"Monday Monday, it was all I hoped it would be..."

Whew! I'm glad to know that I've not been the only suffering in this weather, as well as the only one who's garden has gone down hill!  Granted I'm not suffering as bad as poor Dave here, so I probably have less excuse.

Still, can I please just blame the dog and the weather?  My little bitchy (well, she is) has been consistently waking me up at 5:30am for the past couple of weeks and usually I just get up and roll with the hour that she wakes me up at (which used to be a tolerable 6:15am-6:30am) but anytime prior to 6am (even 6 in the morning is pushing it...) is just plain insane to me.  So after a few exhausted pets from me, she starts scratching me like she's a mole and I'm a delicious bulb she wants and if I don't get up, the barking begins.  Then I yell, she whines and I finally get up after cursing up a storm.

That's when I feed her and attempt to creep into bed again, but invariably she starts up again and I get no more than an extra 15 minutes of rest more.  When I finally do really get up, I take my little time (because I'm annoyed at her) and clean up the kitchen, water some houseplants and stuff to dawdle a bit before taking her out since she runs on a 12 hour schedule, of food every 12 and walk every 12 and the later I take her out in the morning, the later in the evening too, which helps in this dagnabit hot weather.

Of course, this means that I've been getting up not only grumpy, but later than I like to get into the garden, and thus as it's warmer, I'm in no mood to garden for longer than a quick sprinkle of water on the potted plants to prevent them from dying.  Mondays and weekends are worst for waking up at a reasonable hour, because you just want to have fun and go to bed late.  I wish I was one of those lucky in the gene pool, super "no need to sleep" people, so that I could get my gardening done before it feels like high noon in the Sahara here.

But there appears to be hope!

Can it be? It really is!  TEMPERATURES BELOW 90 degrees F for a few days! (Then it hits above 90s again on Friday, go figure, but still, respite!)

Perhaps this is over excitement, but I might be able to get some real gardening done again!  Pull weeds! Oh joy! To eradicate weeds again!  Spread more mulch-y stuff, clean the sunroom and garden area up, mow the lawn!

Being able to do these things again will be thrilling, considering how far behind I feel the garden has been and how awful it's starting to become.  I am feeling very little hope for the vegetables this year.  The heat I think has also been preventing good fruit set and I just pulled off 6 little hornworms off some tomatillo seedlings I had potted up, pests that I might have been able to prevent and noticed their damage earlier if I was able to spend more time in the garden were it not for the heat.

I'd like to note that I'm that breed of morning gardener.  Morning are my time because it gets me up and at 'em, stretches my bones and gets my mind going.  Plus, it's usually the least hot and buggy time of the day for me, especially when I perpetually must wear boots, overalls, and long sleeves when I garden to prevent from getting bitten up and lumpy.  Even then, the buggers find my hands, wrists, neck and face to snack on if I'm out for more than 5 minutes.

Either way, I'm thrilled to have a few mornings below 70 degrees and will just settle to the thought that this summer's garden may be a wash and dream of fall.

Start of Friday Foliage, Flowers and Fruits photog

So, working on this organization and discipline thing with the blog (as usual) that will hopefully provide good content, learning for you and me, interesting dialogue and updates on my garden as well as assuring a good amount of photographs, consistently.

Here's the plan, feel free to comment and tell me if you think this is a good/bad idea:

-MONDAYs: Going ons in my garden
-TUESDAYs: Plant spotlight either in my garden, or of one of my interest
-WEDNESDAYs: Plant/nature poetry, sorry, need to get that creative urge out.  If it's painful for you, skip this day
-THURSDAYs: Horticulture lesson, for my sake, I want to understand all those fun terms like pinnate leaves and crap
-FRIDAYs: Foliage, flowers and fruit photographs in excess for your weekend viewing pleasure (I hope)

So, I guess here's to kicking off my new Friday tradition!

The ornamental Black Pearl pepper is fruiting and looking gorgeous!

I'd like to call this pic, jestingly, "Spicy hot pic of myself"  If you click on the pic, you can see clearer the reflection of me in the pepper berries.

 More detail and still some reflections of me

I love the colors of this pepper, the fade of red and black!   Tiny spiders making webs between the berries.

