Red

These are the most beautiful flowers and add a light to my life. The red is brilliant.

Geranium

And... my gophers don't eat them (crossing fingers). They will even eat the garlic, just not as often. They LOVE roses and they have taken down a full grown apricot tree after (thank goodness) the first full crop. The apricots were some of the best I have ever eaten, which made it so hard to lose the tree.

One year they undermined the road (dug a hole under the road) and a big rain came and washed through the whole and washed out part of the road, when the rain was over there was a hole on the side of the road I could stand in. I am short, but it still came up to my thighs.

So I now spend time trying to find things that they won't eat. I also plant in chicken wire baskets that I make but that is no guarantee either. I drill holes in Cat litter buckets and plant in those, not so good for the bigger things though. But they don't go through those either. The buckets will also break down in a few years from the sun out here and have to be replaced. They have to be watered and fertilized more often also.

I get a perverse thrill after watering and seeing the mounds of dirt around the bucket and the plant still there. You know the movie with Bill Murray , Caddyshack ,that is real.

That's how I ended up with the huge crop of garlic I have. The gopher would dig a hole, and I would stuff a clove of garlic down there, LOL! We even have cloves of garlic in the little pathways. These don't get watered often.

It only worked for a bit and then he started on the tops of the garlic. He comes out of the ground for those. I believe the bulbs are still there, because the shoots will start again. You know the cartoons of the whole plant going into the ground a lit at a time, bit by bit, that is real people, I have seen it.

Green is green in my opinion and even if it is garlic, it is beautiful to me in the summer here. But those red flowers are divine.

Canna continued...

Here is what came from the canna posting. I used the colors I found in the photogragh and applied them to what I wanted to create.

And so it is.

Canna

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canna_(plant)

If I feel stuck, I go to nature to get some influence or stimulus. I also take very close up pictures. This is a plant I grew from seed and it has been with me for years under somewhat extreme conditions.
We have gophers, I mean millions of gophers, and they eat everything, even trees. OK, maybe it is only thousands. They go for the tender taproot of the tree and then BAM, the tree is dying right before my eyes and the fruit is dropping off the tree. You know those cartoons that you see with the carrot slowly going down in to the ground, I live that.
I planted this canna in the ground in one of my big cat litter buckets with big holes drilled in the bottom of it, and then I planted the bucket in the ground, I leave the top 3” edge of the bucket above ground to discourage the rabbits. I think poverty is the mother of invention. This seems to work. It is so funny and gives me a perverse pleasure to see dirt in mounds, evidence of the gopher, around the buckets and the plant thriving.
It is a beautiful example of reds.