A few things looking happy and growing well in my Texas garden this month, despite the crazy heat wave that won’t let up.… Read More
The post Summer garden moments appeared first on Digging.
Texas summers always test me as a gardener. I dislike the heat and humidity and generally view summer as a holing-up season, a downtime to wait out, the way gardeners up north view winter. Except of course the weeds don’t stop growing during my downtime.
But this isn’t a post about weeds, or the news-making heat that Texas is currently experiencing, or anything else I try to ignore. It’s just about a few things I spotted and enjoyed enough to pull out my phone and take a photo of while outside watering pots and new plants.
Like the toothy, speckled foliage of ‘Fiercely Fabulous’ mangave. Look how happy Fierce Fab is! She’s not minding the Death Star’s glare one bit. What a trouper.
Other summer lovers include old-reliable purple skullcap (Scutellaria wrightii), ‘Bright Edge’ yucca, and ‘Peter’s Purple’ monarda. The monarda finished flowering a week or two ago. A passing neighbor asked me the other day whether she should pull up her monarda “now that summer has fried it.” Oh no, I assured her. Summer hasn’t killed your monarda. Here in Texas, ‘Peter’s Purple’ monarda blooms in early summer and then goes to seed, and it will return again next May.
I typically leave monarda standing after the flowers dry up because I think the seedheads are interesting. But you can carefully (don’t pull up the plant by the roots) snap off its blackened seedheads and scatter them where you want more plants, just like you’d do with purple coneflower. Or if you leave them standing, as I do, they’ll do it on their own.
Mullein is another self-seeder in my garden. This one seeded itself at the corner of the house in the decomposed-granite path, and it looks so pretty there, flowering tall and yellow.
I did do a little “gardening” early this summer: I rolled the battery-powered mower out of the garage and mowed the Berkeley sedge lawn. So satisfying to mow just once all year and enjoy the lawn-like appearance of my now-10-year-old sedge lawn!
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The post Summer garden moments appeared first on Digging.
