A Tale of Two Cannas (and other garden drama)

On the right side of the back garden I have two patches of Canna within 15-ish (maybe) feet of each other: Canna 'Wyoming' and Canna 'Flambe'.

Canna 'Flambe' looks like this:

Canna 'Wyoming' looks like this:

The grasshoppers went to town on the Canna 'Wyoming' and haven't touched the Canna 'Flambe'. It's baffling. I've never known grasshoppers to be particularly discriminating? They did that last year too, but my 'Flambe' were on the opposite end of the garden and I figured I'd just gotten lucky that they didn't migrate.

I'm tempted to pull them up and replace them with 'Flambe': they're SO unsightly, and they're getting too much shade to hold their dark foliage color. I LOVE the orange of the 'Wyoming' bloom, though. And if I'm being a garden mercenary, the 'Wyoming' may be the bait drawing the grasshoppers away from my 'Flambe'.

hashtaggardeningproblems

I can't believe I haven't posted since July. Every month I've taken pictures and mentally planned a post, and that's about as far as I got.

August started on a high note: I finally got my above ground irrigation system installed in all the beds (no more soaker hoses!), with timers so things would get watered automatically while we were gone at the end of the month. I'd gotten some great ideas from Lori and Robin for the back bed along the fence, and I couldn't wait to get busy on it! Then we left town to go to Oregon and run the Hood-to-Coast race, and Harvey rains swept through Austin.

I shouldn't complain: it was stressful to watch it from afar and try to figure out the logistics of my pet sitter perhaps not being able to get to the pets due to flooding in the 'hood, but it worked out fine and it sounded like we've had way worse rainfall in the last 3-4 years.

However when we got home I saw we'd clearly had a lot of water pass through the back yard very quickly: my young-ish Crepe Myrtle was nearly horizontal as was my brand new Fig tree and the Canna 'Flambe' (the ones above), and other smaller shrubs were pushed over with the soil partially eroded. The real punch to the gut: I lost 3 Fatsia 'Camouflage', I think because they just got saturated and rotted (they seem much more delicate than standard Fatsia japonica). Two of them were the ones I'd planted last fall and seemed to be doing so well.

I was SO excited to find more of them at Leaf Nursery, so I just bought more. They also died. Then I bought two more, which also died. I gave up on all of it at that point, and by "all of it" I mean gardening.

At present, I have one Fatsia 'Camouflage' that seems established and healthy, two that show promise, and 2 that are barely clinging to life.

This is as close as I'll get to this Fatsia 'Camouflage'.
Do not water or feed the Fatsia. Do not make direct eye contact with the Fatsia.

I've stopped watering all of them. I also stopped trying to work on that bed against the fence until this weekend. Well, I haven't actually done anything yet, but I'm at least thinking about it again. There's part of me that thinks I just need to get some big wide planters and give up on things in the ground: any time it rains, all the runoff from the behind-neighbor's yard flows through ours and saturates it. I need plants that can handle a period of drought punctuated by massive amounts of water.

I did take lots of pictures of the things that carried on in spite of my apathy! Brugmansia 'Double White' kicks ass! This is what it looked like last week because we got rain:

Brugmansia 'Double White' in late October, along with Canna 'Flambe',
Salvia 'Ember's Wish', and Whale's Tongue agave.

My red-blooming Firespikes are all going bananas, and yet I haven't seen a single hummingbird.

 Odontonema strictum aka Firespike

Close-up blurry  Odontonema strictum bloom

My front garden got huge and amazing, so I'll have to do a whole separate post on that!