I find the foliage of Black Pearl very attractive too, a purple-green-black-bronze burnish.

A cluster of spider webby berries

Immature berries with lone purple flower

The contrast of the green background was nice I thought.  These are like jewels! Who needs rubies or amethysts when there are these plants? 

Hyacinth bean, or lab-lab bean I learned is another name for this plant recently.  Lovely dark purple edible pods eventually.

Not a great pic, but interesting of inside of a rose mallow flower with focus on stamens.  The petal ribs were a cool pleated effect I thought.

A little duller in color, but more equalized focus here again.  Someday I'll get this one right.

Let's pretend to see beauty in destruction ok?  This is the sawfly (that we identified earlier with Dr. Turpin from Purdue's help) damage.  Specifically this is a hibiscus sawfly that has affected the previously shown Rose Mallow hibiscus and this Red River hibiscus.  It seems that I'll need to get pyrethrin to treat the sawfly larval damage as neem hasn't worked.  Luckily, I learned that the Haight Ashbury, and other hibiscus sabdariffa varieties are resistant to this sawfly, so the hibiscus that are delicious are being spared. Yea.

 Closeup of damage.  Lacey, could be pretty almost.  Who needs to crochet when the bugs do it for you?

Taking pics of these new untouched by sawfly damaged hibiscus leaves was wonderful (Doesn't it look like it's indicating to you to come to it?).  Slightly stupid breathless commentary I wrote in haste of this below:

I hold my breath as I take the pictures, one after another, not wanting to breathe  because the inhalation of air would travel from my nose to my lungs, expanding my chest  and raising my arms and moving my hands, ruining the picture.  I begin to see stars and   blackness creeping in at the edges of my vision.  Beauty is literally suffocating me.   The leaves, cupped up, catch the wind, cups of wind, holding distillations of air from  who knows where.  The leaves, full of wind, are able to move the entirety of the tree  in one direction to another. The tree would travel and follow the wind if it could give  up its rooty anchor, but it's content just to sip the wind that flows into its cups.  I  wonder if it would appreciate me digging it up and putting it on a well oiled wagon so  that it might be able to travel with the wind as I can tell it yearns to, but it is too pragmatic and has set down deep roots.  This is home to it, in my yard, and I am glad that it has stayed despite the bugs, despite my poor watering and neglect.

New leaves, what can be more beautiful?

This one reminded me of a chameleon, with little arms!

One final curl.  


Have a great weekend and I hope your garden is doing better than mine!

Keeping away the Twilight fans and Babies everywhere! (click on title to get)

A week ago (I know, behind on posting in real time) my garlic was looking really scruffy and yellow indicating that it was garlic yanking time!

I've already done a post on garlic harvesting and braiding from a while back so I won't bore you with the details all over again.

When I harvest my garlic each year, I also re-plant it at that time to replace what I've pulled up despite many people saying that garlic planting time is in the fall.  I figure if I have holes in the garden already, why not just plant more in them and my other reason is my garden is sort of self sustaining in the garlic growing area.  The first year I planted, I planted so much garlic that it was way too much for one harvest and it seemed that the cloves I planted might have grown at different rates, some smaller than others, so I left those smaller ones  in the ground for the next year's harvest.  Some I think have even been in there for 3 years just because I wanted them to get bigger.

Well, this year was a little different.  I still is a good sized harvest despite leaving some of the smaller ones in the ground as usual and there were quite a few beautifully sized bulbs to dry for use this year. Smelly joy!

The only change in the garlic harvesting/planting came from the garlic itself telling me something: They wanted to have babies apparently:

Lots of the garlic started sprouting flowers and growing bulbs at their tops like the Egyptian walking onion, but also bursting with little bulbs oddly from the middle of their stems too.  I assume that it was their time and they had matured and these little bulbs can be considered seed garlic.

The mama bulbs that produced the seed bulbs were still small and I set them aside with the idea of replanting them too, but decided later as an afterthought that maybe they had run their course and it might be better to just simply use them despite their smallness (maybe their flavor's more intense?)  I also made the decision not to replant the mama bulbs because there were so many little seed bulbs, those and the already too small bulbs still in the garden would get a little crowded if I added anymore extra garlic bulbs to the mix.

