Summer Garden

Winter is well and truly over! The sun has started to shine the rain has eased off, well at least this week anyway, and the sunshine has re-energised my enthusiasm for 'my little flower garden'. Little you may ask, well this is because I have a small suburban garden and I constantly want to fill it up with colour. This is how some of  it looks like  now:

 This here is my Cosmos flowers  (hope you can see it ok) I planted these in late winter as seeds and they have just started flowering near the end of spring. They are still not in full bloom so will post a photo later.

 Mandevilla, Crimson Fantasy, I purchased this in late Autumn for $6.00 at Flower Power. It was half the size and full of flowers but I made the classic mistake of buying before I knew anything about it. I found out it hates the winter and people usually bring it indoors through winter. Now, the size of the pot made it a little difficult to bring indoors so I kept covering it with a blanket through our  frosty winter, thankfully it survived and has now grown and is trailing.

Lilly, this one is also known as Lilium Asiatic Toronto, I have always found these to be beautiful plants and because i have 2 daughters I decided to plant a pink one.  I did not know if it was easy to grow but it grew easily and is so far bug free. Should I remove the bulbs or leave them in the ground for next year? It would be great to hear from you for advice.

 

White Petunias, I have grown these by seed from last years flowers which I purchased at Fower Power. It took nearly 3 months for an abundance of flowers but it is worth the wait when you know you did it all your self, with a little help from nature of course and you didn't have to spend a thing. I will talk more about my experience on growing flowers from seeds on another post very soon.

White and Pink Begonias, I love these plants they seem to just grow so easily in my garden. My mother in law tried to grow them but she said that the snails just loved the juicy thick green leaves but for some reason in my garden the snails are staying away. I started of with just one pink and white begonia plant and have propagated by dividing the clumbs and just replanting with a little TLC. It is just the beginning of summer so I will show you later how well they have grown. I also have a huge space behind the Begonias to plant a tree, I was thinking of planting a Crape Myrtle, what do you think?