Garden Bloom, September

This looks set to be the shortest Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day post ever.

To date, I have planted five plants: two Salvia farinacea…

…and four lilac-colored Catharanthus roseus, the tender vinca that is very heat-tolerant and will continue flowering even in a desert summer.

They aren’t blooming very heavily at the moment, but they are there--a few flowers day in and day out.

I put both the Salvia and Catharanthus in around our very small but already well-established kumquat. It’s a very slapdash little ring, but it’s done its job of giving me some flowers to look at each day from the kitchen window.

The kumquat was half-dead when we arrived in late June, but a bit of watering, followed by unusually strong monsoon rains, have brought it very much back to life. It even bloomed lightly, but it doesn’t seem to have set any fruit.

Here is my little grouping.

It doesn’t look like much yet!

Well, that is the extent of my planting so far. I have a few other plants that I’ve picked up here and there; but I have them waiting, tucked under the patio roof till temperatures drop with more autumnal weather. We’re still reaching triple digit temperatures regularly here, mostly in the 99 F-103 F/37 C-39 C range, but it’s gone dry again as well. Not good planting weather!

Still, there are a few more flowers to show.

First is the star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) my sister just bought and set on the patio waiting to be potted up properly.

The flowers are lovely, but the scent is even better!

Then there are the wildflowers. There are fewer now than there were a few weeks ago, but it’s still a wonderful showing. The front of our property slopes sharply down to the road. That slope is a mass of native shrubs and small trees, including sweet acacia (Vachellia farnesiana), mesquite (Prosopis velutina), and desert hackberry (Celtis ehrenbergiana). But beneath these are stands of prickly pear (Opuntia) and brittlebrush (Encelia farinosa). The more mature stands of brittlebrush are flowering sporadically now--I presume in response to all the rain, as its usual bloom season is in the spring.

In any case, it is spectacular more or less year-round because of its silver foliage. It’s a fair-sized perennial too; the established plants must be at least two and a half to three feet tall and often wider than that.

But the most eye-catching wildflower at the moment is the one I put in Monday’s vase. I’ve since managed to identify it as Hymenothrix wislizeni.

Many of them are setting seed.

Pollinators adore it.

When we arrived, I was under the impression we were in USDA zone 8, with winter temperatures potentially dipping to 10 F/-12 C. However, I keep seeing distinctly zone 9 plants, such as bougainvillea, in the area. The Sunset Western Gardening Guides unequivocally put us in their zone 10, the high desert of Arizona and New Mexico. So I am waiting to find out what the winter weather patterns will be like.

Meantime, it’s September and still essentially summer here, just the tail end as the monsoon season tapers off.

Thanks to Carol for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day across so many different gardening environments!