Welcome to (still more of) Dan & Rita's Garden!

This page is pictures of our Kentucky garden in Summer 2001.

Our buddleia grew from a 1 gallon pot to a 5 foot tall - 6 foot wide flower bed sprawling monster in the first season!

Also known as butterfly bush.

You can see why.

Check out these castor beans! Consider this....

• This is an annual plant so it sprouts from seed around the first of May.
• This picture was taken in August.
• I am about 5 1/2 feet tall.
• The castor bean is twice as tall as me.

That means this plant grew from a seed to 11 feet tall in about 4 months!!
I really love these plants!!!

One more close up of the castor bean in bloom.

They are HUGE and colorful and stately and tropical and just too cool not to have some!

Castor bean seeds are POISON!!! Don't grow them if you have small children around who might get hold of the pretty seeds!!!

In fact the entire plant is toxic but the seeds are the worst!

I save some of the seed pods in the fall when they turn brown and I never have to buy new seeds. These are descendants of some that were given to me 4 years ago.

This pergola was the "Spring project" for 2001. We talked about some sort of "vine covered tunnel" to lead us from the fishpond area out to the covered swing and this is what we came up with.

I surfed the internet looking at pictures of arbors and pergolas and found one I liked the shape of. I also wanted something with arches and this has them on 4 sides!

Nothing exotic here, it's just treated yellow pine and lattice. It's about 7 feet square and 8 feet tall.

This is the SAME view as the picture above.
The pergola is under there somewhere!

These purple beans are another of my "gotta have some" annual plants. Also known as purple hyacinth beans, dolichos lab lab. You can usually find them in the seed racks in spring time or in some of the seed catalogs.

Once you've grown them one year you will never need to buy more seeds. They can be saved from year to year.

Once these purple beans start producing around the middle of July, they continue non stop right up till frost.

It's normal for them to have blooms and mature pods on the very same stem. They hold their blooms up high and occasionally attract humming birds.

Really trouble free. They like lots of water and rich soil but will go right on and bloom with little water and no care. Fairly bug free and disease free.
Plant them, give them something to climb and stand back!

Even in late September when nearly everything else is burned up and dried out and bloomed out this cosmos is still showing lots of color.

Lacy leaves and floppy stems fall over without support but they bloom and bloom so we'll have some next year too!

This alyssum isn't terribly remarkable unless you know that it is an annual AND it's still in bloom a week before Christmas!!

It bloomed from mid summer right up to the end of the year.
We'll plant it again next year!

French hollyhock is another flower that surprised us by blooming most of the second half of summer.

This came from a grocery store and it had a plastic tag that said "althaea" and below that it said perennial. I looked it up in my Southern Living Garden encyclopedia (which I recommend!!) and it says it is Malva Sylvestris and it's a biennial. So we will have to start over next year from new seeds. Lots of less than truthful nurseries will sell plants marked perennial when they really aren't.

The blooms are such a pretty color that we will try to keep some going from now on. Biennial means we'll have to plant seeds each year to get blooms next year.

Winter is when Harry Lauder's walking stick really shines!

Those curly branches are fun to look at when the leaves are gone.

This shrub/small tree is one of my favorites.

It's hard to beat miscanthus for year round interest.

This is miscanthus sinesus variegatus I think!

It came from a grocery store years ago and we've divided it many times to give away to friends as well as surround our pool.

If you have room, you need some tall grass!

This is not the same grass.

I wish I could tell you what it is!
Once again it's from the grocery store MANY years ago. We've divided it and given it away several times. It reaches a good 15 feet tall and lasts all winter. I'll cut it down around early April using a rope to tie it in a bundle and an electric chain saw to cut it off at ground level.

OK so I was out playing with my camera.

When God gets out His paintbrush, I try to pay attention!!

If you'd like to use December Sky for desktop wallpaper you can try right clicking on it and choose "set as wallpaper". If you really want a high quality version of this picture, drop me a line and I can e-mail you one or put it online for you to download.

You made it to the bottom of Dan & Rita's 2001 garden page! We hope you enjoyed your visit.
If I encouraged you to plant one more flower or to stop one time to smell the roses in God's great big garden then I have accomplished my mission for this page.

These pages were ALL created with plain old NOTEPAD

Thanks for stopping by. We hope you enjoyed your visit to our tiny piece of Kentucky!
Come back, anytime!

Up to the top of this page
This way to the Pond page!
Let's visit the garden in winter!
Take a time machine back to Summer 1999!
To Dan's Garage