The Garden - Summer 2011
As spring rolled into summer, we realized that Texas was experiencing a drought. It turned out to be the mother of all droughts - with over 40 days of temperatures over 100 degrees, and literally months without significant rainfall.
Blog posts throughout the summer centered around the drought, and trying to keep the garden and our pine tree alive.
Thank goodness for the sprinkler system - it certainly earned its keep this summer.
In spite of the drought, as I looked back through photographs taken during the summer, I realized how much beauty we have here. We managed to find the right schedule for watering the garden, even with mandatory water restrictions, that kept the garden vibrant and conserved as much water as possible.
In addition, I discovered that several plants I had been gifted by a gardening friend turned out to be drought and heat tolerant, like the Homestead Verbena shown below and the salvia above.
I had taken some cuttings from the Rose of Sharon which graced my garden at Cottage Gardens and the cuttings took well and provided a mass of blooms all summer long, to the delight of bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.
I bought several "New Gold" Lantanas, having read that they were drought tolerant and also butterfly magnets, and planted them in the front flowerbed.
In the back garden, another plant gifted to me by my gardening friend was a Texas Star Hibiscus. I actually have two, one red and one white.
I started to add more photos of butterflies and hummingbirds to this page, but I realized that they were taken in September, so I'll finish this page with a photo of an unusual visitor to our garden.
I think it really illustrates how severe the drought was when not one, but two young armadillos showed up in our garden and actually stayed for two days!
They seemed to be attracted to the wet ground where the hose pipe had leaked, but they also enjoyed burrowing through the flowerbeds.
We enjoyed having them, but we did wonder if our flower beds would survive.
