It's a new garden. (Kind of.)

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What I mean is, since last summer, when the Great Dying of the Plants occurred (I lost all – ALL of my hybrid geraniums, two of my miniature roses, one of my scented-leaved geraniums and the petunias [yes, I was heartbroken]) I hadn’t had a real chance to re-plant and try to recreate my container garden.

New responsibilities at work (we got a new president, and a new head of the department as well as some new colleagues – whew!) also kept me busy busy and unable to give my garden the attention it deserved.

So it is only now, in late May and early June, that I’ve been able to start planting and pampering my plants again. For a while I wanted to see if I could replace the flowers I had lost with the exact same ones…until I realized that it was crazy to try…not only because I might not find the same exact types that I had, but also because it was no longer the same garden. You can’t recreate an exact copy of what you had. It was going to be a new garden, just as beautiful and loved as my old garden, but different.

My container garden is still a work in progress. I didn’t quite realize just how many flowers I had and how much it was going to cost me to replace them!! (And I hate looking at ugly empty pots with dried soil in them!) It’s been fun so far but I think it will take me a little longer to fill in all the empty pots…luckily in Houston the warm weather lasts a very long time (I would even say: “cold weather?? what cold weather??” but then again last year it actually did get pretty cold at times…).

So here’s a look at my new garden now:

I didn’t quite know what to do with this strawberry pot for a very long time (after the failure of my strawberry experiment) and it just sat on the balcony, looking ugly and forlorn. Finally this year I decided to replace all the soil, line it with plastic and put a tube down the middle so that water can reach all the plants (a suggestion I found on GoY!!) and planted these beautiful orange-peachy portulacas in it…I hope they like their new home and bloom all summer!

This summer reds and pinks have caught my eye, in addition to the peaches and yellows (to a much lesser degree), as can be seen in these lantanas:

The one with the dark green leaves is “Dallas red” and the one with the beautiful light green leaves is “Samantha” yellow. I have also wanted to grow equinacea for some time, so I was happy to find these “Primadonna Deep Rose” which I planted with bright red verbena: