The Guild 5-13-2003 Try some new Annuals in your garden

Better Homes and Gardens ^

[BigWaveBetty]

It's fun and challenging to grow new or exotic plants, but it's also nice to have some solid favorites to fall back on, too.

Mexican Sunflower
Include the late-blooming Mexican sunflower to shift the garden from summer through autumn in grand style. The bold plants, available in many nurseries and home and garden centers, grow almost 6 feet tall. Fiery orange, 2-inch blossoms seem to illuminate everything around them.

Heliotrope
Growing only about 18 inches tall, heliotrope is perfect for the front of the garden and grows best in full sun and well-drained soil. Consider growing heliotrope in a container or window box where it will be closer to your nose.

Snow on the Mountain
Like the closely-related poinsettia, snow on the mountain has "flowers" that actually are specialized leaves or bracts. The true flower is inconspicuous at the center of the variegated green-and-white bracts. Growing to 4 feet tall, snow on the mountain is well-suited to the middle of the garden.

Four o'clocks
If you have little time in your day to enjoy your garden, you will appreciate night bloomers such as four o'clocks. The bushy 3- to 4-foot-high plant will open its tubular 2-inch flowers in late afternoon to early evening, and fill the garden with sweet perfume. Each flower lasts but one night, but the plant blooms constantly from midsummer to frost. Flowers come in magenta, yellow, or white and in striped combinations.

Mexican Zinnia
The bushy Mexican zinnia is a welcome change from the typical zinnia that is gangly and prone to powdery mildew. Two outstanding varieties are "Orange Star" and "Star White." They grow about 10 inches high and spread to 12 inches wide. Their mounds of fine, almost needle-like leaves give rise to single, daisy-like blooms that resemble a demure coreopsis more than their larger double-flowered zinnia cousins.

Love-lies-bleeding
Also known as tassel flower, this is a guaranteed showstopper in any garden. No shrinking violet, it grows 3 x 5 feet tall, spreads up to 2 feet across, and bears long, red-to-crimson-purple flower tassels. If the size of the plant doesn't grab your attention, the 2-foot-long panicles of flowers that resemble chenille will.

More at the link. Happy digging!

[BigWaveBetty]

PREVIOUS THREADS

[BigWaveBetty]

Good Morning!

[Iowa Granny]

Good Morning. It's suppose to rain again today. At least I don't need to be concerned about watering the things I've transplanted. Once they're watered in, Mother Nature takes care of the rest.

Busy, busy here.

[lodwick]

Beautiful gardening lesson today SL

[BigWaveBetty]

Dry and 94 here again today. Hubby's thinking of taking the day off so maybe I can put him to work in the garden while I supervise. ;-)

Lodwick, I hope the weather remains nice for your visit. Bring shorts and sun block!

[mountaineer]

I'm coveting your weather! It's been raining nonstop here for days and it's 46 degrees this morning. Brrr.

[Carolina]

Good morning! Gardening--what fun.

Here's my favorite annual--the double impatiens. I especially love to group purple ones with pale pink and salmon.

I also love the mandevilla. Of course, where you are it's probably a perennial. But here it's an annual, although it blooms until Christmas when we usually get hit with a killing frost.

And for hummingbirds--lantana and fuchsia:

[lodwick]

[BigWaveBetty]

Those are all great, so colorful. I especially like the lantana but only the flower, the stems and leaves are kind of stinky.

One of these days I hope to have a pond so I can grow water lillies.

[mountaineer]

PageSix reports:

A BOMBSHELL new book by Frank Sinatra’s valet lifts the lid off the seedy side of Old Blue Eyes’ long and colorful relationship with the Kennedys.

In "Mr. S.: My Life with Frank Sinatra" (HarperCollins), excerpted in the June issue of Playboy, Sinatra’s devoted valet George Jacobs claims that:

* He saw then-Sen. John F. Kennedy doing lines of cocaine with his brother-in-law Peter Lawford in a guest room of Sinatra’s Palm Springs mansion. " 'For my back, George,’ Kennedy said to me with his bad-boy wink," Jacobs writes. "Peter was more direct. "For God’s sake, George, don’t tell Frank."

* JFK’s father Joe Kennedy was a bigot who told racist jokes about blacks and Jews and particularly hated Sammy Davis Jr. The elder Kennedy had sex with hookers that Sinatra packed his Palm Beach parties with, and told the singer he could either be U.S. ambassador to Italy or U.S. senator from Nevada if he helped get JFK elected.

