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Getting down to post-freeze business: Procrastination

Posted Jan 23, 2010 by Loren Omoto

Updated Jan 23, 2010 at 12:47 PM

I’ve been promising myself all week I’d spend the day in the garden today, get a start on cutting back and cleaning up all the freeze damage.

But here it is after 12 p.m., the sun is out, it’s a beautiful day to work in the yard. Instead, I have gone to the gym, cooked a big breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, and watched two episodes of a really good new show on MTV, “My Life as Liz.”

You don’t need a medical degree to diagnose my condition.

To inch my way closer to the garden, I thought I’d take some post-freeze pictures and match them up to pre-freeze photos before destroying the evidence. This is a very justifiable reason to continue putting off actual work. Won’t it be interesting to see which of these guys come back? And to avoid being completely morose, I’ve included some survivors.

Here’s the pagoda clerodendron before:

And here they are after. I’m sure they’ll come back, even if they didn’t have that hopeful bit of green still hanging on one bush:

Pond before (this is a cheat, it’s actually several months ago, so I had some different plants to the left and right, including salvias and pentas.)

And the pond after. I hope the plumbagos come back. One good little survivor here, the green plant behind the pond is a Knockout rose. And in front, which you can just see a bit of, is the aptly named Ice Plant, or baby sun rose, a surprise survivor—I bought it in the Keys!

Last one - the butterfly cassia. Here it is in all its glory:

And after. ... A few fried branches, but I think it’s otherwise OK. (As is the Asian lettuce to the left!) But, yeah, the walking irises, bougainvillea, plumeria and chalice vine that were there before are gone. Night-blooming cereus, however, made it.

It appears they won’t be showing “My Life as Liz” again anytime soon, so I guess it’s time to pull on the gloves and pull out the pruners. At least the sun is out!