Testing the limits: 2015 winners

If you're going to "test the limits" you have to be willing to take a few losses.  That was the point of my previous blog post (see Testing the limits... and finding them: 2014-2015 losers) when I wrote about the plants I lost last winter, which along with 2013-2014 brought my area's two coldest winters in 20 years.  Each of those two winters, on its own, wasn't so unusual; we get winters like that every 10-15 years and we were several years overdue.  What was unusual was getting two such winters back to back.  That makes the survivors all the more special to me.  They don't necessarily look their best this year, but considering the minimal protection I gave them I'm more than happy.

Three days of glory

After a long, cold winter and a late, chilly spring--followed by a week in Buffalo--I finally enjoyed a perfect spring weekend, feeling a bit guilty about not working in the garden but happy to just enjoy the warm weather and appreciate the flowers.  Stealing the show today is my tree peony, an unknown cultivar that is one of the very few plants I've kept from the previous owner.

Beautiful monsters

Passiflora caerulea, a beautiful monster

There are some plants that, beautiful though they may be, you should be wary of inviting into your garden.  These are plants that grow so fast, so big, and propagate themselves with such enthusiasm, that they will bully and overwhelm anything the least bit slow or small or dainty until one day in mid to late summer, you realize that several of your most precious plants are missing.

Spring has sprung

Iris 'Buckwheat'

What a relief that spring is finally here!  In fact the last 3 days have felt more like summer, humid and with highs close to 80.  In addition to the spring perennials cheering me up, I'm seeing recovery on several plants that were badly damaged by the winter and that I thought (or feared) were dead.  To recap, this was the Washington, DC area's coldest winter in 20 years, and was a good test of all the marginally hardy plants we're growing here!  The low in my own yard was about 5 degrees in early January, with several more lows in the 9-12 degree range and several periods of temperatures well below freezing.

400,000 views

Clerodendrum bungei

For Throwback Thursday, I'm looking back at some of the photos I've taken over the years.  I've been using Flickr to post and share my photos online since September 2007 and I've just passed 400,000 views on my DC Tropics Flickr account.  That's a pretty random milestone and I should note that I only checked it after a friend and fellow Flickr user announced that he had reached 10 million views.

So far I've posted almost 3,800 photos.  Many Flickr users have posted far more photos than that (my friend has over 62,000 photos posted) but like many of those users I'm not very happy with Flickr lately (suffice to say their ugly and clunky "new and improved" version sucks) but there are still some things I like about Flickr.

Palm Progress, 2009-2013

I've always believed that starting small and allowing plants to establish themselves was more important than the instant results I could have gotten by planting larger specimens.  This was the case when I began planting hardy palms in my garden in 2002; most were planted as small seedlings (several of which I started from seed myself).  I want to find out how hardy these "hardy palms" really are so except for my dwarf windmill palms or "waggies" (Trachycarpus wagnerianus) when they were just starting out, none of my palms has been protected except for mulching.  Some of my hardy palms saw temperatures in the single digits in their early years, with the coldest being 6 degrees in February 2004, but winters since then have been warmer and it has been over 5 years since I've measured anything below 10 degrees in my yard.*