Front Yard

Landscaping and gardening are slowly coming along, even though it is at a creeping pace. While I have pulled out some failed plants and am still nursing some along, I deliberately pulled out all the marigolds because they became full-fledged bushes. I didn't know marigolds could get so big!
I just wanted little plants but they seemed to take over the whole garden as well as the flowerbed under our front window.

On the side of the front yard where the crape myrtle tree is, where there was a small strip of bare dirt, I planted lantana as a groundcover. (I lucked out that someone in the neighborhood had cut down and mulched a tree and were trying to get rid of excess mulch.) Butterflies have been flocking to the lantana and they have grown pretty fast without much water. At first, I thought I should have bought more because I got them as small (aka cheap) as I could, but they are filling in just fine.

That little flowerbed under our front window is still pretty pathetic. I couldn't make up my mind what I wanted to plant there until it was too late in the season so I just stuck whatever was left at the nursery in there to make it look nice temporarily.

Fortunately, the few plants I put there permanently have done well even though I was a bit worried since I planted them at the smallest stage I could find (because I'm cheap). My hibiscus, though it didn't flower very much, is no longer being eaten by whatever bug was chewing it up and it is growing again. The bougainvillea seems to be thriving, though not with as many flowers as I expected, and has outgrown the little trellis as I knew it would (so I need to make something bigger).

But most of all, I am SO proud of my Nightblooming Jasmine. Many despair that their plant hardly grows or that it never blooms. But despite my kids breaking off 2 of the 4 branches when I transplanted the tiny thing, it has grown into a beautiful little bush. Uncle Mike told me it needed acidic soil, but I didn't amend it beyond a little compost. However, I did some research and discovered that to make it bloom, it needed to be kept "compact." At first, I didn't know what that meant. But when my 2 branches got bigger, I cut them, and, as I hoped, new shoots sprouted and I kept doing that till I got more and more branches (and the original branches from the bottom have grown back too). Take a look at this magnificent plant:

Not only does it look nice and healthy, but it smells SO good! Now that it's been cool enough to open the window in the evenings and mornings lately, we've enjoyed filling the house with it's fragrance. It even carries upstairs when I put the fan in the Megan's upstairs window directly above it. Rex just told me we ought to put one in the backyard too so we can enjoy the fragrance through our bedroom window.

It's too bad we had to chop down the big oak tree. I've been back and forth about what tree to plant there instead and for a long time I was going to go with an apricot tree. Now I've thought better of it and decided the apricot tree will go in the back with the other fruit trees. After doing lots of reading on Texas plants, I decided on a Bigtooth Maple -- a fast growing shade tree with color-changing leaves and requiring little water. Now the trick is finding a nursery that carries it; I found one that said they sell it but didn't have any yet. I hope it doesn't go the way of the apricot last year and get wiped out as soon as they get them in.

The ash trees in the back make such a mess and two of them are choking out an oak tree. I think the oak would be able to cover just as much area with shade as the three of them combined if it was given a chance. I hate to cut down trees, but whoever planted these didn't plan very well. We're not yet ready to hack those down yet, nor are we ready to chop the other ugly twisted one. I'd like to replace that other twisted one with a pecan tree so that the pecan already there will have a mate with which to grow pecans. After all, what's the point of a fruiting tree that doesn't produce? The tree we did chop down this season is something we couldn't identify but had pretty white flowers that lasted a week. The rest of the year, it was a spindly thing with sparse giant leaves. It was a leaning eye-sore that, like the neighboring oak, didn't get enough light. It seemed partially dead and was ridden with fire ants. That made the fifth tree to come down since we moved here. One tiny dead one that Rex pulled out the first week we were here, another tiny web-wormed one growing 6 inches away from the shed, one huge one that technically belonged to our neighbor that we removed to save our fence, one huge one that died of oak wilt killed by the people who trimmed it, and another that was just too pathetic to stay. But to our defense, we did plant four trees (apple, peach, orange, and lemon) and have plans to plant two more (maple and apricot).