* JFK was obsessed with gossip and scandal, Jacobs relates. "He wanted to know all of the Hollywood dirt - who was a drunk, who was a junkie, who had black lovers, everything. I would ask him about [Fidel] Castro or [Nikita] Khrushchev, but he wanted to know if Janet Leigh was cheating on Tony Curtis. He read every issue of Confidential magazine. To him, that scandal sheet was a lot better than Foreign Affairs."

* Once while Jacobs was giving Kennedy a massage, the skirt-chasing president-to-be told him that Marlene Dietrich had once performed a sex act on him in the ballroom of the Hotel du Cap on the French Riviera.

In addition to exposing the kinkiest Kennedy secrets, Jacobs reveals these tantalizing tidbits about Sinatra:

* He was a neat freak who showered and changed clothes four times a day.

* He concealed an enormous penis by wearing custom-made underwear.

* He wore a good-luck toupee on opening nights of concert engagements.

* He stood just 5-foot-7 and wore lifts in all his shoes.

* He always had sex the night before a recording session.

* He hated Marlon Brando, whom he called "Mumbles." Brando called him "Baldie."

---

Oliver Stone spent Mother's Day not with his mother, the charming Jacqueline Stone, but with Fidel Castro, who was so flatteringly depicted in Stone's documentary "Commandante."

---

More from the Daily News on JFK's intern girlfriend:
Her name was Mimi.
Long-sealed documents released yesterday offered tantalizing details about the teenage intern who is said to have cavorted with President John F. Kennedy on official trips - and even in the White House.

The college freshman played poolside with the dashing young President in places like Palm Springs, Calif., and was spotted crouching on the floor of a car in Kennedy's entourage during a trip to the Bahamas.

Full story: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/83181p-76104c.html

[FoxGirl]

Rise & Shine! It's that time of year, for sure. My friend is coming to help me plant these tomorrow, before they die (due to my neglect!)

[BigWaveBetty]

I'm sorry you're so soggy and cold!

Maybe this will make the rain and cold a bit easier to take... The rich and famous can't go to the beach!

SWIMMING was banned off some of the French Riviera’s most exclusive beaches yesterday after they were polluted by an oil slick just two days before the start of the Cannes Film Festival.

With the normally golden sands of Menton and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin stained by patches of crude oil, a criminal inquiry was launched to try to find the ship responsible.

In Menton a local plumber said: “The patches of oil were enormous and the smell so strong that we couldn’t stay on the beach.”

The Maritime Prefecture in Toulon said that almost certainly the pollution had been caused by a ship emptying tanks in the Mediterranean. story

You don't suppose that was an accidentally on purpose kind of emptying, do you?

[lodwick]

Camelot sounds more like came a lot.

Thanks for the skinny.

Nice work butler.

[Carolina]

Oh, gawd! More crouching interns. Lord help me if any of my children tell me they want to intern.

[BigWaveBetty]

Sen. Ted Kennedy's office declined to comment on the report.

It makes one wonder, was Ted consulted on the release of this (JFK did it too, so clintoon's not so bad legacy rehab) info? Or did hillary just have it done without Ted's knowledge?

I also find it interesting that the part of the book that's getting no attention is the fact that Kennedy was pumped full of drugs and almost died on numerous occasions before he took office.

Those damn clintoons have made me so cynical that I'm thinking the media thinks trumpeting the intern will some how make the toon look better.

* He concealed an enormous penis by wearing custom-made underwear.

Too much information!

[BigWaveBetty]

It seems this thread is very timely. :-) Get those beauties in the ground! Then please take a pic and let us see how they turned out.

[mountaineer]

I didn't know whether to leave in that bit about the custom-made undies. Hmmm.

In other sleaze news, my dear Dem. governor has been caught with his pants down (literally): story here , and Bill Clinton will be heading to little historically black Tougaloo College for Sunday's graduation, story here. No word on whether he'll share those ("N word") jokes he likes to tell on the golf course.

[Billie]

Good Morning! Are we on the same page or WHAT?! :)

How Does Your Garden Grow?

[Carolina]

In other sleaze news, my dear Dem. governor has been caught with his pants down (literally):

And my very dear Dem gov crashed a race car in an "I'm-a-he-man" moment.

[Iowa Granny]

He concealed an enormous penis by wearing custom-made underwear.

Pardon me for being skeptical. Can you troll around for a pic of Ole Blue Eyes in a flight suit for verification?

I have lived my life under the assumption that custom made underwear has a special compartment for Socks.