Our garden is sick

'Seven Sisters' blooms just once a year, but what a show!

'Seven Sisters' in a vase (which has since been broken by Roxie)

'Mermaid' blooms on interlocking trellises

A few years ago, our crinum stopped blooming. A year or so later, our Formosa lilies stopped blooming. I didn't think too much of it; things like that happen in gardens from time to time. Last year, our spider lily also looked bad and failed to make a full bloom stalk, a condition I passed off as having been caused by pests (the year before, someone had eaten the flowers). Then, last year, our beautiful peach-colored miniature daylilies looked really sick and did not bloom. I dug them up, isolated them, and inspected them, and they seemed fine. Perhaps I should have bleached the crowns, but they looked so healthy in their nursery pots, I replanted them just as they were.

The peach-colored daylilies look bad again, and are not going to bloom. The daylilies around them are going to bloom, but their leaves look really bad. And in another bed across the yard, the daylilies look sick, and they have produced short bloom spikes with only two or three buds instead of the usual eight or nine. They are not overcrowded, so they do not need dividing. They are just sick.

Now we have to get soil samples tested for at least two of beds. We had planned to obtain the soil this weekend, but it looks like it is going to rain. This is all very depressing, since we have put so much work into the garden.

In the meantime, the roses are blooming very nicely, the hydrangeas are making many buds, the salvia is blooming like mad, and a couple of cannas and one of the gingers have already begun blooming.

Because of Hurricane Katrina, we have an abunance of 'Mermaid' blooms this year. We had 'Mermaid' climbing up a crape myrtle tree, and it never got much sun, so the bloom was spare. After the hurricane, we had to take the tree down. 'Mermaid' was unharmed, so we put it on interlocking trellises, and once it saw the sun, it began to bloom profusely. It is probably my favorite of all the roses in our garden.