Recently in Ramblings Category

Central Florida's chilly winter this year is going into the record books as the coldest in nearly 30 years.  The National Weather Service stated this week that this has been the coldest winter season on record since 1981.  Winter does not appear to want to give up its hold on us so we could be on the way to setting the record as the coldest winter season on record.

The only upside to all this is that our much-needed rainfall has been above average this winter. 

I say let's close the record books and bring on spring!

This has been a tough move for my blog.  I must have installed and uninstalled it on my new server at least a dozen times this week trying to get it display properly.  I think I finally have it right. I'm hoping this post will make it online so I can get back on track with my garden blog.

Don't expect to be inundated with posts the next several days.  I still have a bunch of my event websites to move and upgrade, and then of course my SommerGardens.com site needs to be built from the ground up again.  :(

I will be ready to do some serious gardening when this monster project is completed.

The smell of death is the air as plants damaged by Florida's recent devastating freeze succumb to Mother Nature's wrath. The visual impact is bad enough without the need to max out the senses with the smell of decaying foliage.  

I thought I would share some pictures of the ugliness in my yard. At least I have enough evergreen plants scattered around to balance out the signs of death.

My dog Inga blends in well with many shades of brown the freeze has generated. Here you'll see brunfelsia (foreground) and tibouchina (background) showing severe damage.

I guess I should not expect any bananas this spring.

The clerodendron (right) really took a beating. The acacia on the left will have to be cut back to the ground.

My yard grown brugmansia look like death warmed over.

The gold dust croton is one of the hardier types of crotons and it also succumbed to the cold this winter.

It would be cool if this Ixora would keep this nice bronze color year round.

This giant king sago is going to need a major pruning next month, something I am not looking forward to because of the serrated stems.

I'll use my lawn mower to trim the asparagus fern. I have large beds of sprengeri plus some smaller plantings of meyer (below).

More photos to come....

With record setting cold blanketing Central Florida this week, nothing was spared from Mother nature's wrath.

This orange tree happened to be on the outer fringes of my outdoor brugmansia growing area and got caught by my sprinklers during the sub freezing weather.  The sprinklers were on to provide a protective ice blanket for my brugmansia during the freezes. 

I'm not sure if it has gotten cold enough to damage the citrus yet, but many of my brugs took a beating.  We have a hard freeze warning in effect for the next couple of days so the worst may be yet to come.  Tonight's forecast predicts the lowest temperatures of the winter and seeing how it is has only reached 34f by noon today, it does not look good.

I'll have a better idea of the extent of the damage a couple of weeks from now.

I decided to remove some of clutter of my blog design and go for a simpler look.  If you frequent my blog often you may need to refresh this website by hitting F5.  That should clear your cache for the old look.

While everyone knows of the Blue Bird of happiness, well I've encountered the Blue Jay of happiness.  This cutie has been hanging out in a group of my older brugmansia seedlings for a couple of weeks now.  It tends to hang out near me when I'm out there and as you can see, it does not seem to be afraid either.  Could this be love???

While much of the east coast is covered in snow this weekend, many of my brugmansia were dusted with what can only be called 'Florida Snow'.  This snow is actually a shower of stamens from a couple of nearby giant eucalyptus trees that happen to be in bloom right now.  At least this snow will not harm my plants!

I would like to welcome my new blog readers that came over from Blotanical.com.  Thanks for the nice comments.  Please visit often to see what surprises my hybridizing efforts produce.

I had a major event over the weekend so I missed a couple of days of new bloom pictures.  I'll make uip for it this week by posting a few extras.  I'm heading out now to see what is blooming this morning.

Geeze, what's up with this weather.  I went out at 12:30am to look for new blooms and the temperature was 81 degrees out!!!  That is about 10 degrees warmer than it should be for this time of year.

Orlando set a new record high of 93 on Sunday.   It was actually a couple degrees warmer out here in Clermont.

The good news is that a cold front is supposed to come down next weekend and drop our temps down to the normal zone for October.

I'm ready!

I just changed my blog settings to allow comments to the posts.  For right now you will not have to sign-in to comment, all you need is a name and valid email address.  To keep spam off my site I'll have to approve your comments before they appear with my posts.  If spam really becomes a problem, I'll install a captcha program and allow approved posters to post live.

To comment on any of my posts or pictures, just click on the "comments" link below the title of each post.

Let me know what you think about some of my blooms...should I toss them or keep them?