2026 CW36 - A Gloomy Moody Week
This week was full of afternoon thunderstorms, making for a distinctly gloomy, moody atmosphere around the garden. To compliment this atmosphere, I set down the phone camera and broke out the DSLR to take some moodier than usual plant portraits for this week’s blog post. Enjoy!
Overcast & Undergrowth: Stormy Garden Portraits
Buckle-up! For the moody cover story this week, we’ll be going plant-by-plant for more than a dozen varieties and appreciating the vivid colors they produce against a dark backdrop!
First off, we have the Night-Blooming Cereus on the back patio! This healthy little plant is on its second round of blooms, and they have been stunning! So far, we have had more than ten blooms from this single plant, and each of them is spectacular! As the name suggests though, you will not be seeing these blooms in the middle of the day. Emerging directly from the ridges of flattened, leaf-like stems, its blooms are a rare and fleeting highlight on the back patio!
Next, we take a close up look at the Bubblegum Supertunias in the front beds. These vibrant pink blooms are performing fantastic for us given their late planting! However, we do have some maintenance to catch up on with these which you will see later in this week’s post.
Taking a break from the flowers, we take a look at some of the maturing peppers around the garden! Here we have a green and red Cayenne intertwined with one another suspended from one of our back patio pepper trees! Back in the in-ground beds, Red-Ripened Jalapeno Peppers and soon to be picked Bell Peppers dot the rows.
Here we have our Moon Yellow Wishbone Flower which has really taken over the window basket! The deep green of the foliage reminds me of fresh hydrangea growth, and the density of petite yellow and purple blooms is quite impressive!
There are some plants that find themselves scattered to every corner of the garden over the years, claiming a tiny pocket to call their own wherever they land. One of these staple plants for us is this Purple Heart. Though deep purple for much of the season, they put on tiny bright pink triangular blooms with delicate yellow stamens. In a way, they’re the inverse of the wishbone flowers shown just before!
Of all the colors (primary at least) blue is the rarest to be found in the garden. I suppose the sky being blue was all one primary color could handle! Despite their elusiveness, our garden does host a few blue tenants. This one in particular is a Plumbago which surrounds the base of our Peggy Martin climbing rose.
Back to the vegetables, I don’t think blooms come much moodier than Okra! These blooms open only in the morning and are a weekend only sight for me (I depart for work long before daylight). This particular bloom was not quite fully opened yet, but the sun shining through the petals caught my attention! These truly are mesmerizing vegetable flowers with their rose like petal layering and blackhole like center!
Last week you saw us finally plant our cheap Hydrangeas along the driveway. Well, as part of that process, the hydrangeas were pruned back aggressively to get the shape we want, make room for new wood, and just make the planting process easier. This week they are already bouncing back, filling out their stems with freshly sprouted leaves!
One thing we have not shared much of recently is the flourish of rose blooms continuing to set in the garden. Here you can see a fresh Red Knockout Rose with recently faded blooms in the background!
Sticking with the red blooms, let’s check in on the hanging baskets on the Live Oak in the back! Here we have some VERY dramatic Dragon Winged Begonias draped from the oak with flowing bundles of Silver Falls.
These Cat’s Whiskers blooms mark a very recent addition to the garden, but they wasted no time in becoming one of our absolute favorites! I have been pleasantly surprised with the constant replenishment of the blooms and thoroughly impressed with this seemingly delicate flowers’ ability to stand up to the heavy rains!
From a new plant on the block to a veteran of the garden, we move on to this delightful Crape Myrtle. In total we have five Crape Myrtle trees spread around the property with most of those coming from Sara’s late grandmother’s home in Pascagoula. Not only do we admire the physical beauty of these plants, but they also hold a special sentimental place in our hearts given their origin story.
Back at the front porch we focus in on an often-overlooked resident of the hanging baskets. Throughout much of this season, the gigantic Coleus plants overwhelmed the front porch and stole the spotlight. However, with the Coleus transplanted to the backyard and the smaller Sunpatiens in their place, these regal Kimberly Ferns can finally shine!
Speaking of the Sunpatiens, here’s a close up of these new additions. I love that this picture allows you to really see the texture of these petals. They have a soft, papery, almost synthetic feeling that is really difficult to articulate. Despite the near-disaster we had with these a few weeks back when we were overwatering, they have really turned into quite the centerpiece for our front hanging baskets!
Recently we have been seeing a lot of Hummingbirds in the garden. One of their favorite natural treats in our garden has been these overflowing Ginger blooms perched atop towering six-foot-tall stalks.
The vegetables are not done yet! Our cattle panel arch trellis system continues to play host to these Gourdgeous Luffa fruits! Several of these fruits have already begun to dry on the vine, all while new blooms open each and every morning!
Finally, I want to end our dramatic section with this perfect specimen of a fresh Moonflower. I don’t think anything can embody the term “moody” more than this pure white flower against a backdrop of deep green luscious foliage. As a bonus you can see a lot of soon to be opening moonflowers in the shadows of the top right!
Spurts of Productivity!
Just because things were gloomy does not mean we failed to have the occasional productive moment in the garden! Sara worked her way around the yard clearing old, damaged leaves, collecting weeds, and deadheading everything in sight until she had filled a Wheelbarrow!
As for me, I stuck to the front beds where I tended to the Bubblegum Supertunias. Likely in part due to our late planting of them, these supertunias have become quite leggy over the past few weeks. In an effort to give them some better form as we enter into the fall gardening season, I spent some time carefully pruning these back to encourage bushier growth in hopes they develop the mounded color style these are known for!
Pests and Pets
Finally, we have the section of the blog where we share our two, four, six, and sometimes even eight-legged friends that call our garden home (or playground if you’re one of the supervisors!).
Here I had the opportunity to get all up close and personal with a Bumblebee early one morning as it bounced from bloom to bloom on the Luffa trellis.
At the request of a dear reader last week, I spent some time focusing on birds this week! In particular I was on the hunt for a photograph of one of our garden’s elusive Hummingbirds. As I set out with my camera one early morning to spy on these visitors from the back patio, one immediately graced the feeder! Unfortunately, being that it is 68 degrees and 30 percent humidity inside juxtaposed with the 90-degree, 90-percent humidity sauna outdoors, the camera lens had instantaneously fogged over!
I snapped a photo anyway and despite, the substantial haze in the original, I was able to edit it into what turned out to be a [quite fitting for this week’s blog] dramatic hummingbird image.
Despite my persistence, success eluded me when it came to birds. I was able to capture these two other images but could not produce something I was genuinely proud of. I’ll try again next week!
As always, we close out with a selection of the garden supervisors lounging in the playground. I was able to capture one dramatic photo of Scout to fit this week’s theme, but otherwise she and Yoda spend their time gleefully rolling in the sand.
