Skip to main content

In the Yard

I made a trip to a local plant nursery.  Two extremely helpful women helped me to identify the plants in my yard, gave me the Sarasota County Extension service phone number, and steered me to a web site with plenty of information about taking care of the yard.

This may be the slow season here as far as tourism, but it is a great time for customer service.  I am glad we get to do the big shopping time instead of during the winter months.

Frangipani flowers (a bit spent)--they have a lovely scent.
The tree looks like dead sticks in the winter, though.

 These white flowers smell so much like an orange blossom that I was guessing it was some kind of mock orange.  The woman at the nursery called it an orange jasmine.  On the net, I found out it is also called a tea tree.  The smell is wonderful (and I thought of you, Arkansas Patti).


These are seeds on a crape myrtle, which blooms in summer and shed leaves in the winter.

What Florida yard would be complete without an hibiscus?  
These are Mexican petunias.  They will pretty much be in bloom year round so that is one plant we will get to enjoy more fully than some.

Comments

  1. Wow, this is an interesting post. How exciting it will be for you to learn all about the plants in your new environment.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you, I had my nose to the screen. LOVE that smell.
    Arkansas Patti

    ReplyDelete
  3. What a colorful garden you inherited!

    ReplyDelete
  4. How beautiful! Like an artist's paint box! God is quite the artist, isn't he? By the time you get home to Vermont, the leaves will be all colored too!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wow these plants are awesome! Nice work grandma...you really got a nice place too!

    Sarasota plant nursery

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I appreciate readers' comments so much. You don't even always have to agree with me.

Popular posts from this blog

It's TIme

 It's been a while since I have posted anything and even my reading your posts is falling by the wayside. I am in Florida now. I have a yard where little attention was spent on landscaping for the past years so I am slowly and (somewhat) methodically addressing that. I also volunteer to work at the pollinator garden and the edible garden I helped install at the UU grounds and I took over the volunteer job of cleaning out the overgrown community garden by my neighborhood mailboxes. The neighbor who was doing that got sick and could no longer attend to it. It's a bigger job than I'd thought at first -- not only overgrown with weeds, but the plants that are wanted there are in life and death competition for each others' spaces. And two walks a day, morning and evening, so Levi can keep up with addiction to canine social media and a daily rousing came of stick or ball midday take up another chunk of my time. I have a weekly meditation group that I co-facilitate, and my own ...

New Furniture

 We went shopping for a new couch. I liked this one, the first store we went to. Of course it would be an impulse to buy the first one so we trekked around to other stores -- something we liked more, a better deal? No surprise that we ended up going back to that first store the next day and purchasing that couch for our living room. Also a matching love seat for the den where we watch TV. Because I had replaced my old love seat with two recliners. We couldn't keep three households worth of furniture after all. Well, my recliner was not big enough to accommodate both Levi and me. Poor boy had to watch TV from his bed on the floor. There! This is much better! Spoiled much? The little tail on the floor belongs to his toy squirrel, Buddy. It's like having a toddler with the need to be picking up toys or risk tripping over them. But his very favorite play thing is that bathmat that can be found anywhere but the bathroom floor.

Walking

 I have always been a walker. Now that I have a high energy dog there is no excuse for not getting out there. And the weather is not an interfering factor here. Early morning and early evening are our preferred times so even when it gets hot we should be okay. We can get quite a long walk going around the neighborhood, greeting neighbors out working in their yards or walking their own dogs. But the landscape changes quickly just beyond the confines of the housing developments. It could be described as natural Florida or as sites of future housing developments. I do prefer the first option. And I really enjoy being out in natural areas so I often opt to head to a nature setting. I would have liked to put a picture here. Unfortunately my iPhone has made a unilateral decision. It will no longer be sending my photos to my computer. Why? I have no idea. However, we may be walking along happily enough -- me listening to the birds or trying to identify wildflowers and other plants while L...