It’s Christmas Eve. Tomorrow, I’ll drive to Princeton to have Christmas dinner with my family. My sister Nancy will give me (us) an amaryllis for our Christmas gift. It will bloom, magnificently, sometime around April. (I keep our house COLD. All the other siblings, who also get amaryllises, say theirs bloom right away.) And then will come the conundrum–do I keep trying to keep this amaryllis going? Or do I just say–okay, I loved you this one time, but that’s enough?

I will keep growing the amaryllis, even though it will never again bloom so magnificently. So. I’m a sucker. Or an impossibly hopeful optimist.

Well, WE got walloped yesterday with snowfall. I’ve never in my life seen snow like that. I went out to scrape the car, and I felt snowballs pelting me in the back. I looked all around, but no one was in sight. Then–POW!–another snowball hit me! I realized the snow was actually FALLING in snowballs, great big clumps of it. It was uncanny. I had a bunch of errands to do, so off I went in the car. Every time I parked, when I came back out to the car I’d have to scrape another three inches of slush off of it.

I was so curious to see what would happen in the garden, not to mention to the houseplants I hadn’t quite gotten around to bringing inside yet. Out I went today, in the bright sunshine, and found … well, it’s a mixed bag. I’m pretty sure my gorgeous nicotiana are done for. What was great mounds of bushy tobacco-leaf foliage two days ago is all shriveled up now. Some zinnias are poking through the slush, and I have one peacock lily still standing tall and proud. I think the amaryllis I hadn’t brought in yet will be fine, along with the hibiscus I’d left on the front porch. And a jalapeño pepper plant that was drenched in snow yesterday is perky in its pot today. And look here! I went out to fill the birdfeeder, and the beautiful raspberry-scented ‘Madame Isaac Perriere’ rosebush is still blooming strong! I couldn’t quite reach the flowers over the mounds of snow, so I brushed the petals with my hand and inhaled that glorious scent.

There’s a definite hint of fall in the air these days, though last night we were the warmest place in the entire nation, apparently. I went out and picked a few more dried hydrangea stems for arrangements before the frost, inevitably, hits. My gorgeous Nicotiana alata are still perfuming the sultry evenings, and the peacock orchids continue to bloom. I have a lot of sort of scraggly-looking Impatiens balsamina, mostly the fat, ready-to-pop buds along the stems, and the chrysanthemums are just starting to come into their own. Oh, I must remember to mention the toad lilies, which are blooming their pretty little heads off. But the summer flowers are just about over and done. These zinnias provide one last dash of sunshine, a memory of lazy summer days.

I’ve never been that big a fan of coleus. I mean, I like flowers, not foliage. No matter how zany leaves are, they’re still just leaves. But for some reason, last spring I decided to plant a large planter on my back patio with four different kinds of coleus. And I have got to tell you, I’ve gotten more pleasure out of this planting than just about anything else I’ve ever done.

Those coleus took off! Something about the site and the container, maybe even the soil, just suited them perfectly. They got big and fluffy, they branched out, and they even all grew at sort of the same pace, filling out the planter and creating a garden focal point that really made me proud.

In past years, I’ve tried to grow flowers in this shady spot, but I’ve never had success like this with any varieties I planted. I’m afraid I’m a convert. From now on, it’s coleus or nothing for me!

And yes, I do realize I should either clean up before I take photos in the backyard or else learn how to crop photos. Probably easier to clean up, considering my technology aversion. Sorry about that!

Remember how worried I was that my big, lush Nicotiana alata, also known as jasmine tobacco, wouldn’t get around to blooming before frost, since I hadn’t started them indoors the way the seed packet said to? Well, thank heaven for this stretch of extra-nice Indian summer, because these babies came through. They smell so wonderful at night! And they have much more substance than the smaller hybrid nicotianas (which I also love, by the way, even though it’s hard to understand why breeders allow fragrance to pass out of a plant like this). I am admiring them greatly and wondering what strange, monstrous moths and night insects they’re attracting while I’m safe asleep!

