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Garden journal

 

January 26, 2025. Snow day
Since moving to the Houston area nine years ago, it's snowed twice (not counting slushy-freezy weather events), and this past week certainly qualified as the snowiest I've witnessed. The week continued the pattern of recent years where considerably colder than average freeze snaps take swipes at the Texas Gulf Coast: there was a string of five nights of freezing temperatures with a low of 20°F on Tuesday – once again threatening all those tropical plants our nurseries keep selling. I kept my protective efforts simple this year, wrapping only my lime and mandarin orange trees in protective fabric (with colorful Christmas lights underneath as a source of some warmth). Many other plants, including recently purchased ones, may have perished; I won't know for sure until signs of life present themselves (or not) in early spring. But it sure looked pretty! This photo of our backyard pond was taken while the snow was still coming down pretty hard, so we accumulated a bit more. Our dogs had never seen snow before, so they enjoyed the new experience. And by now, a few days later, the snow is all gone and we're back to typical Houston winter weather (with an overnight low of 60°F!). It's all very exciting when these cold snaps hit, but I must admit I wouldn't mind returning to a climate where it's a given that killing freezes will happen every year, and people garden accordingly...
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A four o'clock and a century plant
December 31, 2024. 2024 in review
Another year of gardening come and gone. A hopeful beginning, a disappointing middle, and a hopeful ending...
Well, all years have a hopeful beginning – because the beginning is the starting of seeds, and the emergence of many flowers from their slumber, and then the planting of those seedlings. All of which takes me at least through April, and into May. In spring, it's not hard to find time to do some gardening, since the garden is enticing in those warm but not yet sweltering days, and tackling weed infestations is a pleasantly meditative activity that time of year. Then June comes, and that's often the turning point around here: hot and wet, or hot and dry? This year, we got some reprieve from the summer-long droughts of last year, with rain persisting into early summer, boosted by a visit from hurricane Beryl in July; but then, seemingly inevitably, the showers and storms stopped, and we were back to the hot dry pattern that had marked the summers of 2022 and 2023. Meanwhile, I found out that my favorite local nursery, an oddball one-of-a-kind affair somewhat out of the way, had ceased to exist in its previous quirky form, depriving me of a source of interesting new plants to try. So I once again found myself rather uninspired about the garden through the dog days, which once again led to the demise of nearly all those so hopefully started seedlings when my nursery beds found themselves neglected in the watering department. But somehow, around the middle of the year, I realized that to start enjoying the garden again, I had to get out there and put some more effort in, even through the hot days of late summer: and so I started working towards making the garden a nicer place to be and enjoy, for me and my family, and I'm glad to say I've kept it up in the last few months of the year. Believe me, it was necessary! 2024 was a year of editing trees: I already wrote about the downing of the jujube in the aftermath of Beryl. I also decided that it was time for the Hercules' club to go, since it didn't hold up its part of the ornamental bargain in the garden. And a couple of quite enthusiastic tree volunteers (an American sycamore and a rough-leaf dogwood) had outlasted their welcome. All of which meant that my chipper did overtime this year, producing lots of organic top-dressing for the garden beds as well as food for the compost pile. A few trips to local nurseries (not quite so eccentric as the one we lost, but still good for an occasional haul of plants) produced a crop of green things needing new homes, partly to fill in the holes left by activities above. And there you have it, the garden held my interest, and a few months of chipping away at the problems I'd allowed to fester for a while (such as a painful proliferation of brambles through many of the garden borders) has resulted in a much more manageable slab of sururbia going into the new year of gardening. I'm already well into the annual ritual of starting seeds (the patio table is filling up with greenlings). And the lack of freezing weather so far means that the garden is still surprisingly full of flowers: the tropical waterlilies are still going strong in the pond, the iochroma, thryallis and duranta are duking it out in purple, yellow, and blue in the back border, as well as blue butterfly and Turk's cap in the side border. And that's just the main players. Many others continue to charm, often on a small late-season scale, such as the single flower on the four o'clock in the picture here, or a final few flowers on the Speedy Gonzalez rose. Of course, the first flowers of the new season aren't far away (I already see the summer snowflakes pushing up) – so here's to an all new round of gardening in 2025! May the freezes be mild, the rains plentiful, the hot months merciful, and the inspiration to garden never too far away.
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December 24, 2024. Anything going on around here?
