Tuesday, July 22, 2014

A new favorite flower?

For two years now I have missed my favorite North Carolina flowers.  I’ve missed my mandevillas because they were a summer staple for me for the last 15 years—always at least one but sometimes more, blooming like gangbusters all summer long.  Sigh…

And I’ve missed my gerber daisies because when they did bloom they were so great and provided such great photo ops.  I’ve planted a few gerbers here but they are very limited in colors because they get some kind of disease here.

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I often buy plants from the 50% off clearance rack at Lowes, and last year I bought some dahlia tubers.  I had no idea what they were, but the picture looked promising.  They turned out to be HUGE yellow flowers, so heavy that I had to stake them to keep them upright.  I enjoyed them enough last year that this year I bought more at Costco.  I’m still waiting for most of those to bloom this year, but already I can tell that I might have another favorite flower.  In most places in Oregon you have to pull up the tubers to over-winter them so they don’t rot, but in our back yard the towering evergreens sheltering from behind the back fence kept off most of the rain and prevented these from rotting. So I have great hopes about them coming back. (My plants get to over-winter in the ground.  Or die.  That’s just how it is.)  Here are some pictures from the back yard right now.  I can’t wait to see the rest!

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1 comment:

  1. I LOVE that yellow/white one! Beautiful. There are some weird but pretty plants in our backyard here that are not looking too good... I'm hoping I can save them, but seeing as though I can't even keep plants alive in NC, I don't have much hope for doing it in the desert! ;)

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