Currently I am leaving them to hang in the garage (pardon the mess o' sports equipment and tools in the background)  It's a relatively dark place with what I hope is some air circulation to prevent rot and sprouting.

(pic of lone mid-section sprouted bulb plant)

(closeup of the midsection garlic, great color!)

Last year I dried the garlic in the guest bedroom, but it did stink the place up of garlic (made worse because I kept the door closed in that room) and as I have guests coming, it's not happening now unless I can confirm my guests enjoy garlic scent as air "freshener."  My only concern about the garage is that it is rather hot and humid outside, the heat not so bad in the garage, but still, a bit of a concern.  I suppose we'll see.  Granted garlic is cheap if it goes bad, but it's obviously nice to use what you grow and that it doesn't go to waste.

(artsy photos of the garlic with my spiffy "it's Italian night!" tablecloth I found at the thrift store)

(who knew garlic could be so pretty?)

(I don't know what happened to this bulb for it to end up looking so weird... spirals of garlic cloves! Maybe I should plant these out in hopes that I can reproduce spiral garlic? Note: this is being propped up by a small bulb of garlic)

(Unpropped by another garlic bulb.  It's like some sort of garlic unicorn horn, or a smelly seashell?)

This, and winter squashes (missing those so bad this year) are amongst my favorite things to grow because of their shelf life.  Someday I'll get/make a root cellar and I might be able to keep carrots, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage and other goodies well into the fall/winter without refrigeration. Someday, one day I will!

I try to use the garlic up as fast as possible because there's nothing like peeling or chopping up your garlic to find that it's all gray-black and nasty smelling.  Any recipe suggestions?  Lots of Italian and roasted garlic use here, so if you've got something real good, send it this way!

OMG where did the time go? I blame Summer Soltice!

Hallo, where did the time go?  I was running around all day that I didn't get to really write up a proper post as promised!

Um, gardening updates/news: I inherited a large rubber tree/shrub plant in a pot from my volunteer place and pruned that sucker back and will be taking a bunch of cuttings for people who actually missed it.  Apparently there was a bunch of naysayers about the poor rubber tree who thought it looked like a bunch of sticks.  But it was in full rubber tree leaf glory! All dark purple-green glossy leaves! Ah well, beauty in the eye of the beholder?

I also had to re-pot up some orchids that I've been slowly killing the root system too because I 1) over watered and 2) forgot that they like to be a little root/pot bound.  The good news is that freed up some of the large pots as I had to trim back dead orchid roots galore.

Um... it's still hot? But looks like rain is in the forecast.  Which will probably mean fungus.... again. Blah.  I might be bringing out the big guns now, like copper spray, we'll see; I'm not thinking my everbearing strawberries will be everbearing again this year.

And now, allow me to distract you with some pretty borage pics!

What I I especially like with the morning pics is all the DEW:

Ugh. Summer in Memphis.

So, I'll give some updates on the garden tomorrow, because as of late, it's been  HOT here, and I have been a lazy bum, hosing the garden down on the 99 degree F days (F-days, no joke...) with heat indices in the 103-107 degree F areas.

I'm hosing the garden with sad, city chlorinated water despite having full rain barrels again because I want to be able to zip back and forth between the beds and give them a thorough, cold drink(I know they might not like the cold, but we'll pretend that they enjoy it).  Plus lately I've wanted  to be out of the heat before 8pm.  Usually I like to be in there for an hour at least, and back in no later than 10:30am, but that's not happening here on out unless the summer magically cools off or I decide to change my sleep schedule to waking up at 5am (and messing up the dog's sleep/food schedule and having her wake me up daily at that hour)... so maybe I'll just work on that being more efficient outdoors thing.

Another problem is that I'm an utter newb and never remember to drink enough liquids before, during and after hot weather gardening and have a tendency as well to black out a little when I get up from stooping during gardening.  The mom in law says that apparently petite people such as myself are prone to that.  Great, another annoyance in being short.  You'd think that there'd be less distance between my blood to my brain so that I wouldn't get all black-y out, but no.... being vertically challenged is a real bitch.

