Refurbishing after a dreadful heatwave

This summer was the hottest on record so far (don't they say that every year?). And to make matters worse for our plants, we went on a long holiday. This subjected them to dry and hot winds, without receiving any water. Sadly, we lost about 50% of our plants.

Not wanting to cause further damager, we waited for the monsoon to arrive before we shopped for new plants. Yesterday was Plant Shopping Day!

We'd gone with a long list of pots to fill. And we've come back with a lot of plants! 

I'll let the pictures do the talking for this blog post.

Hibiscus

Pentas

Philondendron Xanadu

Crepe Myrtle

Lemonia

Plumbago

Texas Purple Sage

Ruellia and Evolvulus Blue Daze

Aralia, Golden Money Plant, Pearl & Jade Money Plant, Neon Money Plant, Aglaonema

Song of India and others

Croton and others

Autumn colours

I have only ever seen autumn foliage in my 2 years at Germany. What's the big deal you say? That's what I though too! But when you see the trees with lovely shades of red, that's when the beauty really strikes you.

We do not have many trees with that kind of foliage. But the couple that we have are still pretty good looking. For the others, the yellow leaves look nice as they last for a long time.

Here are some pictures.

Pomegranate

Pomegranate

Maple

Maple

Crepe Myrtle

Crepe Myrtle

Summer round up - 2

Princess lilies – For my birthday this year, Anshuman gifted me a new plant called Princess Lily. It has nice white flowers, with slight pink and cream streaks though it. Even the leaves are lovely, with a nice white border. Once the flowers die down in autumn, the plant still looks striking. It needs a partly shady spot, so I put it under the Hakea.

Princess Lillies

Cactus - Last post I was looking forward to a cactus flower. It did have several flowers, surprisingly very dainty for such a prickly plant! Only the purple cactus flowered. The red and yellow had no change from the last year. In fact the stem of the yellow one seems to be rotting, even though I never water it.

Cactus flower

Crepe Myrtle – This is one of my absolute favourites! I envy the people who have this growing in their yards. When full grown, the tree is 8 ft tall or so. The branches are quite linear, fanning out from the trunk. This gives a spectacularly organised effect when they have flowers growing at the end. So far, I have seen various shades of pink, light purple and white. They only flower for a month in February-March, so they are much looked forward to.

Crepe Myrtle

Carnation – These are still happily flowering away. Since the seeds were mixed colours, we have had white, light pink, dark pink, red and recently a dark purple Carnation. Strangely enough, they smell like cloves. I googled and turns out that the variety I have is called “clove pinks”, because of the smell.

Cascading colourful Carnations

Calendula – Until I grew this, I had no idea what a joy it is to see an orange flower. Maybe because that is my favourite colour! I had grown a couple of them in a pot, which took more than a year to flower and died after 2 pale yellow flowers. Since we did not have any vegetables in the patch this year, I sowed several seeds of Calendula. They struggled with some pests for a bit, but really shot to glory from January! Each flower lasts for roughly a week and attracts butterflies and bees.

Calendula

Winter is around the corner. While this forces us indoor, we have the lovely Daphne to look forward to.

Garden retreat

The disadvantage of our plot location is that we are lower than our neighbours, which makes our garden very visible. There are naturally several trees that grow fast enough to be used for screening, but they are very common. We wanted to have variety as well as functionality. At the start of the new season, we had grand plans for spending more time outdoors in our garden.

By now Morrison nursery and BAAG had become our favorite haunts for uncommon plants. An episode of Better Homes and Gardens introduced us to a plant called Tibouchina, which is an evergreen shrub with beautiful flowers all year round. We got two of those to brighten up our garden.

Tibouchina

Our next purchase was a more functional one. We wanted a fast growing tree to block out the view from our neighbour's newly built deck! The best option was an Australian native called Hakea Salicifolia. It is an evergreen tree and really bushy.

Hakea Salicifolia

And finally, Anshuman wanted a maple because of it's beautiful leaves and bark. Maples are deciduous, so we had to pick a location where the view to our garden was not so direct. But the tree was just beautiful and worth it!

Maple

I did say finally, but on the way to the cashier our eye was caught by another tree called Crepe Myrtle. These are also deciduous but have beautiful paper-y flowers for a short time in spring. We picked up one from the Indian summer collection.

Crepe Myrtle