Meanwhile…
The hollyhock is still standing.
The buds look healthy. The flower isn’t wilting. This volunteer that appeared out of nowhere is still hanging in there.
The porch plants are all back outside and the temps are going to be nice and warm for the rest of the week.
I know that it may be difficult for some people to understand my sadness about losing everything in the garden so suddenly. I get it. “It’s Mother Nature’s way.” But I’m not just a dabbler in the garden, someone who plants things and then moves on. I absolutely love gardening and flowers and plants and watching things grow. Recording the changes that happen on a daily basis in the gardens is one of the great joys of my life. I watch everything. Every bud, leaf, bug, bee, butterfly – everything. I know it intimately and it’s my baby.
So it is a big deal to me. And it broke my heart a little this week. I was short tempered yesterday and more than a bit blue.
I’ll get over it, of course. But I’m sad. No doubt about it.
I have to go into the city today for a bit more work on the show, so this will be short.
Happy Tuesday.
It is always hard to see the garden go after we have worked all summer tending it. And then there is next year. The hollyhocks are a hardy bunch. Ours are thinking they might bloom again. They were all cut back weeks ago and are once again green and lush, but they won’t last long for our weather is to change this week, too. I hope you are having a good week, anyway.
Thank goodness for the hollyhock, Ann!
Great day to go to the city. Have a great day Claudia. Doris
Lovely weather, but still a hectic day. Just got home and I’m pooped!
I guess my word for the day is great! Ha Doris
xo
Of course you were sad. A garden is a wonderful living thing. I spend a lot of time tending the community planters downtown where I live. One morning this summer I was crushed to find someone had systematically uprooted and pulled into small bits plants from every container all the way down the street. Vandalism is inexcusable at any time, but someone willfully destroying the plants I’d started from small containers made me more than a bit sad.
How sad that anyone would want to uproot a living thing – a beautiful plant. I would have been so sad.
Awww…hugs for you. :]
Thank you, Brae.
I totally get your sadness…isn’t it odd how some flowers succumb to the frost/freeze…and others do not. The hollyhock…who would’ve thought? Our gardens are special to us. We create them, nurture them…and take pictures of their growth. I mourned the departure of my hummingbirds. ( They are mine….and return year after year).
Hope today goes well for you! ;)
I’m mourning my plants and the birds,too. Especially since it hit 70 degrees today and will be even warmer tomorrow. Those plants could have kept on going if not for that one day of frost.
No need to apologize for feeling sad about the end of the growing season as it is something which many of us mourn. We celebrate the new signs of life in the spring and share our joy as we follow the growth of our plants. Fall, as beautiful as it is, still signifies the end of the growing season that so many of us consider to be one of our most favorite and productive times.
I have to tell you that a few weeks ago in my Gardening Journal I put Hollyhocks on my list of things to plant next year because of that gorgeous one you have shared with us. My mom and grandmother always grew them, but I have not! Another one I have listed is Bachelor Buttons.
I hope you have safe travels on your journey into and back from the city today!!
Well, hollyhocks certainly seem to be hardy, bless them. I’m still sad – as I was telling Donnamae, the temps are in the low 70s which makes the untimely loss of the plants even more poignant to me.
I know! It was 70* here yesterday, 72* today and 74* tomorrow. Crazy. I’m just glad we had the flowers with us for as long as we did. The last few years we have had freezes much earlier. I think what makes me so sad is knowing what is ahead of us. I just so dread the winter months coming much too quickly. It seems that as I get older I just hate thinking about the cold and the snow. The first freeze is just so foreboding and seems to signal that dread within. ?
I know. The first freeze means it’s real. Winter is coming.
It’s so true that when one truly loves someone or something, there is good and bad. Happy and sad. I’m sorry you are on the dark side of that circle of life now. I can tell you to look forward to renewal in the Spring, but that’s too far off and your emotions are dealing with the immediate. You’re good at finding those small moments of enjoyment. Hope you get loads of them this week.
I hope so too.
It’s good that you take lots of pictures so that you can see your beautiful flowers when it is cold and snowing outside…not as good I know..but better than nothing…Nice weather to visit the city today!
Nice weather, but very busy and hectic and tiring. Glad to be home.