Rob's Plants has been up and running for over 20 years now (yes, I know, it shows in the outdated design). In the early years, it was a whirlwind of activity, with multiple journal posts many weeks, and always new plants to talk about. After our move to Texas, there was a new garden to build and new plants to be excited about. But in recent years, the activity level has dropped a good bit – it turns out that the garden doesn't change as much from year to year here as it did in Pennsylvania, and many of the plants I attempt to grow from seed don't end up surviving our climate – so they don't reach a wow-inducing journal-worthy state. So judging by the number of journal posts in the past couple of years, you could be excused for believing that nothing is happening here on the gardening front, and that the website is mostly static. But that wouldn't be quite true – you just have to know where to look. When I find new critters to document (admittedly not so often now), they get added to the wildlife pages (there's an overview of the most recently added ones here). And I'm frequently tweaking individual plant pages – adding photos I've taken (some recently, but often catching up on photos taken a while back), or observations from a stroll around the garden. And in the winter season, when I'm actively starting seed, I faithfully add my germination results. I've now made it easier to find updated pages – you can find the few dozen most recently changed ones right here. Oh – and the Plantlinks part of the website is also still regularly maintained. It's one of my own go-to sources for horticultural information about specific plants, and I encourage you to take advantage of it as well!
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Run this way, girls!
December 23, 2024. Canine superhighway
Sharing a backyard with two enthusiastic dogs is not always conducive to gardening success. Our older mutt Hippie was a digger when she was young, but had outgrown that tendency by the time our younger one Birdie came along. Alas, Birdie has thus far shown no sign of outgrowing the urge to uproot.This is immediately obvious from the lunar landscape into which our backyard lawn has devolved, and has also proven treacherous for all manner of newly planted seedlings and nursery purchases. I still hope that next year will be better in this regard.
A different dog challenge is that of treating the garden as a high-speed running track. Again, the lawn is the most immediate evidence of this, with the stretch of grass favored for their most exuberant running, traversing most of the back side of the house, worn down to mostly bare soil. But lawn grass is just there to eventually become garden borders, right? So my bigger concern is those borders. It seems like there's always cause to run into the borders and bark at the fence, often accompanied by enthusiastically jumping at the fence, of course trampling anything that might happen to be attempting to grow underneath. Despite my many attempts to impress upon them what "in the grass!" means, those girls just don't seem to get it. So I've resorted to surrounding particularly vulnerable plantings with upright sticks and poles meant to discourage the worst abuse. With some success, anyway.
Another type of havoc is wrought simply by high-speed travel through especially popular borders – of which the primary example is the area between our pond and the back fence, which Hippie and Birdie treat as the back leg of their Formula 1 course. The circuit also includes a good part of the Rock Garden Zone that faithful readers may remember inspired me with so much hope for becoming a special area filled with plants requiring excellent drainage. Alas, nothing much will grow there, courtesy of unrelenting rapid paw movement with no regard for greenery. A year ago, hoping to remedy the situation, I installed a few two-foot-tall chicken-wire fences across their preferred path. Silly me – it was futile. The fences became fun obstacles to hurdle across, or to bypass by instead taking a shortcut along the rocks lining the pond. Meanwhile, the fences impeded my own gardening efforts. So last week, I decided to try a new approach: create a single opening through the main fenceline, and line up some really big flagstones as a path through that opening, in hopes of encouraging travel only along that pathway, and limiting damage to adjacent garden areas. It's too early to tell if the strategy is working (I've still seen prominent pawprints in nearby areas I was trying to protect), but I'll give it a while. At least it's easier for me to get to that back area now.
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Habranthus robustus in full bloom in the spring garden
December 21, 2024. Finally: a page for the rain lilies
Back in Pennsylvania, rain lilies were an oddity I tried to grow a few times – not quite hardy in our garden, but I managed to overwinter one or two species in pots and troughs a couple of times, so I was aware of their charm. But it wasn't till I arrived in Texas and realized I could grow them out in the open garden that I became more enamored of them. Around here, they are among the few ornamental herbaceous perennials that not only reliably return year after year, but positively thrive in our hot and at times dry climate. A couple years after moving here, and after getting my first taste of their performance through my purchase of Z. 'Labuffarosea' at a local garden, I embarked on "Project rain lily" in 2018, growing as many varieties of Zephyranthes and Habranthus from seed as I could get my hands on, expecting to compose a page for Robsplants when they started to differentiate themselves. But although I've been enjoying my rain lilies and their exuberant blooms after thundershowers ever since, I did not get around to writing that page – until a week ago, when I finally set myself to it. The result is a shiny new page about my experiences with rain lilies. I admit that part of my motivation for writing these genus-focused pages is to have them for myself as a quick resource, or to force myself to do the research that I might not otherwise get around to – but I sincerely hope it comes in handy for some of you, too!
