Clivia Lillie from Africa, bring inside for winter.

I absolutely love flowers!  I have them everywhere.  Which translates in to “I have to have a way to say no” to all the beauty available in catalogs and at nurseries.  I had to set some parameters for myself.

I have a fairly small yard so only the smallest dwarf versions of shrubs can be considered. Being more diligent in purchasing plants that fit my light conditions was another given.  I needed to control my successes and failures better.  When buying perennials in season, most plants are $10.00 to $25.00 and that is for the more common ones. Some budget controls are in order.

No matter how much I might long for all the flowers in the catalog, I narrowed my selection of plants to blooms and seeds that attract birds, especially hummers, bees and butterflies.  I have selected plants that bloom at different periods during the summer to keep a food supply for the hummers. If the bloom has a fragrance it is more likely to find residency in my yard.

I try to reserve some space for winter interest with texture variations, height, or being an evergreen plant.

My mother had many iris so I have to have them, violating all my parameters.  And then there are the lilies with so many colors, blooming periods and varied heights.  Needless to say, I have several Oriental Lillies for their heady fragrance and long lasting blooms.  I planted a couple more this spring.  After all, they were on sale!

When I garden, I make my own rules and then bend them just a bit here and there when my resistance is low.  Mostly, every gardener needs to enjoy each and every plant.

Row of Day Lillies along front walk way, continuous blooms all summer.

Asiatic Lillies.

Asiatic lillies.

Asiatic lillies.

Tiger Lillies

Tiger Lillies.

Fragrant Nicotiana placed by the back door, started from seed.

Highly fragant Star Gazer Oriental Lillie.

Tall pink blooms are Bee Balm, simply loved by bees and hummers.

Asiatic Lillie

Iris

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

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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Fountain Plant

The Fountain  Plant or Russelia equsetiformis is the one!   It is also commonly called the Firecracker plant also. Its brilliant red flowers appear on 12-inch long sprays throughout the warm season.  The blooms are 3/4 “to 1” in length and are narrowly tubular, making them ideally suited for the long, slender bills of hummingbirds.

Other common names for this plant are coral fountain, firecracker plant, rain of fire, and coral blow.  With its cascading fronds and red blooms planted in a tall slender red pot, it will be a great focus plant!  I love containers as you can vary the forms and colors you select and they can be moved to show them off when in full bloom, then retired to less prominent

Flowers of Fountain Plant

locations when not at their peak of glory.

The Fountain Plant can reach 3 to 6 feet high and 4 feet wide.  If that is a bit large for you, just limit the width of the container but keep good height to the container as the branches take root easily and may  have a tendency to be invasive.  Or, to simplify, just plant it in a hanging pot!