As of 9 days ago, there were still blooming flowers in the yard. Fewer, but still blooming, and this even after two days of frost since the end of the official growing season.
I mainly have kept the tropical milkweed in pots although I’ve found that it self-seeds in the garden easily and I get blooming plants by summer. This one is in the frontyard, kept warm by the morning sun.
Silky Gold is especially prolific in self-seeding and grows rapidly enough to be treated as a self-seeding annual. I love plants that I don’t have to plant… ;-)
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Below is a salvia that popped up late in the season. Maybe because it was so low to the ground and originally sprang up around September between some plants that were in pots surrounding it, it grew well and bloomed starting in November! It was blooming still last week… I can’t remember actually growing this one last year and from where hence came the seeds, but hey, my brain has been a sieve of late. I actually found two other plants in the same area.
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What’s a garden without a few geranium plants? Geraniums can be incredibly hardy. Again, in the frontyard which gets morning sun, these and others were still blooming in early December. I remember being in Italy, freezing my butt off in Assisi , but seeing red geraniums growing and blooming from window boxes despite the cold in December. Previous to that trip in the mid-80s, I had only ever grown geraniums as houseplants.
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The Brazilian bachelors button below was surprisingly hardy. It could be that they being tucked in a sheltered corner of the backyard they continued on to bloom very late into early December, but they are tender perennials, or rather, annuals here. jayden explained to me that these self-seed easily in his Austin garden, so I’m hoping for the same in my Long Island garden.
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But by last week on Saturday… (always a sad sight every year… leaves going black and then mush...)
And three days ago…
But then there are those that I’m determined to winter over and those I’ve brought in to an enclosed but unheated side porch. Out of the wind and chilling night temperatures, they are blooming away — even with the decreased amount of light being inside.
So despite the cold that descended upon us, especially yesterday when the wind chills last night made it near zero temps (4 degrees is near zero, right?), I can show some that are still blooming now…
It’s winter, and most of the garden has either gone kaput or is at rest, sleeping underground. With a little help and heat and shelter, flowers can continue to bloom even when it's 4 degrees outside. But whether with a little assistance or not, No. No, you can’t kill us. Even if we die, we’ll seed the garden with more surprising beauty. Even as we appear to be gone, we’ll rise again from strong and viable roots that are merely resting. We will always return...