Early this morning was the ideal time for tucking new plants into the garden, after last night’s gentle evening rain gave the soil a good soak. I slipped a couple of brilliant red Nasturtium ‘Empress of India’ (see www.anniesannuals.com) into the bed next to my veggie boxes and can’t wait to toss their peppery blooms into a salad. They’ll also help me out by attracting hover flies, which make a meal of my nemesis: aphids.
Speaking of showy plants and hovering creatures, I was lucky enough to have my camera slung across my shoulder while I was oohing and aahing over some Kangaroo Paws (Anigozanthos ‘Harmony’) I’d planted a year ago. An ecstatic hummingbird was having the time of his life dipping into one fuzzy gold-orange flower after another.
Thanks to the climate of Southwestern Australia being so similar to ours, we can grow their Kangaroo Paws and hundreds of other Mediterranean-climate plants easily here in the East Bay. And because their seasons are opposite from ours, many of the plants begin blooming in our winter and keep going into spring and summer.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason to plant the same old annual summer “color” only to rip it all out at season’s end and start all over again with the same old winter “color.” If you want some serious color that also adds interesting form and personality to your garden, go for perennials and shrubs that harmonize well, play off each other with terrific contrast, or do some of both. Just ask at the nursery for Australian—and South African—plants, and you’ll never look back at those silly little impatiens again.
