Hollyhocks, snapdragons and chrysanthemums! Do you love to garden? So do I. Well, no, that isn’t exactly the truth. I love gardens. I love flowers. But working to make that happen, eh, maybe not so much.
What I love is planting flowers, watering them and watching them bloom. What I don’t love is weeding, spraying for bugs and pruning.
My garden changes from year-to-year and I never know exactly why. For three years my backyard was ringed with amazingly tall, beautiful pink, purple and magenta hollyhocks. They towered over the fence and were a joy to look at. Then, for some reason I’ll never understand, they stopped reproducing themselves in spite of my best efforts of re-seeding, putting down more dirt and plant food and even going so far as to talk to them. So I planted snapdragons which are, technically, an annual but seem to re-seed pretty well. So for two years it was snapdragons. Then the nursery had mums on sale and I got whole bunches of them which I discovered bloom in the spring as well as the fall. Bonus!
My garden is always a surprise which is great fun except when the surprise is that nothing appears – then it’s another trip to the nursery to discover something new.
And how about his vine-thingy that grows on my back fence? I think it’s a honeysuckle, but don’t much care what it’s called as long as it continues to do what it’s doing. And the hummingbirds love it. So that’s a double joy — a beautiful vine and little birds, too! My only concern is that Lop Ear likes to sleep in the flower bed, but the hummingbirds stay out of reach and move way too fast for him — he’s too fat and lazy to do any real hunting!
I hope you’ll enjoy visiting my garden and seeing what’s blooming now — it’s never the same. (It all depends on what the nursery has on sale.)