A guy at the place where I work got flowers sent to him recently. I love it when guys get flowers at work. It just makes me grin. Anyway, this was a tasteful little, contained bouquet of various stuff—allium, foamflowers, love-in-a-mist, pincushion flowers, a.k.a. scabiosa. This last one is one of those “okay” flowers for me. I don’t love it; I don’t hate it. I’ve never tried to grow it. But I think that next year, I will. Because this guy’s bouquet contained regular old pincushion flowers, and then, right beside them, it contained … well, how do I describe them? Pincushion flowers on steroids? Pincushion flowers gone postal? They were such wild-looking things that I took a picture. You can see what I mean in the flower on the lower left. The insides of the blossoms got all weirdly overgrown and mutated, kind of like floral cancer. (Not a pretty image, I know!) I found these singularly appropriate for a guy’s bouquet. There’s nothing run-of-the-mill “pretty” about them, but they sure are interesting!

When I ordered flower seeds from a catalog last spring, the company, Select Seed (I tend to use a different one every year, just to keep the catalogs coming), threw in a free packet of Nicotiana alata, also known as jasmine tobacco. I love the sweet-smelling flowers of nicotiana, so I was pretty excited. I wasn’t, however, excited enough to start the seeds indoors, as the package advised. Instead, I tossed the nicotiana seeds in the ground when I did my first direct outdoor sowing of seeds, on St. Patrick’s Day. The other stuff I planted then—poppies, cornflowers, calendula, larkspur—duly grew, bloomed and withered. I forgot about the nicotiana, to tell the truth. By the time the dreadful heat of July gave way to the monsoon rains of August, I was pretty much done with gardening for the year.

The nicotiana, however, weren’t done with me.

I noticed them about a week ago, in the back of the bed. I went to college in North Carolina, so I know what tobacco looks like in the ground. And the big, strong monsters of plants coming up back there looked like Carolina’s best. There are flower stalks on them as well, growing up from the center. They look to be a few weeks away from blooming at the moment. The trouble is, jasmine tobacco isn’t hardy. Which means that if frost hits, I’ll never get to see my huge, gorgeous nicotiana plants bloom!

So it’s a race, out there in the garden bed. Oh, I know, when it’s as hot and muggy as it was today, and the Phils are still playing, it seems like summer. But autumn arrived last Friday, ready or not. (And I was not.) Which will get here first, I wonder—frost, or frosty white nicotiana flowers?

Incidentally, you can make cigarettes out of jasmine tobacco once you cure it, and there’s a ton of info on the Internet about how to cure the leaves after you pick them. Too bad I quit smoking. That would have made for a most interesting DIY!

Photo by MRaccine licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Been too long since I posted! First there was the long, hot drought, which meant that commenting on gardens–at least mine–was basically senseless, since everything was as parched and dry as the Texas panhandle. And then I went on a brief (but lovely) vacation to the seashore, and moved my daughter into her first real apartment … oh, what the heck. You don’t want to hear excuses; you only want to see the baby. So, for a good month and a half after the initial early-July plethora of tomatoes, there were no more tomatoes (see drought, above). But now the tomatoes have started to come back in, as has a fine mini-crop of jalapeños. And I cut a bunch of white (now green) hydrangeas–they’re Proven Winners’ ‘Incrediball,’ and the flower heads really are as big as a child’s head–and put them in a white vase a friend from work gave me, and took a photo of the whole blessed thing, and this is the result. It makes me feel better about a harvest year that didn’t quite turn out as well as I had hoped.

I should mention, however, that I planted some free nicotiana seeds that came with my seed order this year, way back in the spring. Then I more or less forgot about them. Hey, guess what? The seeds germinated, the plants got WAY big and fluffy before I realized what they were, and if frost holds off just another three weeks or so, I’ll have the lovely, unmistakeable fragrance of Nicotiana alata in my garden this year!

Too hot to garden! Too hot to breathe! Not too hot for somebody in my house (not accusing anyone in particular, mind you) of busting some branches off the big-ass coleus beside the back door while taking out the trash. (I will mention there are only two other people in the house, and they’re both male and accident-prone …) Anyway, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade! Look how pretty the busted leaves look in a vase. I never would have thought to do this if somebody hadn’t broken my plant.

And I bet they’ll last longer than flowers do in this awful heat. Supposed to hit 100 today! Sticking close to the fan …

Lookee here! First crop of the year! The son and I had bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches for lunch for the first time this season. These are decorating the kitchen table, and there are more out there ripe for the picking! I’m so happy it’s tomato time!!!