Metro Greens: Journey of a plant lover

Sunday, June 21, 2015

From my Summer Garden

Last year, around this time only, I did a post showing my portulaca blooms. This time around, it's the portulacas again. Last year it was 22nd June, this year, it's 21st June. The portulacas that I got last year from the plants nursery bloomed, and did that beautifully, and throughout the summer, providing me much needed relief from the excruciating summer. This time around, though the summers haven't been that excruciating, because of some wet spells of untimely rainfall and some dust storms that have, ended up gicing us some respite from the summer heat. However, the last years portulacas had spread hundreds of tiny seeds in the pots they were planted in, and also in some of the nearby pots, and this time, since January, as the windet season set to come to its end for the year, the seeds germinated into tiny seedlings, and over time those seedlings grew up well to give me blooms for the summer season. Though, the variety of colours I had were missing this year, with the yellow ones taking it all, red ones were not too far behind, and then there were a few white/off-white coloured blooms, once ina while, that changed the overall look, and then, the portulaca grandiflora variety too is doing a great job this year.

There was a time, I used to have three different colour varieties of the grandiflora cultivar. However, over some years, due to some negligence, and the rainfall giving us a skip in monsoon, last year, I am left with just the pink one. The white and the mixed pink-white are gone. Anyways, as I always do, I took some shots of the blooms, to share them with you all. Here are the pictures. I sincerely hope that you'd enjoy the beauty of the blooms. In the meantime, I planned on getting a timelapse video too of the portulacas, however, this isn't happening of some odd reasons. As usually happens, I end up clicking photographs of the same flowers from different angles, and when I try posting them here, I find it difficult to remove too many shots to form the ones that would finally make it here, and hence post them all, so, you might end up finding shots of similar looking blooms throughout the collection.

I'll keep you guys posted with all of the happenings in my garden, which has turned out to be a happening place these days, due to the untimely spells of rains we are seeing since the beginning of this month. A lot is happening down there, and there's a lot to share with you all. The miniature roses I introduced last year are in blooms, something, that is somewhat odd for me to see. Then, II had got some stuff from my Garden Tourism Festival visit. The yellow Tulip was one of them. Though, it couldn't make it to the next year, as the only bulb died in the early summer heat, other stuffs like the Glorissa lily have germinated and seem to be doing good. Apart from that, the lily bulbs I had got last monsoon too have grown into many plants, and I am expecting them to bloom this monsoon. Apart from all these, the rains seem to have given a new lease of life to the Arabian Jasmine plants, both of which are in blooms, and are blooming for a third time this summer. I will get back with something more, in the upcoming posts. Till then, keep trying and HAPPY GARDENING!