garden, bitches!
That's my gardenia. Or rather, an ex-gardenia. It's ceased to be. It's gone to meet it's maker! It's pining for the fjords, etc etc etc.
There's a planter in the backyard that was full of them, but it seems that gardenias are persnickity things, and prone to up and dying if they don't get enough fertilizer. Or water. Or too much water. Or misting. Or bugs. Or heat, or cold, or you look at it wrong... No wonder it didn't survive. :(
Today, I replaced the gardenia carcasses with something a little more spiky and angry. And drought resistant.
That's an aloe. Or rather, there are aloes in there somewhere under the weeds and dead crap. There's a flowerbed full of these in a long forgotten corner of the yard. So... when fixing the planter, I killed two birds with one stone.
After some digging and pulling and @^R^!%!! thorns, the planter now looks like this:
Green! And pointy! The aloes on the end were rescued from the flowerbed. Once I extricated them from the pile of weeds and trimmed off the dead stuff, they actually look halfway decent. Hopefully they'll fill out a little now that they're not fighting for space.
The yellow and green bastards in the middle are century plants that I *yoinked* from the front of the house where they're growing like, well, weeds. I hope they stay wee, but we shall see.
I still have a bunch of aloes in the flowerbed. They're difficult to kill, don't need much water, and the leaves are full of goo that feels good on sunburn and the scratches you got pulling them out of the ground. If anyone wants an aloe of their very own, I have some extra pots and dirt, and a whole flower bed full of them. Send me an email at ms.kar3n [at] gmail [dot] com. :)