October blooms brighten my garden

October! It’s the champion period of the year, providing saccharine alleviation from a Texas summertime with cooler upwind and rainfall and bringing the plot backmost to life. Let’s instrumentality a stroll ALL astir the plot and spot what determination is to see.

It’s oxblood lily season! These dark-red beauties (Rhodophiala bifida) popular up from summertime slumber with a late-September rain, and portion each angiosperm lasts lone a mates of days, each bulb keeps making caller flowers for 2 oregon 3 weeks. 

I divided a clump of bulbs past outpouring and tucked them successful the stock-tank planter on with divisions of ‘Labuffarosea’ rain lilies (Zephryanthes). And present they’re each blooming, conscionable arsenic I’d envisioned, implicit a metallic tract of autochthonal woolly stemodia (Stemodia lanata).

Bees emotion them too.

Look astatine those stuffed pollen baskets she’s toting!

The ‘Winter Gem’ boxwood balls that outline the Circle Garden scorched a small during this hellish summer, but they’re putting connected caller fresh maturation and greening up now.

‘Color Guard’ yucca and lantana (can’t retrieve which one) glow successful the mellow October light.

The Circle Garden arsenic seen from the platform steps

And arsenic viewed from up connected the deck, wherever the sunburst stonework is champion appreciated

A wider view

Curves and much curves, blues and much blues, silvers and much silvers

The beauteous whale’s lingua agave (Agave ovatifolia) successful the halfway of the banal vessel is simply a variegated assortment that was a passalong from a person moving overseas.

More of those saccharine pinkish rainfall lilies and a new-to-me assortment of purple bosom — ‘Pale Puma’, a part of which was fixed to maine by decorator Toni Moorehead of Signature Gardens successful Grapevine, Texas.

It’s filled successful a challenging portion of bare ungraded encircling the stock-tank planter and asked for virtually thing this summer.

More rainfall lilies, positive a unpaid Verbena bonariensis that snuck successful there

‘Fireworks’ gomphrena, my caller favourite summertime yearly that’s behaving similar a perennial for me. Or possibly it’s each coming up from seed, but astatine immoderate rate, it’s a large works that survives our broiling summers.

In the little garden, Mexican beautyberry, aka black beautyberry (Callicarpa acuminata), is each berried retired with striking, wine-red berry clusters.

What a gorgeous works for shade! Birds don’t look to find it arsenic tasty arsenic the American beautyberry, truthful the berries past longer. Plant the American for the birds and this 1 for you — but springiness it tons of space. It gets big.

I’m truthful blessed this autochthonal histrion has yet travel backmost from Snowpocalypse. Evergreen sumac (Rhus virens) is simply a handsome histrion each year, but erstwhile it blooms successful fall, it’s adjacent better. And bees emotion the lightly fragrant achromatic flowers too.

Yucca rostratas and bluish partition down the bluish pool

The agelong view

More oxblood lilies with soap aloe (Aloe maculata)

Ghost plant (Graptopetalum paraguayense) successful the Texas licence sheet planter

Squid agave (Agave bracteosa) successful its tall, fluted cookware makes a focal constituent astatine the extremity of the swimming pool. Beyond is the covered structure wherever I’ve been moving during these beauteous October days.

A postulation of succulents connected the potting seat and hanging connected the fence

A Wilson’s warbler rests connected the ’70s-groovy, tree-man candle holder from my puerility home. I’m acrophobic this saccharine small vertebrate whitethorn person deed a model due to the fact that it seemed stunned and fto maine get adjacent to investigate. After a portion it flew away, and I privation it safer travels.

Side way up to the caller metal-mesh gate

In the beforehand garden, the sedge tract is lush and green. This is Berkeley sedge — click for the communicative of however I planted it 10 years agone (yes, 10!).

Along the driveway, a metallic plot shines with a small much sun: Paleleaf yucca (Yucca pallida), Wheeler’s sotol, and woolly stemodia, Texas natives all.

‘Amistad’ salvia adds deer-resistant colour on the curb.

My garden’s communicative is mostly a communicative of trees and deer. The dark-gray, undulating trunks of unrecorded oaks basal everyplace successful my garden, and the shady spaces that effect indispensable besides beryllium tremendously cervid resistant. Therefore my works palette is constricted to grasses, sedges, yuccas, sotols, and scented- oregon fuzzy-leaved plants similar shade-tolerant salvia, ail chives, Jerusalem sage, and the like. I cage a fewer tiny trees but similar to debar unsightly ligament cages. To get mean tallness plants that cervid won’t destruct with their rut-season antlering, I find elevated containers helpful, similar the alloy tube planters astatine left.

The trees person taken a beating the past respective years acknowledgment to drought, utmost heat, and the unusual crystal storm. But I effort to assistance them with regular arborist checkups, an exertion of compost passim the plot successful fall, and summertime watering. I can’t deep-water each histrion during droughty summers the mode experts urge — I person 30-some trees — but I bash my champion with them. I find myself often worrying implicit them though, and fantasizing astir a smaller plot with 1 oregon 2 shadiness trees to support steadfast alternatively of 30. I can’t contradict their beauty, though, and distinctive Central Texas look.

Right present it’s acorn season. It’s comic however often a falling acorn gets impaled by a yucca below. A shish kabob for a squirrel!

The thoroughfare view

It was conscionable past February that it looked similar this, aft Austin’s epic crystal storm. The plot has astonishing powers of recovery.

‘Vanzie’ whale’s lingua agave with unpaid conifer muhly, yuccas, and bluish Mediterranean instrumentality palm

Softleaf yucca (Yucca recurvifolia) and hummingbird-favorite Turk’s cap (Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii)

Wheeler’s sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri), woolly stemodia, sedge lawn, and those iconic unrecorded oaks

Back into the rear plot to respect Bat City’s mascot plant, bat-face cuphea (Cuphea llavea)

And those glorious bunches of oxblood lilies. Planting them successful a raised furniture similar this lets you bask their blooms up close.

More!

‘Moonglow‘ mangave

Purple oxalis (Oxalis triangularis)

And a hypnotic-eyed copper snake — he’s friendly!

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Digging Deeper

Come larn astir plot plan from the experts astatine Garden Spark! I signifier in-person talks by inspiring designers, scenery architects, and authors a fewer times a twelvemonth successful Austin. These are limited-attendance events that merchantability retired quickly, truthful articulation the Garden Spark email database to beryllium notified successful advance; simply click this nexus and inquire to beryllium added. The Season 7 lineup tin beryllium recovered here.

Tour respective Austin gardens connected Saturday, November 4, connected the Garden Conservancy’s Open Day circuit for Travis County. Tickets indispensable beryllium purchased online successful beforehand and volition beryllium disposable opening September 1st.

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