Paul James, the host of HGTV's Gardening by the Yard, will not be making his scheduled appearance at Shangri La Botanical Gardens in Orange.
Although the photo is as hazy as the early morning when I took this picture today, you can tell that orange bulbine is an attractive plant with deep green succulent leaves that look a lot like onion leaves and stems of orange and yellow blooms. My plants, which badly need to be divided, bloom all year except for winter. They produce thick clumps that nicely fill in an understory.
Orchid lovers - be sure and check out the Orchid Festival at 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Oct. 10 at Shangri La Botanical Gardens in Orange. Orchids are among the world's most beautiful flowers - and make up 20% of all identified plant species, according to Shangri La, which houses many varieties in its Epiphyte House.
I love fall food. Almost any dish with pumpkin in it calls to me. And call me strange - you won't be the first one - but I also adore squash, turnips, beets and other root crops. I like them roasted with a light glaze of olive oil and sea salt, pureed in hearty soups, or baked into casseroles. Most of all, I like breads heavy with spices and pumpkin.
Each year, I look forward to the first day of October. It means that, for the most part, the days of 90-plus degrees and humidity are over. That's welcome news to gardeners, who are worn out from battling the heat that exhausts both them and their crops and gardens.
If you want to plant fall vegetables, you can find young plants all around town. Here's what I found at area nurseries yesterday:
Yesterday. S. Ward emailed to ask where she could buy spider lilies. She had thumbed through catalogues but couldn't find any. I placed some calls to see if we had any available at local nurseries, but also came up empty.
If a day trip to Houston sounds like a good idea, you might consider dropping in at the Houston Zoo Saturday, Oct. 10 for a 2-hour guided tour of the zoo's 55 acres of tropical and native plants, trees, flowers and ground covers. The zoo's horticulture Manager, Joe Williams, will lead the tour. In an inspired move, the zoo will open its gates 90 minutes early at 7:30 a.m. which means you can tour it during cooler hours. According to a press release, each year the Houston Zoo’s team of 12 horticulture professionals spend than 20,000 hours taking care of the plants. Tickets are - Member $25; Non-Member $30; Child/Student/ Senior Member $15; Child/Student/Senior non-Member $20. Admission includes a continental breakfast and all-day access to the Zoo. To purchase tickets on-line, see http://www.houstonzoo.org/horticulturetour/ 
The first spider lilies (Lycoris radiata) of the season popped up this week. It's easy to understand why they are known as the "surprise flower." Unlike most plants, where flowers bloom on stems and greenery already in place, this old-fashioned lily emerges from the ground as a single stem with the hint of a bud at its tip. It grows so fast you can almost see it, forming a big, spidery bloom.
This morning, I read about Timelapse PlantCam, a camera that takes photos "at user-selected time intervals and then converts them into a time lapse video, so gardeners can see an entire growing cycle in seconds!"
A photo to make you smile today...
While eating lunch with friends after church today, the subject of plants that produce colorful blooms in Southeast Texas came up. Glen and Mary mentioned that when they evacuated for Hurricane Ike, they stayed in Uvalde. While there, they became fascinated with mass plantings of a good-sized shrub with vivid red/orange blooms 3 inches across. When they returned home to Winnie, they called the city of Uvalde and asked for the name of the plant.
One of my favorite creatures found in abundance on our two acres are tree frogs. These sweet little insectivores are native to the Southeastern United States. I love the songs they sing to each other late in the evening. 
If you've been thinking about installing a rainwater collection system for use in a home landscape, now would the time to do it. Because of a stalled low pressure system and an area of disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico, it looks like Southeast Texas finally is going to be very wet for the next few days - at a minimum.
Joel and I took a trip to Kerrville over the Labor Day Weekend to celebrate his parents' 60th wedding anniversary. While we were there, we arranged for his brother, Denis, and sisters, Brenda and Sherry, to meet us early Saturday morning down at a little park on the Guadalupe River so we could take a family portrait for his parents as a surprise gift. We used a digital camera, downloaded it on Joel's laptop, printed it out and framed it. His parents loved it, as we knew they would. 
The birthday flower for September is the aster, which represents Love, Faith and Wisdom and symbolizes Valor. Asters are members of the family Asteraceae (sunflowers and daisies belong, as well).
Well, here's the finished product of the clay pot I covered with bits of broken china and pottery. The one on the right is the first one I ever made, using some leftover materials a fellow classmate had on hand (thank you again for sharing!). That was a challenge, which is one reason it's so gloriously gaudy with all those shiny beads, but that's OK. I'm giving it to my mother-in-law, Alta, whose taste tends toward the colorful and heavily embellished. I'm thinking it's a match made in heaven.
In the age-old battle between birds and fruit tree owners, the birds often win. It's hard to keep them away from ripening fruit. Even if they don't eat it, they can mar the fruit, the way birds do by pecking away at citrus fruit to get oil to rub on their feathers. One of the old-time methods was hanging aluminum pie plates from strings on the tree branches. Sunlight reflects off the pans as they spin in the trees and frighten the birds away. Really smart birds catch on, though it does help. Next on the shiny object arsenal came compact discs. Thread a string through the hole, and, voila - instant reflectors.
Every day I check the weather forecast to see what the odds are of us getting any rain. After a long, hot, dry summer, we really need it here in Southeast Texas. The trouble is, in our region, when it does rain, it's hit or miss. On the way home from Beaumont a couple of days ago, I drove through a nice sheet of rain. It stopped five miles from our house, which was dry as a bone. How can a cloud hold so much water that it has to let it go only to dump it with such precision that you'd think it had a logistics map and strict orders not to miss the target area?
I give up. I've battled and battled the garlic chives that keep showing up everywhere in my herb garden ever since I allowed them to go to seed before discovering it. I went so far as to pull out the plants and pull up the heavy clay chimney flues that make up the base of the herb bed so I can start again. I took out all the soil, then pulled each plant up by its root. They still kept coming, so I pulled some more. I think I might have eradicated them in a couple of pots, but they have completely taken over the space between the pots and the edging next to the brick walkway.
Ah. summer. Cicadas singing harmoniously in the trees, fireflies dancing delicately across the pastures and dirt daubers darting daringly into the house at every opportunity.
How cute is this? My friend Buddy gave me this recently at a celebration in my honor. It's a wonderful bromeliad mounted in moss on a wooden plank.
Because our home is 100 years old or more, most of the hardy varieties of old plants already were here long before we were. That's been an amazing blessing. Who wouldn't love moving onto two acres that had an abundance of paperwhite narcissus, hardy amaryllis, old-fashioned daylilies, spider lilies (Lycoris radiata), a Belinda's Dream rose and more?
