Besides showing spectacular flowers, some of my fellow Twitter gardeners come up with some clever ideas. One who goes by @AlbertSnail (aka Sophie) presented a new hashtag in early January, #1PlaceIn12Months. Participants could choose one spot and take a picture to post on social media each month in 2022. I thought it was a great idea, so I did it in January and February, then I’m not sure what happened.

I have been taking occasional pictures of my chosen location but haven’t posted them for the past four months on Twitter. So, this is my catch-up with apologies to @AlbertSnail.

In January, I started with the worst. In this photo you see the odontonema (firespike) blackened from a recent freeze. Mississippi Horticulturalist Felder Rushing calls this “booglified.” The holly fern in the center looks pretty good, but the weeds and old growth from the summer and fall of 2021 are an eyesore. So I thought I was rather brave to post this ugly photo for all the world to see.

I cut the firespikes to the ground in February and made a first pass-through on weeding the bed.

I concentrated my gardening efforts elsewhere in March, so the weeds were growing again with a vengeance by April. On second thought, maybe this is worse than January, but at least it’s green. You can see the purple spiderwort that insinuates itself all over my yard. I suppose my lack of attention to this place is why I didn’t post pictures on Twitter!

In late April and early May, I spent some time weeding. Perennials were up, so I could work around the plants I wanted to keep. I have iris, one dahlia, some pink hardy begonias, and emerging firespikes. The holly fern was getting too big for this spot, so I moved it somewhere else. The annual white impatience that I used here last summer self-seeded. This made me glad I waited to weed the bed since I might have destroyed all of those little plants. The gold lantana in the planter returned, looking healthy.

I added more impatience a bit later in May, but I wanted lots of colors this time. The perennials were taller, so I corralled them into plant hoops to keep them upright. I was disappointed that my iris didn’t bloom this year.

Now in June, two kinds of caladiums are filling in the middle where the holly fern was. I planted White Christmas and Fannie Munson a few weeks ago. The impatience is doing well, and hardy perennial begonias are blooming. I’ve had a couple of pink flowers on the dahlia also. One shows up in the picture at the top of this blog today.

After that rough patch of neglect, maybe I can keep up with a monthly Twitter post. I’m afraid it may be boring for the summer and early fall. I’ve planned this bed to take care of itself with long-blooming plants, so there won’t be many dramatic changes until the firespikes bloom again. The good thing about periodic photos is that they show subtle changes I might not notice otherwise. I will save the summary of the next six months’ progress for a Six on Saturday blog in December.

Have a productive week.

Shalom, Dottie