All the Dirt on Gardening

Proven Winners has definitely release a real winner with their Cherry Cheesecake Hibiscus or Mallow. Here's the PW link for all the information. It's deer resistant, matures at 5-feet tall, hardy in zones 4 through 9, and tolerates most soil conditions. I tucked it into a place where I could keep an eye on it and noticed that it was getting a fair amount of leaf damage from a chewing insect but since we don't spray it had to take care of itself. The next time I was watering and weeding, I discovered its first bloom - look at the size of it with my hand held in front! What a winner! Hibiscus Cherry Cheesecake Mallow Summerific in our garden Cherry Cheesecake flower with my hand

Botany dot com says that the Chinese Parasol Tree is native to Africa and Asia but it's tendency to become invasive in the southern U.S. is more typical of plants from Asia. The Parasol Tree's other names include Phoenix Tree, Bottle Tree and Varnish Tree. The seed pods are valued by crafters. Ours came from tiny (2-inch tall) seedlings that were given to me when I wrote about a glorious garden in Tulsa. That gardener's were a stand of 15-feet trees with garden furniture placed underneath. Glorious! Here's my blog entry about Tina Logan's garden - she is the incredible gardener who gave us our baby trees in 2010. They are pest free even in our wildscape. Hardy only in zones 7 to 9 though gardeners on Dave's Garden grow in in zones up to 11. The beautiful bark is complimented with the pink petioles or leaf stems. The flowers have a lovely scent and they are followed by long seedpods. When the pods open they have a brown fluid that resembles varnish...

By December we will wish we were in South America - or at least Florida. But, alas, we can't all go. We'll have to console ourselves with fall photos of cold hardy plants that are usually considered to be grown only in tropical climates. Cold hardy Banana trees, Musa Basjoo , have thrived in our zone 7 garden for a couple of years and grow larger each year. Another one is the cold hardy Begonia grandis pictured here with it's pink petioles and flowers as it looked at the beginning of October. And, you can add a gorgeous ginger to that list, too. There are 1,000 varieties of ginger and at least one of them, White Butterfly Ginger , is cold hardy in zones 5b to 11. So when you are catalog shopping this winter or making a list of must have plants for next spring's shopping spree, add one or all of these to create a tropical look and feel to your surroundings well into next fall.