My Dilemma ...

It's a beautiful spring day, albeit a bit windy, and I've been out in the garden puttering. We've had too little rain and too much wind recently, which means I'm doing a lot of watering by hand, not just containers but the garden itself. As I watered plants and pulled more violas, I found myself mentally composing posts for this blog ... which brings me to my dilemma. If I take time away from the garden to blog about gardening, no actual gardening gets done. But if I'm outside working in the garden, I can't blog. I suppose I could do shorter posts but then I feel like I'm cheating myself and any readers. Do I overthink things? Oh, YEAH. ::: sigh ::: How do you other bloggers handle it?

As for the garden itself, I'll share a picture I took earlier this week. Last spring, I bought a small bauhinia tree at Mercer Arboretum's March Mart, as usual without any idea of where I was going to put it. Impulse buying is one of my weaknesses as a gardener ... but when this bauhinia began to bloom for the first time, it reminded me of how richly I can be rewarded by my impulse buys. The label says "Hardy White Bauhinia", which is all well and good but WHICH hardy white bauhinia is it? This is when botanical names are not only useful but important. For some reason, I keep coming back to Bauhinia acuminata. So I went Googling and found this page from Top Tropicals. OK, so the petals are a bit different than those in their picture but, hey, this is Katy, not Phuket. Even if it's one of the other varieties, I'm delighted to have found Mark Shedden aka Bloomin' Bert. I gotta love a guy who offers this advice on pruning my tree: The best advice I can give is to prune after your second beer - not too many to affect your judgement, but enough to gather a little enthusiasm for the task. And now, I take my leave of y'all and head back to the garden to continue my attempts to impose a vestige of order upon the chaos.