Herself’s Houston Garden

One of the first things I noticed down here was the landscaping was all backwards. In New England we put large trees and shrubs at the outer edge of the yard and progressively smaller plants working in towards the house.

Down here people put trees, bamboo, large shrubs right next to the house and progressively smaller plants working away from the house.

We work so hard to keep the windows clear of plants in New England to let in light and provide a view. Here windows get covered up so when you look out the window you see the plant.

I hated it at first. I could not imagine why you’d cover up all those wonderful windows. I have to say it is beginning to grow on me over time.

There is something nice about looking out a window into a stand of bamboo. Or looking at bird sitting on a branch in a tree just inches from your window. It feels like you are living in a jungle or forest rather than a city.

Another thing that jumps out at you is large leafed plants. You don’t see many large leafed plants up north. Planting plants with large leaves always gives a tropical feel to a garden. And large plants jump out at you. We have large trees and shrubs at home but it is rare to see non-woody plants in large sizes. They look prehistoric to me. I love them all and am intentionally adding super sized plants to the gardens. While hunting for some new oddities for the garden I ran across this:

Super Size Elephant Ear

How cool is that? And as soon I can purchase and bulldoze the neighbor’s home to make room I’m going to plant one. Just kidding, I am actively looking for an interesting location for one in my garden. I also ordered their catalog so I can see what other odd, very large plants they might have of interest.

See also:
Timor Black Bamboo
Golden Hawaiian Bamboo

We picked this up at a Mercer sale a couple of months ago. It is settling in just fine. We often find mosquito larvae in the water so a few grains of insecticide or drops of oil have to be added as needed.

It will not survive a frost so must be protected on cool nights or brought in if you have it in a pot. Ours did not winter over. You may want to pop it up and bring it inside when the weather cools down.

It will grow to about 18″ across and send out offsets to form children when happy.

They prefer light shade to full shade. When placed in sunnier locations they grow more spread out, in darker locations they grow more upright.

Tiny purple flowers form in the center where there is water now. You might also find an occasional small frog, toad or lizard hanging out and getting a drink.

Bromeliads are epiphytes, which means they do not get nutrients from the soil. The roots they grow are to anchor them in place. They will feed a bit through roots if they have them, but the main source of food is through scales on the leaves.

See also
Bromeliad Biota has some interesting bromeliad information.

I love all these swamp plants I can grow in my yard.

This horsetail rush is growing near the water runoff ditch that runs under the fence. I just put him in the ground a week or so ago. Eventually the rush will get about 3′ tall and the stems will be about 1/3″ thick. I’ve seen them growing near buildings where the landscapers trim the tops level and it looks really cool.

No flowers, no seeds and the leaves are tiny and what form the ridges along the stems.

Rush can handle full sun to part shade.

Ground should be wet, do not let rush dry out. It wants to grow in wet soil – not in a pond or underwater. It will turn yellow and die under those conditions.

Early settlers used the stems for scouring pots and pans. Non-toxic to humans it has been known to occasionally poison live stock.

Can be invasive if conditions are right.

This is one of the older plant species still with us.  Rush first appeared in the Carboniferous time about 345 million years ago.

Blog theft has been a hot topic on blogs about blogging for a month or so now. This week I ran across it several times on garden blogs. I know that my house plants site gets scraped several times a day. Why that one of all my blogs should attract scrapers I don’t know? I haven’t looked for copies of it yet. The scraping may be legit for research or other such uses. It has always attracted large numbers of spiders and bots even before I converted it to a blog format.

You’ll recognize scrapers in your log files by they way they visit your site. Humans don’t visit every single page on your site in alphabetical order or in order of links. Nor do humans view pages so quickly. You can’t block spiders and bots with out blocking legit spiders like GoogleBot and Yahoo spiders. ( Know who is visiting your website, Google Analytics )

So far there has been no solution. You can pursue the offender but it is not easy and not always successful. The same rss that gives us newsreaders and back up tools also provides easy ways for the less honest among us to scrape sites.

During the Q&A of this session, the topic of blogs came up and what you could take from them to use in your own article and how you would then attribute this source. The panel’s reply almost made me apoplectic! They said: “These people put it out there and it is there for the taking” and to basically not worry about any attribution, link, sourcing, etc. Now this is a group that fights tooth and nail for its members to get paid by newspapers who buy only “first rights” to articles, then put them on their websites without additional compensation. And here they were, my esteemed colleagues, actually promoting theft and plagiarism!
Garden Rant: Garden Writers on Blogs: “Say what?” or “Steal from ‘em!”

The mainstream media once felt that way about news and political bloggers. Slowly they are gaining respect and the same legal protections that reporters for mainstream media possess. I’m sure mainstream garden writers and media will also come around in time. In the meantime know your rights and check your logs.

You can block image bandwidth theft with your webhost or .htaccess file. This will not prevent images from being downloaded but will prevent others from incorporating them into their sites while you host them. Details on preventing image theft

Another problem I’ve run across only on garden blogs is iframing. This is when someone takes something of yours and puts in their site in an iframe. It appears on their site as if it is theirs and hosted their. I’ve found just renaming the file often works. If it doesn’t you can put something creative in it’s place. That always cures even the slowest learners.

More information:
Blog Pirates
Do You Know Your Garden Blogging Rights: Copyright Infrigement