On happier news, I had an epiphany that led to me an overall revolution.  After having given myself a permanent tan on my lower back due to insufficient high pant/too short shirts I have learned why farmers wear overalls, duh.  I find that I probably look like some adorable mini-farmer now in them, and it really harkens me back to the 80s.

But yes, back to heat.  Things are wilting and dying, not setting fruit and being in general ornery and annoying. First drought, then floods, now heat and humidity.  A regular Memphis summer I suppose, so regular whining.

Back atchya tomorrow.

Introducing into the Garden: Sweet woodruff

Now this is the stuff that I was really after at my mom-in-law's place! (Thanks's mom!)

I have been lusting after more fun (and free herbs) and an herb that act as a groundcover, is rumored to be a bug repellent, and will work in the shade, and is commonly used in wine? Totally there.

This is a hard herb to come by (at least in my area) and when I saw that it was being sold at a local garden store I sorely wanted to buy it, but no, no, no my plant moratorium was still in place.  I remembered vaguely in the recesses of my mind that my MIL had mentioned having it at some point and I fired a quick email to her before leaving for her place a couple of weeks ago to ask if she still had it.

YES SHE DID, and it was now taking off too. (And she was willing to share) Excellent....

The patch of sweet woodruff my MIL donated to me was ginoromous (ginorous=1.5ft diameter).  I hadn't expected so much, but she wanted to help get me started, so I am one lucky garden nut!

Unfortunately as I was receiving the herb later in the year, I think missed I missed its glorious flowering that I read occurs in late spring/early summer.  Granted there still might be time for it to flower, but after moving it and chopping it up I won't blame it for giving me the finger and deciding to settle down and root up rather than flower out.   

Sweet woodruff, or Galium odoratum is well known in German culture for its use in maiwein or also known as maibowle where the dried sprigs of the herb are soaked in white wine for hours to days in some cases giving the wine a heady vanilla, honey herbal note. Sweet woodruff's aroma is only perceptible and useful in wine (and other food items commonly found in Germany apparently) when dried.   Trust me, I crushed some up fresh in excitement and that was a letdown.

Apparently sweet woodruff contains a natural sedative, but also coumarin (which is probably part of the source of the sweet scent of this herb), so it is important to not over consume sweet woodruff because it can result in headaches and coumarin can be an anticoagulant.

Dave's Garden reviews seem to give sweet woodruff relatively good ratings from gardeners, though some people cite some invasiveness, though others apparently enjoy that slight invasivity.  This could be the reason why Germans also give sweet woodruff the name waldmeister, or "Master of the Forest."

It is hardy from zones 5-8 and I'm excited to learn too that it is also partially evergreen so it will provide some green during the winter months.  Beyond flavors/odors and medicinal things, the plant physically is very interesting too.  I find the new leaves coming up from the center of older leaves and stems forming in the center as well to be very fun to look at.  The flowers appear to be cute things and no work flowers makes me a happy gardener.

My new sweet woodruff has been halved ( as it was nice and large) and is experimentally being placed in two locations.  One location is in full shade, keeping the lungwort company in a microclimate underneath some holly bushes where this is ample moisture from leaf mold/cover/mulch.  The other half is in part sun with my mature oregano plants and I think as long as I keep my oregano bushy, and not too rambly when I do get lazy, the Galium will be happy and stay above the oregano at its expected foot tall height as long as I make sure I keep the moisture level good.

The following links provide recipes for maiwein and other random information I might not have covered about Galium odoratum as well as pics of it in flower that I don't have personally (yet!):
http://www.herbcompanion.com/gardening/7-herbs-that-grow-in-shade-sweet-woodruff.aspx
http://herb-gardens.suite101.com/article.cfm/growing_sweet_woodruff
http://www.altnature.com/library/sweet.htm
http://www.henriettesherbal.com/archives/best/1994/may-wine.html
http://www.paghat.com/sweetwoodruff.html

Introducing into the Garden: Lungwort

The next new addition to my garden from my mother in law's is lungwort:

