The Lavender's either Dead or Dying

Just before I left for St. Francis Bay, Cape Town was going through a glorious few weeks of hot, sunny weather and it felt like Spring was pretty much here.

The lavender thought Spring was here to stay, so she decided to come out in full bloom. While I was away, the entire month of September went haywire and Winter came back in full force - complete with rainy days, howling wind and freezing cold temperatures. This is what I came back to find on the balcony:

A half-dead/ dying lavender plant.

The easiest thing to do would've been to turn around and blame Kelly for not watering the plants... however, all the other plants seemed to be doing OK. The Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow and the Polygala were both green and blossoming... so I can only assume the lavender got frost bite...? Or maybe too much water from the constant rain...?



2/3 of the plant has turned brown, all the flowers have wilted, and even the green bits that are left are intermittently brown throughout the stalks. I don't know what to do now. Google searches say you must NEVER over-prune lavender to the base as they'll never grow again... So I've pruned as much as I think I can to try and save the plant, but it's not exactly looking very good. I've chopped off entire stalks that looked dead.


And the plant's in a very sorry, bald state now. :(


Guess I'll find out in a couple weeks if the entire thing's a goner... any comments/ suggestions from people with green thumbs are welcome!

I still haven't killed the plants...

The last time I wrote about our plants was when I'd pruned the lavender bush. More like hacked it up. Only to discover later in some gardening website that over-pruning lavender would cause it to never ever flower again. Ever.

Oops.


So since November last year until now, I thought I'd pretty much damaged the plant for good since all the other plants continued flowering except that damn lavender.

...Until now, right in the middle of winter, I'm suddenly seeing the appearance of tiny flower buds starting to appear. YAY! I feel like such a proud parent, maybe I do have green thumbs after all. Yeah right. It's more likely this thing only flowers once a year.



On the other hand, the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow plant has gone cuckoo. It's right in the middle of winter and it has decided to flower like there's no tomorrow (or yesterday and today?). OK, bad joke. I'd recently pruned it (again like the lavender, it was "anyhow whack!") and I guess it liked shedding the excess.


Some stalks had no leaves, just flowers galore. It's really gone mad!


The Polygala's been the only steadfast plant. This is one plant that can really withstand abuse and still keep on going. I kept forgetting to water the plants everyday in the summer, and at one point all the flowers and some leaves were turning yellow and then black. I thought I'd completely killed it but all it took was some pruning of the dead stuff (again, "anyhow whack!") and it's still flowering now.

My only beef is it's still so 'twiggy' looking and bent sideways. We tried re-potting it but the wind kept blowing it crooked again so we've just given up on it.




Not a bad progression from our last apartment in Singapore where we single-handedly killed two plants in less than two months. (But of course that's gonna happen when you don't water the plants. Duh.)

Here's what they look like now.


For what they looked like when we first got them, click here.

Pruned Lavender

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I have no idea if I'm supposed to prune lavender after the flowers have wilted, but google articles say you should. And I have no idea where you're supposed to prune it - right under the flower (like most other flowers), or at the bottom of the long stem, where the leaves stop growing...

I tried pruning just under the flowers, but it looked weird having all the long, empty stalks sticking out of the plant, so I chopped them all off and what's left is... a leafy bush. Guess I'll have to wait and see whether they'll grow anymore flowers after this... gulp.

We've got plants!

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Took a trip to the nursery today and came back with 3 plants: Lavendar (I LOOOOOOVE LAVENDAR! it's the first time I've seen a REAL lavendar plant), Polygala (the one with mauve flowers; it flowers throughout the year), and a Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow (they smell good and have purple & white flowers).

They came unpotted, wrapped in plastic, so we also had to get pots, dripping stones (to line the bottom of the pots), 3 huge sacks of soil and bonemeal as fertilizer... after hauling all this stuff up 3 floors, we proceeded to make a right mess of the entire balcony - soil and dirt EVERYWHERE!!! (and there was an earthworm in 1 of the plants)... ick! We really don't have greenthumbs at all - this is completely foreign (we had 2 plants die on us in Singapore).

It's an experiment to see if we can take care of plants (we kept telling Isaac the nursery sales guy that we wanted "hardy plants that can withstand abuse... or lack of care"). But they're GORGEOUS!