadequate due to your garden size. No one ever told me that size doesn't matter of course, but others have been told.

From a single pot on a fire escape to 50 acres - you make it YOUR EDEN.

Endless stream project looks great! I don't know how you do it, but a great job.

Amethystsm what a nice bunch of blooms. Everyone has shared so many wonderful pics just in the last few weeks. I look forward to the next growing season very much.

These are my last pics since the last three nights a light frost has hit around here. I took these last week just before the rain, wind and frost.

Crocus Rose

Echinacea was still blooming until the frost.

Lady Emma was blooming fool her first year.

Digitalis is still going strong.

Salvia Blue Hills just never stops after one cut back.

last clem blooming

geraniums, can't beat 'em.

Burning bush

Hydrangea Blushing Bride

This lobelia just keeps going

Sedum

and finally a rose, James Galway.

Amy, how do you get so much beauty into the tiny space you describe? The flowers are just lovely.
Ngam, you sure have (had?) a wide variety still in bloom. Especially love the larkspur, which I finally gave up growing because it was a veritable slug trap, and James Galway.

it isn't so much the amount of space that is the issue, it is the surrounding environment which is pretty ugly. i love what i have put together, but then i get a reality check every once in a while - there is nowhere out there that you are not looking at more concrete, asphalt, cars, dumpsters and utility equipment than nature. making an eden is, i fear, not a possibility. i just try to compete with the ugliness. sometimes i forget - then i go thru my pictures and realize - oops, can't post that...

er, the pretty crazy monster cosmos i keep posting - most people in the complex don't even know they are there - here is a wider angle:

(you will never think of my "garden" the same again...)

Amy, my defination of a garden is:
A place where you've folded a little bit of your soul into the soil,
then sprinkled the seeds of love,
watered them with sweat and tears,
and created a lovely place in an ugly world.

I believe you did just that, no need to be ashamed....proud is more the emotion you should go for!

Bebop2 that is a delphinium, new this year and I am hoping it will return again.

Amethystsm every garden has adversity but you sound like you have way more than your share. To produce such beauty in the middle if a concrete jungle and to persevere so much just for the love of it makes you a great gardener in my book. Keep up the great work and please keep sharing your pics with us. A garden can be acres and acres of plants or one pot tended with care and wonder. A real gardener can get pleasure from either.

Well, I just cut the last handful of blooms and put them in a vase - 3 Black-eyed Susans, 2 wine colored Tall Snaps, and 2 Becky Shasta Daisies.

TAMBERLIN - I take a cutting of my Pineapple Sage well before frost date every year so I have a new plant each Spring. This year's cutting has flowered on the window sill!

DAWN LL - I have some mini roses from the grocery store and they, too, bloom well in the cool Fall.

Darn! I had a question for someone about twenty posts up, and now I've forgotten the question!!

Oh yeah .... ngam: did you cut back the foxglove after the first blooms so that it would bloom again for you this late in the season?

ngam, is that cocoanut lime? (lime cocoanut?) I like it more every time I see it. your J. Galway is a beauty, especially this late in the season. I like the hydrangea, too.


Amy, wherever it grows, thats a marvelous cosmos. Putting an island of green and flowers in the middle of the asphalt and other 'stuff' is an amazing thing to do for the benefit of everyone who has the luck to see it.

I like Lady Emma rose - since I have a daughter who thinks her name should be Lady Emma! For now she's just Emma would you clean up your room before you go away for the weekend or Emma why are your shoes STILL in my bedroom or Emma did you remember all your asthma meds?

Yes that echinacea is Coconut Lime and it never stopped blooming once it started. Also the flowers last a long time on the plant which pleased me very much. A new one for me this year and I would definitely recommend it. The grandiflora foxglove was also new this year and started out as a small little plant so only bloomed late in the season. I will see what happens next year if every thing returns as I hope.

Do you all know how gardeners keep their fingers warm in the winter?
They keep them crossed!

Crossing my fingers that everything comes back for you in the Spring, ngam.

Gee, I haven't been in the garden in 2 days.

I made DH go out - we got 12 more delosperma. Too lazy to go out and look!

x, C

Thanks Candice, I hope your theory works for all of us. :)

I've looked out at the gardens this week. We still need to mulch in places, so that will probably take place either today or tomorrow, and then we are done for the season. *sigh*

Carrie, I have 3 or 4 delosperma that I wintersowed that are still in their container and about 1/2". I really should plant them. not much chance of them making it thru the winter, but nothing to lose.

What kind, gram? Ours are delosperma mesa verde.

these are Delosperma cooperi

Well, it's official. All of our bloomers are hacked down, chopped up, done blooming, or sleeping for Spring. *sigh* I'll have no blooms to show until Spring.