I’m not the gardener you are but I definitely get emotionally attached to plants. I’m in my parents’ home and we only have one surviving red poinsettia. They were Mom’s pride and joy. She probably had five very-old-time ‘bushes’ of them. We had to take some out when we rehabbed our yard last year (concrete work, etc.; very upsetting to me) and we really only have one survivor in the front yard which is struggling terribly in the drought. They don’t take a lot of water where I live in SoCalif and we’ve kept it adequately hydrated for its low-water needs but the heat has gotten to it in a way we can do nothing about (poinsettias actually do very well in cities here at the ocean; I’m more inland), so it’s quite withered and I do think it’s about gone. It didn’t help it any when my husband had to cut it back in order to paint the exterior of the house. I think it shocked it; can’t seem to recover. Anyway, this poinsettia is from my earliest childhood memories, so I definitely mourn the loss. Normally, in about six weeks, it would be otherwise blooming profusely.
Well, as you say meanwhile, YAY for hardy and plucky hollyhocks!
And, oh, guys get attached to plants, too: My husband brought a potted ficus tree into our marriage (from his ‘previous life’..!!..) a few decades ago–from the mid-80s–and we have taken it cross-country and to several houses. It’s been shut up in dark trailers; endured ice and also searing heat. It lived indoors, then outdoors. It’s been root-bound yet has survived everything. Last year, when we overhauled the landscaping to somewhat xeriscape but also just do a lot of needed work in general, we finally figured…even if this turns out not to be our final nesting place…it was time (and we had space) to get the ficus permanently in the ground after it’s approximately 30-years-of-living, in a pot. It’s partially shaded under the roof eaves of our house now, almost as tall as the roof itself, is thick and thriving in good soil as it drives its roots deeper, gets just the right amount of sunshine, its leaves have turned glossy-green and, well, I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. I see it every day and give it a smile! It’s finally free!
Yay for the ficus!
I think we should throw that brave hollyhock a parade. I can’t tell you how seriously happy I was to see this photo and your news about it today. Even though I know it’s the Big Circle of Life, I still hate seeing all the gorgeous plants, that we tended and admired and even consumed, all Summer die off each year. Nature put them here for our use – and many of them are doing valuable things for the earth that we don’t even KNOW about yet – but it still feels bad to see them fade away each Fall. I know their next generations will be back, but it’s still sad. So hurray for all those “bulldog” plants that are so tough and refuse to let a little chilly weather get ’em this soon. ☀️
I’m so sad about the plants – and the irony that a frost killed them when it’s 70 degrees today is not lost on me. Everything else is wilting – even the geraniums which I covered for a second night – they came through the first night beautifully, but they didn’t make it through the second – which was even colder.
I think one reason I hate to see the flowers die in the fall is winter seems sooo long. It seems like the fair weather months go so quickly, but the bad weather months linger on and on and on. I have got to get my houseplants in this week. They will have to sustain me until spring. Have a good remaining week, dear Claudia.
Winter seems longer and longer every year, Dottie. I understand. I feel the same way.
Yay! This Hollyhock has proven to be hardy! A sweet surprise… I know you’ll enjoy it.
Thank goodness for that hollyhock – and I see more buds yet to open!
Pretty hollyhock. I think we still have some flowers blooming here but of course it’s much warmer this far south. I will miss them when it’s all grey and brown here. Hope you had a good day in the city. I’m catching up on blogs today!
hugs,
Linda
Grey and brown I am NOT looking forward to, Linda. Not at all!
Me too Claudia! I like Fall, but I know that Fall means Winter and no being out side working in the yard for me. The last things I plant at the end of the summer are Larkspur seeds, and my bulbs. Everything is ‘done’ with their blooming and growing and beginning to die back, or I know the first hard freeze will ‘do them in’. Some things I keep alive in the beds over the winter by covering them when I know a freeze is coming. Others, I winter over in the garage, with days of being outside when it is sunny (my potted gardenia, parsley (love how they look growing in pots, plus the bonus of eating them!), a potted oleander that has done amazingly well this summer), and my beloved asparagus ferns (3 pots of them and they are huge). My husband is so understanding of my love for my yard, my gardens, it is my life’s blood and if I couldn’t be out in the soil digging and planting I think I would be like my plants at summer’s end and would wither up and die.
I can’t imagine not gardening – this, after so many years of being unable to have a garden! I wish I had a garage or some room to overwinter my plants but I don’t, so I have to keep them shoved in here and there all over the house.