charliedoggett.net
My profession is to always find God in nature.
– Henry David Thoreau
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| Year-around blooming flowers for my terrace rocking chair view. |
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| And behind my terrace planters are three layers of plants in my yard and another in the neighbor’s. Soon we will be separated by a jungle! 🙂 One of the round pots I moved from inside because of a lack of sun there. The other had ornamental grass which I will replace with something green. Like my garden, the yard and terrace are always a work in progress! And my poinsettias are still blooming to the right at terrace entrance! |
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| Millipede He comes looking for water, But dries up and dies. I sweep him out the next day. Almost every day. |
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| It will soon be a flowering hedge |
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| From my kitchen window |
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| Nice! |
I did what I thought was pretty radical pruning of the overgrown giant Porter Weeds and some of the Overgrown Red Ginger. But my “TuttiFruti,” which had been my most colorful plant, was apparently dying. So the gardeners cut it to the ground which I would have had trouble doing, though we had been pruning it some. They also sprayed for a leaf-eating insect. If it does not come back healthy, we will pull it and plant something different on my border. But we will probably have nothing blooming along the border when Reagan visits in just 4 weeks. Sorry Reagan! Though plants fool you here and some grow really fast!
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| The colorful border (inset photo) was dying, maybe insects for which he sprayed, but it is cut to ground now, hoping for a beautiful renewal or revival. If not, I’ll get a different border. But waiting is hard! 🙂 |
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| Even without the border and the heavy pruning, the garden looks okay. The Red Ginger and Purple Petunias will always bloom, even when cut. And also the Plumbago, though it blooms on new growth, so cutting it back diminishes blooms briefly. And though not seen above, I am getting new blooms on my Heliconias as seen in below photos. |
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| The tall plant in the back of garden photo above is where this large Heliconia sports 4 blooms right now! This is the biggest of the four. |
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| This smaller Heliconia by my kitchen window also has several blooms. The other plants like it have red and orange blooms but are dormant now. |
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| I cut back the two big Porterweeds the hummingbirds love, BUT I still have one smaller plant blooming and attracting hummers! Though the hummingbirds are mainly in the Yellow Bell Trees now. And very few butterflies are around this time of year. May-July was the most butterflies last year. |
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| The TriqueTraque or Orange Trumpet Vine has not done well, but now that I started feeding it fertilizer I’m seeing it grow a little and getting a few flowers, so there is still hope that it will cover that big massive concrete wall in time! That’s my goal! |
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| The Maraca blooms at the base of a very tall plant. |
Also once my Planta Maraca or Shampoo Ginger gets established, I expect to regularly have more blooms, which is more exotic to me than the heliconias! And every time we trim the Blumbago it shoots out new growth with lots of blooms, so everything will have its ups and downs but as I wanted, something is blooming year-aroung, all the time! And it is fun to watch it change, though I have learned (what I really already knew), that maintaining a garden this big and a yard with lots of flowers is a lot of work, even with a hired gardener a couple of times a month! And for any reader living here, my most constant and prolific bloomers have been the Red Ginger and Purple Petunias. And I still don’t have all the Spanish names for these flowers and that sometimes that changes depending on who I talk to or which website I check! 🙂
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| A neighbors up the hill has yellow & orange flowers blooming together. Click for larger image. |
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| My terrace view while eating breakfast and reading the Washington Post online! Looking over Atenas toward Grecia. It doesn’t show all the Yellow Bell Trees that surround the left end of my terrace. Nice! |
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| Sunset from my Terrace. Yes, similar to an earlier post, but newer and the one I have ordered a 48X12 canvas print of. It will likely hang in my office/guest room. I’m running out of space to hang photos. 🙂 |
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
http://www.ticotimes.net/2015/12/25/photos-christmas-2015
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| Tico Times photos – this of the lighting of tree at Children’s Hospital |
AND MY DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS?
And the crazy thing is that it is during this windy, sometimes dusty period that we have the most tourists and snowbirds trying to get away from cold weather up north. I think I’ve decided I like the rainy season (Jul-Oct) or “green season” better and it’s two shoulder periods (May-Jun & Oct-Nov) which have very little rain but are greener and more pleasant. So for the next 3 months or so we put up with wind, dust and snow birds! Then tranquility begins again! 🙂
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| A new sign just appeared alongside the road I walk to Roca Verde, Calle 8 |
The rough Google translation to English:
The trees are our friends, always await us in the same place.
ADECA
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| My kitchen window friend! |
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| A Hooded Mantis appeared in the dark at my last dinner at Rancho Naturalista No good photos possible |
But what was more entertaining was the group from Denmark on their first night at the lodge. They scrambled all over the dining terrace trying to get photos of this little guy! IN THE DARK! It was funny and of course none of my photos are good, but here’s the experience anyway!
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| They tried so hard they kept scaring the little bug around the terrace. Hope some of them got good photos! |
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| For about two minutes dinner was controlled by a Hooded Mantis |
“Costa Rica supports an enormous variety of wildlife, due in large part to its geographic position between the North and South American continents, its neotropical climate, and its wide variety of habitats. Costa Rica is home to more than 500,000 species, which represents nearly 4% of the total species estimated worldwide, making Costa Rica one of the 20 countries with the highest biodiversity in the world. Of these 500,000 species, a little more than 300,000 are insects.” ~WIKIPEDIA
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| Photo of one of the many Anthurium flowers growing at Rancho Naturalista, one of my fave get-a-ways now! I was so excited about all the new birds there that I failed to say much about the flowers which were beautiful! |