Jack Frost has visited Linda’s Serenity Garden many times this year and

Begonia Betulia in container

we no longer have the fresh cut flowers to bring inside, brightening up the house. Fresh flowers purchased at the grocery store or from a florist are expensive. When you are used to having fresh flowers in the house all through the growing season, buying cut flowers to fill those vases becomes expensive.

With this in mind, we invest in some well-chosen flowering houseplants adding a splash of color to the house.   It gives us pleasure as we watch them grow and flower during over cast and sunless Pacific Northwest days.

As we go leave the Christmas season, the stores are filled with azaleas, begonias, cyclamen and Christmas cacti that are marked down on clearance. Not only is the price right but, these plants bring a welcomed splash of color into your home. These plants are cultivated in a nursery in a controlled environment and like to be kept at a constant temperature. In particular, azaleas hate being exposed to sudden drafts of cold air. Even the short trip home from the store can shock these plants and make them shed their flowers. Always make sure you have them packed in tightly sealed plastic before leaving the store, thus protecting them from the sudden change in temperature.

Although beautiful, a disadvantage of cyclamen and begonia is they rarely flower more than a month. These are short-term house plants that should be discarded after flowering. The chrysanthemum,  or mum as it is commonly referred to, is a potted flowering plant that has a slightly longer flowering season. The mum comes in almost every color except blue. After your mums are done flowering, cut their stems down to just above the soil line and put them in a cool, dark place, such as a garage or basement, until spring. Once spring arrives and it is planting season, you can transplant your mum plant outdoors in your garden.  In the fall, they will bloom again.  Provide some mulch after they bloom, and they will become a perennial plant!

Most house plants benefit from being massed together in one container, instead of being placed around the home randomly in smaller separate pots. Take a large clay bowl, pot or a rustic-looking basket and group into one mass display.  Four or five Rieger Begonia in one basket look spectacular!

Photo Credits

Begonias – http://www.growsonyou.com/photo/slideshow/29184-begonia-betulia

House Plants – httpwww.iflorist.co.ukc-51-house-plants.aspx

I love succulents so much they are at my front door!  They are so carefree!  They can go many days without water or sun (an important feature in the Pacific Northwest).  The right succulents are perennials.  Just check when you are buying them.

As you can see from these photos, I select a range of colors, textures and styles.  Mix in some rocks, figurines, an evergreen, almost anything that is appealing to you.  I really like the spiky grass as a contrast and its light and water needs match the succulents.

To provide unity, I used two ceramic pots of the same color even though they are different styles and shapes.

All gardeners have failures, you just have to turn them in to successes!  That tall slender evergreen in the pot?  It started out as one of several miniature evergreen trees in the same pot.  After a couple of years, the other trees either died or became too gangly.  This evergreen put down a tap root through the hole in the bottom of the pot.  I really did not want it to get larger so I cut off the tap root and put the pot on the black top.  That has stopped it’s growth, at least for this year!

We had a chair that the bottom strapping had worn out and broken through. In our town you just can not put a chair out next to your trash can and have it picked up. You have to take it to the transfer station and throw it into a inter-modal container which is then taken by truck to the railroad yard and put on the daily unit garbage train and taken to the landfill. The minimum fee for the transfer station is $20.00. Throwing this chair out was not worth $20.00 that was for sure.

Need is the mother of invention and we needed to find something to do with this old patio chair. Bob had the idea of turning it into a planter. We found a pot that would fit inside the chair frame. Bob had a some small cut off pieces of  2″x4″ treated lumber from building the fence. These where put on the ground and the pot set on top of them. Linda filled the pot with some gravel in the bottom for drainage and a mixture of potting soil and 1/3 compost, then planted the pot with some flowers We now had a new garden accent for the cost of a new pot! The cost of the pot was a lot less then the $20.00 fee at the transfer station.

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Linda tells about how she over came the winter cold in her greenhouse to keep her plants safe and growing.

Linda from Garden Accent Heaven shows you some of the plants that she grew over the winter inside of her greenhouse.