(ok, so it's not at its prettiest here, because the flower show was over when I got it, and I had to plop it in the not most amazing spot... full of spiderwebs now, thus the not usual closeup pics I like to do.  Note the cool hairy leaves though!)  (Also, please look at the other links of the pics of lungwort to get a MUCH better idea of its grandeur)

I've got an eye for striking looking plants I think (meaning I'm only good at identifying those types of plants, more mundane looking plants and I'm worthless) and lately it feels like I've been seeing lungwort everywhere lately (at the Master Gardener's hoe-down, in Botanical gardens, yada) like once you see one red head, you notice 5 of them all at once in whatever location you're in (redheads are a bad example, but I like to insert them in here because my husband is one and I love it).

Bad example, I know, but maybe because I've been seeing them a lot they've become somewhat on the the mind and it's as though they want to be with me!  "Take us home, Persephone!  There you can see us everyday in the garden in our full glory!  Come mid-spring winter we will be full of wonderful glorious flowers that will make you happy! Happier than daffodils or even hellebores can make you!"

Whoa, talk about some siren song those things have got there, so I asked for some of those too from my MIL and she kindly obliged :)

Unlike the Campanula that I blogged about last time, no on Dave's Garden gave lungwort any negatives or warnings about invasiveness, so hurray there, plant on other end of spectrum! (We like diversity here in Persephone's garden).

Besides just having cool foliage, I always thought about having lungwort (Pulmonaria saccharat) as an addition to my garden because I'd heard of its supposed medicinal herbal affiliations, which I soon began to suspect as folklore after much research.  As its name seems to imply, it has to with the lungs, and how?  Well, the spottiness of the leaves made ancient herbalists be reminded of disease lungs, and so they thought best that this was the herb to treat such problems (like walnuts and pecans are good for the brain because they resemble the brain.... which is not so far off apparently... but yes, association does not mean fact)

Still a very attractive flower in the borage family (which I am a fan of the herb) so in it goes!

Lungwort should grow no more than 18 inches high and 2 feet wide and is hardy in zones 4a-9b and is perennial (heart).  It is partial to partial sun to full shade and so I've placed it in my little microclimate underneath a canopy of holly bushes where it should keep a good amount of moisture and leaves (which will become leaf mold eventually) and so it will hopefully stay happy there.

Apparently it is cool enough that someone bought it a domain name which is chock full of good info.  Interesting info such as the variegation that is so loved in lungworts, the silvery bits, are actually air pockets underneath the leaves that keep the plant cool.

Eventually I might move the lungwort to a little sunnier spot, but as I am running out of room a bit... it's gonna stay there for now.

Introducing into the Garden: Campanula

Now that the DC trip stuff is over, let's get onto the juicy plant-y stuff, newest additions!

While at my in-law's house, my equally plant daffy mother-in-law showed me around her garden (this is tradition, if you go to any of the women's houses in this family, you give an obligatory garden tour).  Mostly the tour was for, "see anything you like? Let's dig it up for you!" (Man, I wish all garden tours were like that)

One thing that caught my eye in her garden was this knee high plant with somewhat rangy looking toothed leaves but cute long, blue-purple colored bell shaped flowers.  Being a sucker for bell shaped flowers (lilies of the valley, daffodils... sort of bell shape? and the like) I asked about it, and for a while she had one of those gardener moments all of us hate, where we just forget the name and it's on the tip our our tongue and it's driving us mad that we can't rustle up that darn name.  So she starts vocalizing various sounds "Capa... cupa...Gah, isn't it terrible that I don't remember?!" and then it clicks in me what it might be, a plant that I've seen in catalog only, and had caught my interest there too. "Campanula?" I ask hesitantly, "Yes! That's it!" she says (and I do a mental air fist pump to myself at my success... it feels good to be able to identify stuff).

(leaf closest to flower is oregano, not the campanula's)

This was a very unusual campanula to me, most I've seen are very blue and very balloon-like when in bud and then open and star-like in its petals.  Though the ones in the catalog are quite charming I found that I liked this one much more than the catalog versions.  We slated this campanula as a "do dig for Persephone" plant and though I usually like to stick to edibles (as I often say) I'm getting the "flowers for the soul" thing more and more,  especially as I can get tired of having to tend to my edibles all the time fretting about "will I be able to eat fresh veggies this summer if the bugs/weather/stupidity kills them?"  Some regular ol' landscaping for prettiness can be easy on the eye especially when I care a lot less about their death if they go, and when they're easy to take of and perennial.  Gotta love them perennials.

