The White Scents of Summer

We were walking home from dinner around 10 last night, on one of those cool evenings that happen so rarely in Georgia in August. There was a slight breeze, and with each step through our own garden, there seemed to be another wonderful scent coming our way. This is the time when the white flowers seem to take over the evening garden.

As we walked under the arbor, we saw the giant flowers of the moon vine opening for the night, releasing that wonderful light fragrance. Further down the paniculata hydrangeas were filling the air with their citrus-y scent, as they've been doing for a few weeks now. Rounding the corner, the first bloom of the white ginger was visible in the light, and its aroma is nothing short of intoxicating!

As we approached the door, we were overwhelmed with the fragrance from the white "Four O'Clocks" that self seed themselves all over that area. Even Sadie the Dog couldn't resist pushing her nose into the cluster of blossoms. Just a few days ago I was complaining about how poorly behaved the Four O'Clocks are, popping up everywhere, and questioning if I should try one more time to eradicate them from the garden......after last night's stroll, I'm convinced it's worth putting up with a little bit of unruliness.

Love in the Glasshouse!

How appropriate that on Valentine's Day weekend, there were all sorts of signs of horticultural "activity" in the greenhouse!

First, the Mission Olive trees are blooming, which is really cool. Since I was raised in New England, olive trees aren't something I'm used to seeing in bloom (or seeing at all, for that matter). We got them last year to anchor two planted islands in the vegetable garden, and I dragged them inside for the winter. I've been told they'll be fine as long as the temps stay above 20 degrees, but these are one of those special plants that gets babied. The color of the tiny blooms is unbelievably intense, particularly against the olive green of the leaves. To give an idea of the bloom size, the leaves on these trees are only about 1-1/2 inches long. (The bottom picture, above)

The other plants that seem to have gone hormonally crazy are the Villages Lemon Trees.....check out the number of blossoms on that baby! (The top photo)

These two plants, the begonias that are shooting up new stems of blooms every day, the remedial amaryllis, and the walking irises are turning the greenhouse into a virtual floral festival! Eat your heart out, Atlanta Botanical Garden!

A Day in the Glass House

Today was the perfect day to catch up on some things in the greenhouse which have gone by the wayside during the busy holidays. My garden cohort is busy lounging in the Florida Keys, so I had the day to myself and the plants in the greenhouse. Since it was in the mid-60's, I could easily have spent the day deadheading pansies, but that can be Patti's project when she comes back from Florida with a tan!

The lemon trees that spent the summer outside now have huge juicy fruits on them; as much as I would like to take credit for doing something brilliant with them, the fruits just seem to have happened on their own. It's sort of cool, since one tree has three fat lemons on it, and the other is starting to get buds, which promise those amazingly fragrant blooms in a couple of months!

It was mostly a day of "puttering," trimming, fertilizing, etc., which brings me to a couple of points that we're sometimes asked.

With reference to overwintering annuals, the short answer is that it isn't always cost effective, so there are many plants I overwinter, and many others that I don't. For those that do get to come inside, we generally keep just one or two "Mother Plants" of each cultivar. Later in the winter (late January or early February), we'll take cuttings from those plants for next summer's containers. Very often the "mother plants" of coleus, plectranthus, etc., are simply too woody to keep over for a second season, so it's their respective offspring that get to be next summer's star performers!

With some of the coleus cultivars, we only managed to get one good mother plant at the end of summer, so I did a couple of cuttings today of some of the favorites.

In the greenhouse, as in the rest of my garden, I do everything I can to keep with organics....it's really not a powerful politic statement, but I feel better knowing I'm not dumping tons of chemicals in the water supply for those downstream or future generations. I figure that if we each do a little, it adds up to being a major change.

For the inevitable mealy bugs that one finds in a greenhouse, I have had great luck with a product called "Pyola," that I get from Gardens Alive. (A great mail order company....I'll talk about their tomato food later). So far it's proven very successful, and we've kept the insect issue to a minimum.

Since I was the only one in the greenhouse today, I could also use my favorite fertilizer, called "Neptune's Harvest," which comes from a company of the same name. Since it's basically fish by-products, it has a little smell when it first gets added, but works really well, and the odor dissipates quickly. The huge advantage of organics is that they tend to work when nature tells them to work with light, temperature, etc., so there's less requirement to maintain strict calendars, etc.

More about the greenhouse later, but for now, it's time to water the plants!