Views of the garden

This is probably the best this backyard is going to look this year because this is that pivotal week in summer. The turtles have escaped their barricades and are busy establishing their main routes. Doesn't matter if there's a big potted plant in their way or not. If it's in the way, it's either walk over it or push it out of the way. One or the other. Turtles don't compromise. Yesterday the temperature was 101 degrees so it's also the time when  furnace temperature blasts of air will be blasting the plants and that means......a brown garden in my near future. I keep thinking I can circumvent both of these inevitable natural disasters but I know this week is the end of the garden as I know it now and.....I guess it's time to plan what I can do about it for next year...which is NOTHING. But right now, everything is looking green which is all I can ask. I gave up on flowers years ago.

This is the area surrounding my tiny fishpond. Pink cheetos (what my friend Sarah calls them because that's what the tubers look like) or "oxalis regnelli" or "triangularis" or whatever purple shamrocks are calling themselves these days is the ONE plant that looks great whatever temperature, sunlight condition, season it has to live in. It is the best plant ever. Don't question me. It can handle anything- it even creates a water storage part in its roots so if you forget to water it, it can take care of itself until you remember. If you want it to grow, it will do its best to make you proud. And at the end of the growing season,  dig them up and next year you will have ten times as many.

Lots of people take pictures of the Pretoria canna and I can see why. It's a pretty thing. It looks great against the pink cheetos (um, purple shamrocks) but what doesn't look good next to them? Pink cheetos really are the best plant ever. Like I said before, don't question me. You want this plant!

This is part of my white garden under the elm. Caladiums are great in this area because they don't need a lot of sunlight and the hotter and nastier it gets, the bigger they get. I think the name of this particular caladium is Aaron but I'm not sure about that. They're taller than what I wanted in this area but oh well. The plants behind it are voodoo lilies. I'll try and take a closeup picture later because they are an odd looking but intriguing plant. Their stalks are lime green with purple spots. They have one frond with leaves that spiral out (the leaves can be 18" or so long). They're called voodoo lilies because they "bloom" before they're ever put in the ground. Not that you want a lot of these things around when they do bloom because they smell like rotten meat for a couple days. Like pink cheetos, you can't keep them down. They really want to grow-when I plant them late spring, I think it takes them all of two weeks to get to full size.