I forgot to ask my mom-in-law as to what variety this patch of campanula's name is before I left, so I did some research and for a while thought it was the Scottish harebell (Campanula rotundifolia) variety, but upon closer inspection it appears very much not the case...

Google image search to the rescue!

I didn't think I'd have a chance at finding it, but after some searching I suspect that it's either Campanula takesimana or Campanula punctata.  If anyone has a good eye and can tell the difference between either an my pics and would like to point it out to me that'd be great.  I'm leaning a little more towards the C. punctata because the bells are not so flared open at the edges as much as the other, but still uncertain.

My mother-in-law warned me that it was sort of invasive.  "Excellent," I said and did a little Mr. Burns-esque finger tip waggle action.  I should really stop with those "potentially invasive" plants I know, but space, must be filled! But it reminds me... mint anyone?

(I love how hairy it is.  You know me and my love for hirsute-rific plants, hairy+bell shaped flowers=I'm there!)

For this campanula, leaning towards C. punctata it should get no taller than 2 feet tall, blooms late spring/early summer and is hardy from 4a-9b.  Should be planted in sun to partial shade, but my MIL had it on the east side of her house where it was running around rampantly, and east side's where mine is too.  I hear that it likes it relatively moist and I've been heartily dousing it in my 90+ F degree weather  while it gets established.  My bed drains relatively well though and it seems fine there for the week it's been chilling.

DC Trip was Plant-tastic! (part 3)

Alright, so I was terrible and didn't take many worthwhile pictures of my plant-tastic DC trip (and this is the worst verbal slide show ever...) I'll be briefer from here on out about "DC trip."

(UPDATE: Ho, ho! I have pics now from the trip! My wonderful sister in law has provided! viewing pleasure abounds!)

The National Arboretum was a blast, though a long, hot muggy blast, so more like a sweaty hike around the beautiful acres and legions of ground you'd expect an arboretum to cover.  This area actually reminded me of the Memphis Botanic Gardens really with the amount of land a person covers.  I've never been to an official Arboretum before and the Botanic Garden feel was compounded by the fact that this one had exhibits/divisions such as the bonsai section (it's all trees right, albeit tiny ones).

The bonsai were pretty splendor-ific, and intimidating (started in the 1800s?! and you're only 3 feet tall?!)  The fact that something can be tended for many centuries, by generations of people is inspiring, but one swoop of some disease and all those centuries down the drain.  Talk about an investment.  There ought to be a bonsai market.

We came at a pretty good time as the azalea bonsais were in bloom.  Tiny trees with ginormous looking blossoms on them!  I thought that the flowers were supposed to become miniaturized too... I need to look into that,  maybe I just saw dwarf plants bonsai-ed once, making their fruit and flowers appear more in proportion? 

Some had some nifty scenes with tiny plants to look like larger shrubs and miniature figurines in them:

Um, they had a slightly larger landscape are complete with a small bridge that I danced/played Godzilla on:

I loved the garden's use of sedums as groundcover!

 Pretty fun to look at the bonsai, though admittedly, and especially on a hot day, after a few dozen, one starts to look like the other (unless it's a truly startling one) and a person sort of wants to move on...

So off we went and checked out the Arboretum's AMAZING herb garden.  Yep, this is another garden I'd love to own if it were possible.  Lots of delineations of gardens (their list): "Dye Garden, Medicinal Garden, Culinary Garden, Fragrance Garden, Industrial Garden, and Beverage Garden feature the different ways in which herbs are important in our daily lives.  The Native American Garden, Colonial Garden, Asian Garden, and Dioscorides Garden"
WOW.  The highlight of the Herb Garden was a central brick area for resting that also had various herbs too of course, but had many, MANY pots of.... scented geraniums.