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A clay mine below the sandy layer
December 01, 2024. Front-yard sandbox
Our cul-de-sac lot has a generous back yard, but a tiny front yard (which has the advantage it takes only 5 minutes to mow). Per neighborhood requirements, it still contains two shade trees, both live oaks – and in the eight years since the home was built, those have grown respectable canopies, enough to cast a good bit of shade on our lawn, which, again per neighborhood requirements, consists of bermudagrass. Bermudagrass hates shade. That's probably why, over the past few years, the patches of lawn between the oaks and the west side of the house have become sparser in lawn grass, and even the weeds that attempt to take its place struggle. So I recently decided to give up on the idea of grass growing there, and instead enlarged the foundation borders along the front facade of the house, on both sides of the front walk. This is when I found out that the shade was only one reason for the grass' poor showing: another contributing factor is that the lawn was appararently planted on nearly pure sand, brought in by the builder to cover over the masonry debris (I unearthed half a wall in my recent digging) and bring the lawn level up near the top of the poured foundation (I must say I'm happy that the builder elevated the foundation above the surrounding terrain – that came very much in handy during hurricane Harvey's flooding rains). Normally, digging new borders in the sticky Texas clay around my home requires bringing in plenty of composty material along with some sand to improve its texture; but in this case, I had too much sand, and needed clay to improve the water retention of the soil for my new border. The only way to do that was to go mine for clay, by digging deep, below the layer of construction debris, to where the hardpan clay layer started. Which was hard work, so I perhaps didn't extract as much clay as I might have wanted. But I augmented liberally with the not-quite-compost contents of my compost bin, so I hope the soil will be water-retentive enough to support the new plants I've installed there. There's still more grass-free lawn to be concerned about – but I'll worry about that some other time.
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'Sihong' after partial removal
September 01, 2024. The rise and fall of the Sihong jujube
Back in the early days of our Houston garden, when everything seemed possible in this strange Texas climate, we purchased a 'Sihong' jujube tree on a whim, hoping for exotic fruit on an unfamiliar tree. In the seven years since, it grew fast, sporting nice glossy leaves and unassuming greenish-yellow flowers – and even a few smallish fruits. Even though we never seemed to get any ripe fruit, it would have been a fine tree for its narrow upright stature and the handsome foliage – if it weren't for its fatal flaw: a suckering rootstock. Already in the early years, our tree would send up unruly growth from near its base, with a different leaf shape and many more thorns than the mother tree. And smallish green fruit, too. As years went by, those roots went far and wide, and suckers started popping up everywhere, as far as 30 feet from the main trunk: in garden borders, in the lawn, between paving stones... So this year, when hurricane Beryl blew through and tried to knock over many of my trees (in some cases successfully), I wasn't too sad that Sihong was blown atilt – making about a fifteen-degree angle from the vertical. Had it been a prized specimen, I may have gone to some length to try to winch it back into a fully upright posture. But no – it was time for lady jujuba to go. It was just small enough for me to tackle the job myself (with Amy's help), and after a few hours of sawing, lopping, and chipping, all that was left of her was a heap of wood chips and a stack of firelogs. And, of course, dozens of suckers in a wide circle, which will be her legacy for quite a while to come, I'm afraid.
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a sea of pink where I haven't found time to weed - even creeping into the lawn
April 01, 2024. A profusion of evening primroses
Among the most recognizable of Texas wildflowers, competing along roadsides with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes for the title of most exuberant performer, pink evening primroses are certainly stellar in their eye-catching abundance, with large blowsy flowers carpeting whole swaths of meadowland. In my garden, I tolerate (or even welcome) many wildflowers and native plants, including those that come unbidden. I wish I could do the same for these primroses – because boy, do they make a statement! Alas, if I were to do so there wouldn't be much room for anything else in the garden – because boy, do they spread! I'm sure they seed around (why else produce such emphatic flowers?), but mostly they gain ground by extending their network of thin roots, popping up at ever greater distances from the original plants. I've found that once established they are nearly impossible to eradicate (I haven't succeeded yet in any area of the garden where they've taken hold); so the best I can do is vigilantly pull them up where I see them emerge, to keep them from smothering their neighbors. And I do secretly enjoy those flowers, even if I have no qualms about uprooting them en masse.

