Farewell to my 1st summer garden on Long Island!

Wow that went fast! Tomorrow is the autumn equinox -the moment when the sun's rays shine equally on both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. This weekend will be the first one that days are shorter than nights, and it won't be long before temperatures start to get cold too! 

It's a bitter-sweet time of year ... bitter cold on the way, but sweet blooms to enjoy. Actually, late summer and early fall are my favorite parts of the year to enjoy the garden. The tropical plants are at their fullest and the weather is gorgeous! 

This year the plants grew especially fast. Long Island saw its hottest August on record and much of the first half of September has been in the 80s. Although most of the island was hit hard by drought, my neighborhood was one of the lucky few that saw persistent pop-up storms. 

Here's how it all started! I was still living in South Carolina when I took this photo and had automatically timed sprinklers on to keep the plants watered while I was gone.

All the plants were as happy as can be! 

The KING of the summer was my Viente Cohol banana plant. I've tried growing the hardy musa basjoo bananas for many years and have never had impressive growth on them, but the tropical bananas shoot up like magic. It's against the south side of my house where it receives a ton of water and blazing hot sunshine. This particular variety is quick to produce fruit. I'm hoping to get a lot of banana fruit next year!

 

Angel trumpets aka Brugmansia are one of my favorite summer blooms. The fragrance is out of this world! The pink Brugmansia in the photo above was a $5 plant on clearance last March. It was just a pot with soil. The entire plant above the ground was dead so everything you see in the photo has grown since spring. An incredible feat! Literally from 0 feet to 8 feet tall in just a few months! 

This yellow potted Brugmansia started off much larger but is actually shorter than the pink brugmansia I planted in the ground.

In late summer, I started a raised garden bed. The fall crops were all destroyed by caterpillars sadly, but I did get a huge crop of tomatoes and eggplant! 

You'll usually find Philodendron gloriosum (left) & Philodendron cordatum (right) as a tiny expensive house plant, but they're anything but small when you set them outside! Philodendron cordatum is usually sold as a tiny trailing houseplant, but it's true form is quite large 

I grow many palm trees, but one of my favorites is Hydriastele Beguinii. It's having a bit of an awkward year, but next year it will look much nicer. The frond leaflets are fused together which is a really unique feature you don't see in most palms! 

I prefer foliage over flowers, but some tropical blooms are too iconic not to grow! Night-blooming cereus only blooms a few times a summer. Usually, I will get a flush of about 3-6 gigantic blooms all in one night once a month through the summer. The flowers open up after the sun sets and reach their peak around midnight. By dawn, they're gone! I'm not exaggerating. 

Speaking of beautiful blooms. My garden wouldn't be complete without Plumeria! Plumeria Melody has the nicest shape of all the plumerias I'm growing.

Plumeria divine is a must for northern gardeners. It's a frequent bloomer and stays nice and small! 

Oddly this plumeria divine doesn't have it's usual shape and flower form. I love it regardless! 

If you're looking even smaller, give Desert Rose a try. A ridiculously generous bloomer that is PERFECT for a sunny tabletop where most flowers would wilt. These love the heat and humidity and don't mind drying out from time to time.

As far as vines go, Allamanda does the trick! They take on a more shrubby habit than mandevilla and have larger flowers. I can't think of a more pure yellow flower for pots and planters. It blooms NONSTOP!

Thunbergia grandiflora is a gorgeous plant that I have been enjoying a lot. It's a late bloomer and not as prolific as Mandevilla. I love them for their uniqueness. Literally, no one else has them on Long Island. But if you're looking for bang for your buck, stick to Mandevilla! 

Of course a Long Island garden wouldn't be complete without hydrangeas. I don't make the rules!

I can't say no to a rose plant on end-of-the-year clearance either! 

Thanks for looking and happy Autumn!

The benefit to using potted plants

Growing anything in NYC almost always requires using potted plants because, at least in my yard, there is not enough room in the ground to convincingly pull off the tropical look. One of the perks to using tropical plants is the ability to move things around as the season progresses and that is exactly what I did last week. I wasn't happy with the way that the plants along my stairs were looking so I did some rearranging and a little bit of manipulating.

Here's how things looked before. My issue was the crotons were pushed too far to the back and the adondila was a bit low.

I decided to add a bit of lift to the plants in the back using some crates and plant stands. All of these stands are covered by the plants in front of them. The trick is to make the plants in the back higher without making it obvious why they are high up.

 Here is the final product! You can't see that the plants toward the back are lifted up but you can see the way the plant's heights increase mimics the stairs. The croton definitely earned their place in the front of the arrangement with their thick and colorful foliage. When the cannas to the right grow out in a few more weeks everything will look very thick and uniform and most importantly - tropical!

Update in my Front yard today!

Here are a few pics from the front yard.

Here's my Loquat making a second flush of growth for the season. This is the first year in the ground for it.

Here's a view of both castor beans, my Crape Mytle "Zuni", and my Ensete from my front porch. 

My Ensete is really getting huge. I love this plant! My Hardy hibiscus is blooming really well also! 

Closeup of the Kopper King Hibiscus! 

 About the best view that you can get of my washy this time of the year. Knockout Roses are doing well too!

Crape Myrtle "Tuscarora"

Crape Myrtle "Zuni" with some spanish moss.

Cucuzza fruit starting to pop up! 

Under the banana leaves! 

Thailand giant elephant ears pup like crazy! I have about 15 plants!

Update on the Mandevilla vines

I love this vine! I mean I've never had a plant climb up this lamp post so nicely. Not sure if it will look this nice in a few more weeks when it is overgrown, but it's perfect the way it looks right now!

A nice substitute for Mandevilla vines if you are hoping for something smaller growing are Dipladenias. If you can find them cheap at a local nursery, they are a very inexpensive and beautiful way to fill out a planter. Annuals don't come cheap AND beautiful most of the time, but Dipladenias might be an exception!

Another beautiful Mandevilla are the white flowered Mandevillas. Slightly less vigorous than the pink flowered ones, but definitely still a VERY fast grower and a beautiful bloomer. Mine has had more blooms in the past, but I kind of like that it is showing a little bit of greenery because the leaves are also beautiful!

Not exactly a Mandevilla, but it isn't an Allamanda either! It's called a Yellow Mandevilla aka Urechites lutea. It's a beautiful yellow flowering vine, but very hard to take a good pic of it. It looks much nicer in person!

Thanks for looking!