Clearly More!

Bonus Packs

I buy 'em. Every year, I buy 'em. Do I plant them? Not always. Sometimes I forget about them, sometimes I plant them too late and they make an effort to grow. I love orange flowers. I used to grow the huge red tulips. Now, I think I will get the orange ones. I thought I ordered orange ones from some nice ladies that sold flowers door to door. But, you can't tell from the bulb. They came up bright yellow. My house is dark, dark gray. Not a color I would have chosen, but the house suits me inside.

My Mom had one of the most beautiful flower gardens in 1975. When I was fifteen. She was out there everyday weeding it with great care. She always had plants in the house. I go through phases. When my daughter was born, I received a dozen beautiful green plants. I lived in a great big farm house with a huge east-facing window. The plants flourished. When my daughter was five I moved to a small cave-like apartment and all the plants died. One by one. I need to get some more and start over now that I am in a sunny house again.

When I was young, my Mom planted about twenty different trees on our property. She and my oldest brother did. I remember a Chinese elm, Russian olive (it never produced olives that I saw), good ole' Ohio buckeye, blue spruce, weeping willow, and a Catawba (Indian cigar) tree. We had two huge sugar maples in our front yard. One was struck by lightning and died. The last time I was visiting the old house you could see where there was the beginning of a new maple tree there. The old tree died back in the late 70's I think. Before we moved there in 1966 there were other trees there such as hemlocks, locust, apple, pear, pines, and an old cherry tree.

Of the bushes I can remember forsythia, lilac, roses, trumpet vine, and a honeysuckle vine. There was another bush by our back porch that the humming birds loved. It has soft pink and white blooms on it. I'll think of the name sooner or later. One year (I think it was '75 also) my Mom had the most beautiful red rose bushes on white trellises. I think that is the plural form of trellis. I'll have to dig through the old family album and scan those pictures in. Deep red roses. She also was fond of wine colored Irises. There's another one - plural of Iris? Patriot hostas.

Around our house when we first moved there were some green loose-leaf bushes. They had tiny white flowers that would bloom in the summer and when you shook them the flower pedals would fall off like tiny little white dots. Hundred of them. I used to pretend that it was snowing when I shook them. I can't find that bush on the web, either. (It was not the snowball bush! Way too big.) Not the asters, these didn't have yellow in the middle. Not snowsprite, trillium, azalea or white moth. The border bushes grew about four feet to six feet tall, had very dark green leaves that were tiny and not shiny. They were not a full bush, but that was probably because we never trimmed them.

Hah! I found the other one! I 'googled' plants that attract hummingbirds and found it on the second hit. Weigela bush. That bush was outside of our back porch and the bees and birds loved it. I love honeysuckle but I despise trumpet vines. Big black ants love trumpet vines. Our trumpet vine would find a way into our kitchen window at the back of the house. We are talking twenty feet up off the ground. It grew between the wooden slats of the window and bloomed inside the kitchen this one year. I think we have a picture of it somewhere. But, I hated them because of the big black ants. And they are hard to manage. Once they take hold, they take over.

I have not checked my hydrangea, yet. I am afraid to.