The unrelenting rain has taken a toll on our garden. There are broken branches everywhere. The paths are slushy and slippery. The ground is waterlogged. And my potato experiment is most likely to fail, for the third time this year.
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Garden in Disarray
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| Waterlogged Potato Plant |
But in this post, I'm choosing to focus only on the beauty that's still around us. Granting a respite from the dark, grey skies are a few bright and colourful blooms in the garden. Here is my first Zinnia flower. I'm grateful that it obliged to bloom in such wet weather. While in most regions, gardeners strictly follow a sowing and harvest season, in Chennai we do get away without following the calendar. With the exception of the monsoon months, throughout the year, the weather in Chennai is much the same: hot and humid. If the plants aren't weak and immature when the monsoons strike, most plants can tide over.
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| Zinnia |
Another plant that's just begun blooming is my Butter Bean. When a small batch of fresh butter beans were forgotten and too old to be eaten, instead of throwing them away in the compost bin, I carelessly scattered them in a spare container. While the squirrels destroyed every other seedling that sprouted, this vine seems to have made it.
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| Butter Bean Bloom |
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| Drenched Yellow Bells |
The Yellow Bells and Morning Glories are in full bloom. Yellow Bells, with their delicate fragrance, are terrific bee magnets. But their fragrance doesn't carry very far. For fragrance that spreads further, there is the Rangoon Creeper. This creeper has climbed up our bare, leafless Gulmohur tree. Both these are hardy plants, which require little care, but reward you with plenty.
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| Yellow Bells / Yellow Trumpet Flowers in Profusion |
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| Morning Glory: One of the 1000 Species |
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| Rangoon Creeper |
All the flowers I've mentioned here are sun lovers. So unless the sun is out soon, the flowers will all be gone. The thought makes me want to sing my son's nursery rhyme: Oh Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun, please shine down on me.
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| Sun-loving Scarlet Cordia Tree |
I like it - you're concentrating on the positive things, not the negative things! Hope the potatoes pull through. You should perhaps consider growing some in containers, which would help you to control the flooding problem.
ReplyDeleteI know that the rains have been terrible in Chennai. I'm growing potatoes in a wooden container this year. Love those rain-drenched blooms...at least the flowers are providing a lot of colour!
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