Needless to say, I went a little nuts.  Like the little kid I sometimes act like, I had to smell every freakin' pot (and I think there had to have been at least 40 of them).  I don't think any of them overlapped either in type! They were unbelievably lovely in all their various sizes, shapes, flowers and leaf types and almost all (minus those weird cedar/nut-what scents) were delightful.  My husband and his brother sort of stood by the side for the next half hour slightly bemused, slightly helpless and impatient as my sister-in-law caught my geranium fever and by the time we were done my fingers smelled like something out of a perfume factory disaster. (Husband gagged when I put my fingers up to his nose).


The worst (and best part) was when I noticed that some of the geraniums were in seed.  So, yep... there I went all Augustus Gloop-ish picking seeds fervently (only 3 plants had seeds) into my pockets.  (1) I'd like to add that I wasn't shoving them into my pockets... just small little fistfuls.  (2) I wasn't sure if they would be viable or germinate true anyways, because I understand that scenteds are either notoriously difficult to germinate by seed or aren't true and thus that's why cuttings are almost always necessary.


Please realize, that I was TOTALLY not thinking as I was doing this... just regular seed saving habit I suppose... instinct?  Either way, my husband, who was flipping through the Arboretum brochure sort of coughed at me and my sis in law and pointed to a section that mentioned "no picking or taking plant matter out of the arboretum."


Oops.  So, I stopped that rightaways.... but figured the seeds in my pocket could just stay in my pocket...?


Either way, my brother in law was having a mini-hey day plucking lavender all around.  Guess we all have our perks.


I later emailed the Arboretum and inquired to some Smithsonian workers about why there was no nursery to sell extra plants/cuttings on site and I was essentially told that because it's government and non-profit they can't sell their items.  BUT, when compost day comes in... there's a line of people waiting and they don't tell the people "no."  Note to self: DC looks like a better and better place to live... Free entertainment, free gardens to visit and maybe even free plants....



We soon took refuge in the Native garden/Fern Valley which was blissfully shady.  Native garden was as you could expect, native and things rambled unattended mostly and there were lots of wonderful ferns which is my husband's plant of choice (I'd like to add that he's not a fan of sunlight, so that might be a hint to his predilections).  

There were, however, frogs in a boggy section that made the best sounds and had leopard spotted golden eyes which I adore, so we stopped to stare at those for a while.

So, of the MANY places to see in the Arboretum, we only got to THREE. Hopefully we'll get to trek over there many more times and complete the trip (and send a donation to the Arboretum...)


Finally my last bit of plant-i-ness (until I talk about the new additions to my garden Monday) is the National Botanic Garden, with the conservatory area being the area I spent most of my time in.  I was unawares and short of time of some of the other areas, so that'll be for yet another trip!


The National Conservatory houses many different environments within its 29,000 square feet.  While I could go through the list online, ones that were favorites and stuck out to me were the children's section, the sedum area and the tropical section which by far was the best.  


The tropical section is tiered so that you can go up a metal walkway and follow the vertical height of tropical palms and other taller canopy plants.  Along the way up he walkway tucked into the taller plants and hanging from the walkway or higher posts are tropicals such as bromeliads (usually a plant that doesn't interest me much usually but they had some very cool varieties I was unaware of and also probably not available in the regular store nurseries) and epiphytes like air plants and orchids of course. 


During the walk up to the second tier my eye alighted upon a strange vine that somewhat thickish and had long slightly curved up leaves.  The vine ran off of the tree trunk and onto the walkway which allowed me to inspect it closer.  The leaves, when I got a better look, reminded me of the orchid leaves at my house, and the only orchid that was a vine that I knew of.... after searching around to find a tag, affirmed my suspicions, it was a vanilla orchid!  And it had to be at least 50 feet long! (ok, maybe I'm exaggerating) but it was a very long vine!

The outside gardens were nice and I could see lots of edible action, but as it was blazing hot, the husband and I missed out on Bartholdi Park, the Rose Garden, and the Water Garden.


So, after 3 days of possibly boring material of verbal slideshow  I'll get on to regular gardening programing with the introduction of new plants to the garden Monday.  Have a great weekend and send some cool air my way, 93+ degrees F of temperatures headed my way this weekend and for about a week on and off!