Foliage Follow-Up Following the Freeze

Crepe Myrtle Bark

Today is Foliage Follow-up day hosted by Pam at Digging. The idea is to showcase all the lovely foliage, bark, berries, and other beautiful non-blooming plants in our garden. Pam's got some gorgeous photos of her succulents and other beauties, and links to others' posts can be found there as well. So go check it out.

A few days ago I strolled around the garden, camera in hand, to create a photographic history of what plants faired well and not so well after our record breaking cold weather. So today I plan to share some of those photos, pitiable though some of the plants may look. I'll start with some of the sad looking ones.

Bunny Ears cactus (in good shape), Aeonium 'Zwartzkopf' (bent over and dead), and Agave desmettiana

The stock tank didn't fare so well, so no pretty pictures here. Although I prepared the soil well to survive our rainy winters, and I heaped pine straw and sheets over the plants, nothing could prevent the damage from the kind of freezes we had. Oh well, it's an opportunity to find something that will survive.

To avoid a long litany of thoughts on each plant that didn't fair so well, here are a few photos of some other plants and their damage.

Fig Ivy's frozen leaves. This should survive I think.

My Bamboo Muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa) turned gray. Will have to cut it back for the first time.

‘Silver Shower’ mondo grass (Ophiopogon jaburan) surprised me by freezing. Note the frozen Smilax vines next to the rock - I wish those would freeze and die completely!

Oregano. Bet that comes back though as it's almost weedy.

First time to see frozen leaves on the Madame Alfred Carriere climbing rose

Now on to brighter things. Some plants survived pretty well. The Red Veined Sorrel below, though small, is rather cheerful looking to my eyes.

Red Veined Sorrel

My Wavy Leaf cactus is a sentimental favorite of mine since I grew this from a pad I brought from my old garden in Austin. It sacrificed its top two pads to the freeze (seen kind of laying down) but I'll just pot those two up and get more! I used some garden stakes for a tent for the sheets. Seen behind the cactus is Agave multilifera, another plant I brought from Austin. This was its first winter in the ground and it did just fine.

Wavy Leaf cactus and Agave filifera

I'm concerned about the camellias. I have two small ones. One of them now has brown buds but this one, Pearl Maxwell, looks in better shape (no close ups of buds as this is a foliage post!).

Camellia japonica 'Pearl Maxwell'

Last but not least is a hardy Autumn fern. It doesn't seem to like the summers here, at least where I've got it, but the cold didn't phase it a bit.

My post last month for Foliage Follow-up looked much more cheerful. But I'll bet by mid February I'll be happy at what's come back. Be sure to check out the other posts at Pam's!

This post was written by Jean McWeeney for my blog Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog. Copyright 2009. Please contact me for permission to copy, reproduce, scrape, etc.

Foliage Follow-Up to Bloom Day

Pam at Digging has a new meme going that celebrates foliage and other non-blooming natural things around the yard, the day after Carol's Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. While photographing my yard for blooms (my Bloom Day post is here), I had great fun in photographing the many interesting textures and colors in the garden. I think this might be the last hurrah for my 'Bloodgood' Japanese Maple above, but a nice hurrah it is.



I wish I had thought to put something at the base of this pine tree so you could tell how massive it is. When I hug this tree (yes, I do that occasionally), I can't get my arms all the way around. I wish I knew the variety of pine it is (might be Short Leaf pine since it has very short needles).



This time of year is when the ‘Silver Shower’, Ophiopogon jaburan, a type of mondo grass, starts putting on new growth. Seems a strange time for it but that's what it does. I have several of these in mostly shade.



The foxtail ferns (Asparagus meyeri I think) are in large pots nestled against the house. I'm too scared to leave them out exposed where I normally have them most of the year. I probably don't have to worry though. They're very hardy.



The texture on my ‘Felt Plant’, Kalanchoe beharensis, is like velvet. Although this photo is towards the top of the plant, the older leaves show more bumps on their undersides.



I like the way my red oak is still determined to hang on to some of its chlorophyll.



Moving to a more ancient form of vascular plant, we have Horsetail Rush, Equisetum hyemale. (It's ancient because it reproduces by spores, not seeds.) This is in a pot in my little water fountain. So far I haven't had to protect it from freezing yet.



I really don't mean for this to be a botany lesson but now I seem to have moved to non-vascular plants like this moss (the black stuff is mold, green stuff is moss). This appears during the rainier seasons on our chimney.



And now I've moved to lichens, which according to Wikipedia is "a symbiotic association of a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont or phycobiont), usually either a green alga (commonly Trebouxia) or cyanobacterium (commonly Nostoc)". Plus a little moss thrown in on the rock for good measure.



More lichens and rock. The only native rock around here is something called "iron ore", so these rocks come from Arkansas. Makes me feel a bit guilty that they're not native but iron ore is usually small, rusty, and hard to work with.



I guess I'll end my impromptu romp through the plant kingdom with a fungus, some type of big mushroom.

Be sure to check out the links to other Foliage Follow-up posts at Pam's (and my Bloom Day post if you haven't seen it yet)!

This post was written by Jean McWeeney for my blog Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog. Copyright 2009. Please contact me for permission to copy, reproduce, scrape, etc.