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first seedlings installed, and ready for more!
March 30, 2024. Spring rolls around again
Quick, I need to post before a full year goes by between my ramblings! Alas, the summer of 2023 was no better (worse, in fact) than 2022: unrelentingly hot and dry, sapping all my desire to engage productively with my ornamental garden (I kept the community farm plot going, to have at least a few okra to show for my efforts). I didn't even collect any seed from my garden last year, so that I had fewer varieties to start indoors over winter – but by the time December rolled around at least the memories of drought despair were starting to fade, and I did pursue my usual seed-starting activities with left-over seeds, augmented in late winter with shipments from the NARGS seed exchange. Which meant that recently, I needed to clear out room in my seedling nursery area to accept the new arrivals, some of which are starting to outgrow their seed pots. The first order of business is always to move any overwintering plants into permanent positions in the garden, a task that can take quite a bit of time. Not so this year: very few of last year's seedlings had survived. I suspect that most of them were done in by the summer drought, but we had a significant freeze in January as well, which may have killed off a few tender ones. In any case, the majority of the survivors were various rain lilies, which have proven amazingly resilient to anything Texas has thrown at me over the past seven years – and which are easy to tuck into various spots that can use an occasional color pop. A few days ago, all survivors had found new homes. Since I can't seem to keep my agave seedlings alive, I decided to further elevate one of my nursery beds by heavily amending it with sand, hoping to provide the well-drained conditions they require (although I can't be sure it's winter wet that's been killing them – those tiny seedlings are so hard to keep track of through their first year of life). Yesterday and today, the first batches of seedlings found their home there, and of course I'm optimistic that this year the weather will be friendlier, and I'll be more diligent in providing the conditions these young plants need to survive. Wish me luck!
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anti-dog defensive measures
April 10, 2023. Getting caught up
Let's fast-forward from my last post, more than 10 months ago, to now, shall we? When I wrote in late May, I had been in a very active gardening mode all spring, busying myself with seedlings as always, engaging in a bit of a plant sale for the first time in years, and connecting with local gardeners in a plant swap. It had been a good spring, following a winter with relatively mild freezes and reasonable rainfall as the weather got warmer. But then, in June, the rain just stopped coming. And stayed away for nearly three months, even as the summer heat reached boiling level – it was probably not hotter than normal Texas summers, but with the lack of rain it sure felt that way. Early on in the drought I faithfully went around watering all the new seedlings and recent transplants, but even so many of them died – and after a while I just gave up, since going outside to see all the parched plants was no fun at all. Needless to say, my final yield from all the seedlings I started in winter of 2022 was quite poor. Eventually, some rain returned in fall (although it stayed decidedly on the dry side), and I started to take inventory of what had survived the drought – but then in mid-December, we were hit by a deep freeze that lasted the better part of a week. In most ways, it was slightly milder than winter storm Uri two years earlier, but it seemed to hit the plants at least as hard – in fact, some that had managed to survive Uri haven't made a second return, perhaps because the drought had not been kind to them. So by mid-winter, the backyard was sadly depleted of plants. My indoor seed-starting was going on as usual, but there wasn't much reason to venture outside until recently. Now, finally, the plants whose roots survived are making their comeback from the base, and everything is greening up. Not necessarily the things I want to be greening up, though: it seems like my season of neglect last year was an excellent opportunity for several noxious weeds to dramatically extend their range, so tackling their infestations has been a big job in the past few weeks. But I'm getting there.
One last anti-garden force I hadn't yet mentioned: our new puppy Birdie, a hyper-active black mutt with a love of both digging and running (with no regard whatsoever for the plants that might be in her way). Our backyard is a collection of holes, and many of last year's surviving seedlings that I had transplanted to various borders found that they were no match for Birdie's claws (which are excellent digging devices). When she also took an interest in the new seedlings that are now finding their way into my nursery areas, it was obvious that some protective measures were in order. So I rigged up some panels that used to be part of a puppy corral to some fenceposts to limit easy access to my lovingly planted seedlings. It's too early to say if that's going to be fully effective – but for the sake of Birdie's continued well-being, I sure hope so!
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Journal entries for previous seasons

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Last modified: January 26, 2025
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