The past several weeks have been brutal with the lack of rain. I feel all I’ve been doing with my gardening time is hauling hoses. Every day I find something else wilting from the lack of any water.
And, then I found where an armadillo dug up some plants, and a buck decided to obliterate the bark on my prized Prunus mume ‘Dawn’ (flowering apricot).
These valleys in the gardening experience are so frustrating.
However, one thing I have taken delight in is Karen’s growing interest in gardening. From cut flowers to growing milkweed for Monarchs, she has really blossomed as a gardener. She has been so proud of her design of the side entrance to the house, and it has looked great under her stewardship this fall.
We made a stop at Blue Moon Gardens a month ago and loaded up on some autumn color after picking up pumpkins at Trader Joe’s. The pumpkins and two mums provide seasonal color, but there are other plant gems tucked in here.
Most plants offer colorful foliage. We have a few houseplants in the mix like the variegated Dracaena trifasciata ‘Laurentii’ (snake plant) and a gold splashed Codiaeum variegatum var. pictum ‘Petra’ (croton). Even I integrated my three year old silvery Cissus discolor (rex begonia vine) into the display by allowing it to clamber over the railing. And, then of course we have her mixed batches of succulents, many propagated from our wedding favors from 2016.
The black pearl peppers pop against the foliage of Capsicum annuum ‘Onyx Red’ (ornamental pepper). A few volunteer seedlings of Celosia argentea var. plumosa ‘Dragon’s Breath’ (celosia) returned from last year. It colors up a brilliant red in full sun, but with some shade it has more green in the foliage.
A few planters that offer fall color by our side door entrance featuring Capsicum annuum ‘Onyx Red’, Celosia argentea var. plumosa ‘Dragon’s Breath’, and Euphorbia × martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’
We moved a few celosia into a larger pot, and in the back we stuck a plant of Euphorbia × martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’ (Martin’s spurge). ‘Ascot Rainbow’ was discovered as a branch sport by David Glenn of Ascot, Victoria in 2005 and has since spread around the world as a variegated Euphorbia with incredible color that intensifies as winter progresses and then blooms.
A closeup of the variegation on Euphorbia × martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’
I grew ‘Ascot Rainbow’ in my 100+ container collection back in grad school for reliable winter color. It really does go through a myriad of hues, intensifying as the weather gets cooler and what little winter sun we have shines bright.
A photo from a January day 10 years ago shows the rich color that Euphorbia × martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’ can turn in winter.
It’s amazing how a cultivar returning under my care brings back so many memories. The smell of winter in Raleigh. The constant noises of apartment living. Piling snow around the pots during a freak snow event to protect them from freezing temperatures that night. Somehow I lost it in the move, but now the memories come flooding back.
Karen asked why I don’t do more pots. She thought that maybe they were a bad practice or out of vogue. I was just burned out on container gardening. Having lived in an apartment for six years in grad school and a rental house three years here in Nacogdoches, I was mostly done with containers and ready for some in the ground growing. And, really, I was mostly done with watering (though I chuckle writing that with all the hose dragging I’ve had to do lately).
In grad school I didn’t have a hose, so I had to craft some tubing with fittings that would hook up to my shower head to fill two trash cans outside. And, then I would dunk watering cans to water pots every other day during the growing season unless it rained. Every pot had a saucer to help hold the precious water. And, for many years that was my life.
Once we bought our house, almost everything went into the ground as I and my plants said goodbye to nomad living. My houseplant collection dwindled as I only kept the plants that were precious and would need to be moved back and forth inside or that wouldn’t do well in the ground here in Texas. And, honestly, I haven’t thought much about containers since.
But, I have forgotten how good these pop up gardens are for the creativity they can cultivate. The thing I loved about containers were they were a miniature lab, an experimental place to see how things do. They had a modularity about them where if something looked bad, it could be swapped out or moved around.
And now that I have someone to help water and care for them, there are even more opportunities to create magic.
The rains have returned, the mums are petering out, and we are about to move the houseplants inside. We got our first frost of 28°F this week, four weeks early. Karen has already started talking about what we should do for the coming holidays in this space.
I can’t wait to see what she creates next.