There’s something special about Sunday mornings. It’s a time that’s built for reading each section of the newspaper, undertaking the crossword puzzle, and lingering over a breakfast that’s a bit more intricate than an eat-and-run weekday meal. It’s a moment to pause and breathe.
For today’s Sunday breakfast, I’m serving up some flapjacks.
I’m always stunned when something sneaks up on me in the garden. Not a snake or a bear, but a plant. I mean, I walk around the garden daily — as I’m sure all of you do — and I like to think that I notice most of what’s happening among the plants.
And then this happens — a bloom that wasn’t there yesterday is here today.
Bougainvillea.
It’s been some time since I posted a “Bloomin’ Update,” because — well — I had nothing bloomin’ in my garden because I didn’t have a garden in zone 10.
But as 2014 changed into 2015, so too did the garden change. Where there was once only lawn, there are now beds. Where there are beds, there are now plants and pots and paths. (Speaking of paths, I’ll describe the path I took to create this garden in a future post.)
With all of the changes happening around me, I decided to make some changes to this blog. For a while, I’ve considered purchasing my own domain — which I have now done. It’s official, I am now Nitty Gritty Dirt Man dot com.
As a general garden rule, I do not like — and so steer away from — plants that can hurt me. Roses are about as close as I get to this thorny issue, which has less to do with the plant and more to do with me. I know me. I know that I can be careless and klutzy — and that combination, along with some blood thinners, means I can easily become a human pin cushion.
A few years ago, Joe and I asked a neighbor if he would like our cactus. It was tall, only one stalk, and never really did anything. It was just there, slightly askew — a leaning tower of needles, so to speak.
The neighbor gladly accepted the offer, digging up the cactus and replanting it along the property line between him and us — far enough and close enough at the same time. Since then, that single stalk has expanded to about seven towering stems — and it’s now in bloom, giving a whole new definition to vertical gardening.
Look quickly, though, the flowers — which bees love — only last a day.
I’m not sure of the name of this plant, but I was charmed by the play of sunlight igniting the leaf’s underside.
Much of my garden time in South Florida is not actually spending time in the garden at all. So far, it’s been about meeting other gardeners, visiting nurseries, reading books, taking notes, and asking questions. I’m a stranger in a strange land here, a zone six-ish gardener in a zone 10 world.
When I learned the local garden club had organized a Saturday field trip to a local nursery, I jumped at the chance to do all of the above — although, I do have to figure out a way to take notes while balancing a camera.
Lacecap Hydrangea.
“You spend an awful lot of time agonizing over leaves,” Joe, my partner, said to me the other day as we drove around the neighborhood. His statement was in response to my noticing that some homeowners had bagged their leaves in plastic bags while others had bagged them in recyclable brown paper bags, which the township now requires.
In the last post, I left the garden for a music-themed writing prompt from WordPress. This week, it’s back outside — or rather, it’s back to the photos that I originally had taken if I hadn’t come across that writing prompt. And it’s a good thing I snapped these photos when I did — because a week of wind later, where once there were leaf-laden trees, there now stands bare branches.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Man 