I’m not exactly sure how my flower-love started. Maybe it was because when I was a kid, all my grandmas and my mom grew beautiful flowers. I think it was my mom’s garden that really captured my imagination, though. She has always planted the kind of garden kids love because it’s colorful and wild and jungle-like. She loves whimsical accents like a tipped over pot with the flowers planted like they’re all spilling out. Just a few years ago, I spied a gorgeous teal and rusty wheelbarrow in a dumpster and rushed straight over to get my dad’s truck to pick it up and give it to my mom for her garden. She planted it with sweet potato vine and succulents and Egyptian Papyrus grass. Dreamy. My mom’s landscaping method drives my dad crazy. There’s no plan, there’s no design, there’s no evenly spaced anything, and there’s certainly no constraint with color. Just writing that makes me laugh because a garden like that is just pure JOY. Part of the magic of my mom’s garden had to be that I never had to do anything to make all that beauty happen. I can only imagine how much work it was for her now that I have my own gardening experience.

When B and I bought our first house in Loveland, OH, I was so overwhelmed with my flower beds. I was terrible at weeding…I would get bored and start doing something else, or a wolf spider would scurry over my hand and I’d have to give up for the day. (The spiders there…seriously. I’ve never seen such monstrosities. I have no photographic proof, but at least 2 times we saw spiders bigger than my fist!)

Ugh. Ok, shake it off. We’re talking about happy things here. Besides the little problem with weeding, the perennials were all kind of going crazy. They had all been there so long, there were huge clumps that looked fantastic for the short time they were blooming, but a big green boring mess after that. There were some miniature purple irises that I loved so much, but they had multiplied so densely, I could only get little starts off the edges and the rest was impenetrable. I made elaborate plans to rip it all out and start over, or to use annuals to camouflage the mess, but after 5 years of living there, not much changed.

When we left that house, we lived in apartments for years and my gardening love went dormant…UNTIL NOW! We still live in an apartment, but this one comes with a flower bed out front that we can do whatever we want with! When we moved in, the whole thing was packed full of a 4 foot tall-half dead type of plant where each stalk has its own root system that was surprisingly strong. After I spent 2 very hot hours of clearing out, it looked like I had barely done anything. By my calculations, it would take me at least 14 hours of intensive weeding to clear that bed. When I told Brian, he looked at me like I was crazy and said, “You have a teenage son. Make him do it.” Genius. About 4 hours later, while nursing my sore muscles and blistered hands, I was dreaming up a garden plan for my newly cleared flower bed! 🤩

This is what it looked like when it was first cleared. I originally kept all those grassy looking plants along the edge because I couldn’t figure out what they were and I wanted to see if they would bloom. They did…kind of. They put out these little tiny stalks of purple flowers, but they also attract mealy bugs like nobody’s business, so I’ve dug them all out now. Pay special attention to the terra cotta planter of succulents. You’re not going to believe what that looks like now! (Wait for it…)

The ponytail palm was given to me by our sweet neighbor lady who was so thankful someone finally cleaned up that flower bed. Getting it planted was an…adventure. I kept misjudging how big the hole needed to be, so I’d dig dig dig, then try to place the palm, and no. More digging. Every time I picked up the palm I was cutting my arms up with leaves, but I wouldn’t realize that until I went in to wash up. The only shovel I had at the time was one with about a 2 ft. handle, so when the hole was getting pretty deep, my head was pretty much level with the ground- which is important for you to know because one time I brought up a shovel-full of dirt complete with a little snake friend. It startled me so badly I literally ran right out of my flip flops! Here he is:

My first purchase was my Meyer Lemon Tree. I’m obsessed. I swoon when I walk outside and smell those heavenly blossoms. I stop to look every day at the one lemon on the tree…it should be ready any day now!

Now get ready for some serious gushing. Bougainvillea. Need I say more? Oh, you need more. No problem. Over the years, I noticed this beautifully blooming plant in many yards around central Florida. I hadn’t put together that it’s also the same plant/tree that can be seen on the side of the roads or in wooded areas growing 20+ feet tall and providing riotous color in otherwise green and brown spaces. This is apparently the perfect climate for bougainvillea, and it can get out of hand if you don’t keep it pruned. As soon as I saw this one at Lowe’s, I knew it was mine, whether I had any plant budget left or not. These colors speak to me.

When the blooms first open, they’re white/palest green and then they slowly turn pale pink and then slowly darken almost to magenta. Very shortly after I planted it, all the blooms fell off and I was devastated. I had read transplanting very often results in failure, since Ms. B hates to have her roots disturbed so much, so I took all sorts of special precautions to keep this beauty healthy. Much to my surprise, just a week or 2 later, it bloomed again! Below is a series of pictures to show you the color progression. I tried to pare them down a little…the sheer number of pictures of this plant on my phone is a bit alarming.

This summer I learned something very interesting about bougainvillea. I read somewhere that they prefer poor soil and not to be watered much after they’re established, and if you do water it too much or treat it too kindly it won’t produce blooms. I kind of doubted that, but I tried really hard to just let it do its thing. It bloomed probably 3 times before the rainy season hit and wouldn’t you know it…it’s growing like crazy, but barely any blooms! Time for some extra neglect, apparently!

I’ve been dabbling in other types of flowers…some that are doing very well (penta) and some that do not appreciate Florida’s desert condition summers (geranium 😞) I’ll keep you updated as I experiment more.

Oh, oh, oh! Remember when I got the starts from Coconut Casita and I said I’d keep you updated on them? Look! The chenille plant really appreciated the rainy season and has grown quite a bit. I put the purple heart in 4 or 5 different places and it’s growing slow and steady, but aren’t these little flowers just adorable?

Did you remember I promised to show you what my succulent planter looks like now? Well, not only did I remember, but I realized it would be super annoying to make you scroll to the top to refresh your memory on what it looked like, and that very likely by the time you got all the way up there, you would forget what you were looking for. So I did an ultra professional job of cropping and enlarging that picture and put it right here for you:

Thank you for reading! May your plants be healthy, your nails be dirty, and your feet be bare! ♥️🌱☀️