It has been a crazy week in the Patch this week, lots of pruning, lots of pea gravel laying and a few more floggings from my pampas grasses, naturally.

The Botox lady has got herself all dolled up for the Garden Conservancy Austin Tour tomorrow.  She has had her hair fixed, and has even started to wear this ladybug as a beauty spot!

“Ya!  Yoo-Hoo ESP…over zere, over zere…you like mine hair ya?  Notice something else?  Oh and look at ze asters, look at ze asters, have you seen ze asters ESP”?

Oh yes, the build up to the tour has made her even more obnoxious then usual, if that is even possible, I hope she tones it down on the big day!

Oh you complete and utter asters!

You just had to do it didn’t you!  I am hoping these blooms hang in there until Saturday. The hardest part of the week has been the weeding and clearing out of leaves in ridiculously inaccessible areas, requiring insanely strange contorted poses to even reach them. Doing thousands of these oddly positioned squats over the last few days has made my legs feel like they are dropping off…

…as this grasshopper can surely appreciate. This find gave me the opportunity to closely check out the spines on the legs…oh yes a kick from this chap would most certainly draw blood…(draws finger across teeth)

This anole could not even look at the dismembered bodily carnage, perhaps he even perpetrated the dismemberment and was hiding under this leaf while he consumed the more delectable parts.

Check out that huge Jurassic right foot, complete with talons!

Like a grazing antelope this huge “Obscure Bird Grasshopper” was most certainly alive, gnawing his way through one of my satsuma leaves, it ate half of a leaf as I took these images.

Where is…

when you need him?

Amazing eyes on these creatures.  While I was clambering around under this satsuma thinking about how sharp the spines on the dismembered leg were and how my fingers were now almost touching the real thing, I rounded a small limb to get a better angle and came face to face with this disgusting fellow…

and it was one of the biggest giant swallow tail larvae I recall ever seeing. It blocked out the sun. There was snow on its peaks.

Papilio cresphontes

Fruit farmers often call these caterpillars orange dogs or orange puppies because of the devastation they can cause on their crops.

Judging from the size, this one must be really close to changinginto a chrysalis. Oh yes, who would want to eat this?

Moving On:

This back area of the Patch has always been a sort of no-man’s land, so I decided to move this old and cracked container from behind a stand of giant timber bamboo where it was mostly obscured and give it a new purpose in life.

I elevated it on a couple of breeze blocks to give it a little more presence before…

filling the area in with granite. Well what did you expect?

I have been up-pruning this pittosporum/ mock orange on the right for quite a few years, the small agave vilmoriniana (yes I am STILL planting those pups) planted all around the pot will get quite large and fill in this scene over the coming years.  The blues of the container and the Mexican beach pebbles goes well with the adjacent silvery-blue hues of the foliage, the inside of the container referencing the brown color of the granite and background trellis.

The browns on my Mexican weeping bamboo have also began to stand out recently.  Note: Never place a rotating hose next to a weeping bamboo, the annoyance factor as strands of bamboo get caught up in it as it rotates are completely off the scale.

As have the now crispy brown seedpods from my pride of Barbados plants, very Halloween looking.  I planted a lot of seeds from these plants this year, mostly in the hell-strip.  Staying with seeds and Halloween:

The seedpods on my celosia are swirling to now comical lengths. Walk down my sidewalk in the dead of night and you may just feel the touch of these slender seedpod fingers trailing over your shoulders.  Brrr.

What a firework display.

Another firework, a tiny sparkler sedge courtesy of Pam at Digging http://www.penick.net/digging/

Moving on to some greens…

A hoja santa leaf catching some fall rays…

…and somebody is really looking forward to selling some fresh limonada at the tour tomorrow.

Me? Lets just say weeding and collecting leaves will not be high on my priority list for the next few months!

I hope to see you in the Patch tomorrow, and a big thanks in advance to my illustrious band of volunteers who will be helping me throughout the day. I did decide to do a quick “Plan of the Patch” in preparation for the tour, this should help me remember those plants that I can never seem to remember:

Stay Tuned  for:

“All Quiet on the Eastern Front”

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Now to some very serious business…Grab your sowesters, make a fresh cup of Horlicks, and try to enjoy another uplifting and jolly episode from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner…Part three