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Garden journal entry

 

three subtropicals amid a sea of Bermudagrass
July 10, 2021. This weekend marks the five-year anniversary of moving into our Texas home (and leaving our Pennsylvania garden behind). Those years have passed quickly, and it's funny to look at pictures of our brand-new yard right after we arrived. At that time, it was just an expanse of grass (Bermudagrass, an unfamiliar concept to me at the time, and still the subject of much grumbling on my part) boxed in by privacy fences. If you've poked around a bit on this website, you probably noticed that those fences no longer dominate the view, and a good bit of B-grass' territory has been reclaimed by worthier garden inhabitants. That all happened a little bit at a time – in fact, it took a while to get started at all, since I was the losing party in a car-on-bicycle accident just a week after moving in, and was in no condition to do hard gardening for a few months. But by the time this photo was taken, in early October 2016, I was starting to envision a future with more vertically inclined greenery in view. These first three potted specimens (which would soon thereafter be planted in the first borderlet along that fence) represented our haul from a local chain nursery, which was full of plants we had no experience with. From left to right: a sago palm (still alive, after two deep freezes), a 'Lisbon' lemon tree (which perished in the following winter), and a cordyline, which may still be marginally alive in a corner of our garden somewhere, but which never regained the splendor of its nursery form after its first winter. So the past several years have been full of new discoveries, finding out which plants thrive here, which merely survive, and which are no match for the summer heat or the occasional winter deep freeze. I'd like to think that I'm better equipped to be a Texas gardener now, but I'm still learning – and likely will continue to learn from my mis-steps, until it's time to move gardens yet again.


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Last modified: September 09, 2009
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