Monthly Archives: October 2010

Sarasota Chalk Festival

Posted by Lesley on October 31, 2010 None comments

I love living in Sarasota and here’s why: there are always really cool things to do.  This weekend’s Chalk Festival is a perfect example.  Artists from around the world have gathered to cover South Pineapple Avenue in chalk.  My chalk art is limited to hopscotch boards, but these artists are producing works of art.  Most pieces are spooky and on theme for Halloween, but this one was particularly Lettuce Share.  The festival takes place both Saturday and Sunday.  This is the progression from last night to this afternoon.

Notice the grid lines.  Other artists had miniature versions guiding them.  And some seemed to be simply free-handing it.  In addition to the actual art being produced on the street, it’s also considered performance art.  

 

For more on Chalk Festival, visit my other blog Wine, Dine and Read where you can see pictures and video from the vampire couture fashion show.

Buddy Walk Butterfly Garden

Posted by Lesley on October 28, 2010 4 comments

Congratulations to Ubermommy; she’s now uber-executive-director too. In her first three months on the job she led her team to a successful Buddy Walk, raising over $65,000 for Manasota BUDS (Bringing Up Down Syndrome).  And congratulations to me on winning the silent auction for a butterfly garden from Mariposa.  John was still feeling guilty over the grapefruit tree, so he literally stood by the list for the last 15-20 minutes of bidding, adding my name the minute anyone else bid. No one was going home with that butterfly garden other than me.  We mutually agreed afterwards that we felt bad about bullying Ubermommy with our eyes when she made an attempt to outbid me.  To make up for it, she got a potted mini butterfly garden of yellow lantana, white button sage and milkweed.

The package was incredible, and the garden is already delivering butterflies.  John’s diligence and devotion won me a cassia tree, passionflower vine, porterweed, two pentas, two milkweeds, three button sages, and three lantanas!  Plus one other unidentified plant that also went to Ubermommy. There were 14 plants in total, and the cassia tree even came with a caterpillar!

I think it will turn into a sulphur butterfly, but then again it could be a moth.  I couldn’t find confirmation in any of my field guides, and I really don’t care either way because the cassia is already attracting so many sulphurs.  They’re an elusive group of butterflies, always flying through the garden but never landing.  With all the different flowers planted over the years, there have been monarchs, fritillaries and swallowtails hanging around but never sulphurs.  Now I have my missing piece – a cassia tree.  It seems like every time I look out at it there’s a sulphur flitting around its flowers.  The big win has greatly improved the view from our kitchen and Florida room windows.  It was as if HGTV came in and gave us a mini-makeover.  Here’s the before:

When we first planted the area, it was beautiful – two pink Perfume Delight roses surrounded by a bed of pink mums.  It held up well for never changing out the mums and very rarely fertilizing the roses, but the weeds and grass took over and it was ready for an overhaul.  Here’s the after:

The only thing it needs now is a little sign that says, “Ella’s Garden” because she’s the reason I walk every year.  Go BUDS!  Go Ella!

Pirate Ella ~ 2010 Buddy Walk

Grapefruit Got Me Down

Posted by Lesley on October 21, 2010 3 comments

I can’t believe it’s been two weeks since my last post.  I’ve been in a terrible depression over my grapefruit tree.  John asked me if it would be okay to cut it back.  We walked outside; he pointed to one stray branch toward the bottom.  “That’s the only one that will come off the bottom; I swear,” he said.  “The top will be trimmed into a giant puff ball,” he said.  ”You’ll love it,” he said.  You know where this is going, right?  His tree trimmers came in and maimed my tree!  I feel bad even looking at it, like it’s naked and it doesn’t want me to look.  

The giant puff ball has been deflated.  Now John’s scrambling and repeating, “It’ll fill in in no time.”  Well, will it fill in before my orchid takes a nose dive out of it’s pot to escape the now unrelenting glare of direct sunlight?   

With so few branches for shade, it’s officially on suicide watch…and the lights, mirrors and random black wire?  They fared far worse than the orchid.  The lights were snipped, the mirrors were cut away as compost, and what did this black wire do???

Really, we have no idea what that black wire did.  Oh well, we’ll deal with that bill some other time.  Here’s my guy in his heyday all dressed up and ready to throw a grapefruit.

And here is the last surviving decoration - one small mirror circa my Garden Spells craze.

Green with Envy over Mable’s Viridiflora

Posted by Lesley on October 7, 2010 6 comments

Bald and a little freaky-looking, it’s the hairless cat of roses.  Not overly inviting and entirely abnormal, I’m still thinking about it well over a week after my visit to Mable Ringling’s rose garden – The Green Rose aka Viridiflora.

It’s an anomaly not only among roses but among all flowers.  The first time I saw a Green rose I thought the petals had blown away.  Not so, there are no petals.  The flowers consist of only sepals.  It’s a very curious plant and mysterious too.  There’s no consistent history on the Green rose, but the earliest paper trail I could find, courtesy of Graham Stuart Thomas, dates it back to 1743.  The sign in the Ringling garden says China – Prior to 1845.  An interesting tidbit related to its Chinese origins can be found on Gardening Know How, “At one time, it was forbidden for anyone outside of the Forbidden City to grow this rose. It was literally the sole property of the emperors.”  The source is listed as a Rosarian friend, Sue Curry, so I can’t attest to the accuracy of the account, but it does make me want one even more.

Thomas, G.S. (1994). The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book. Portland: Sagapress.