I was given a pot of Mums, so decided to plant them in the front garden. If they lived, awesome, if not, at least it was some color for a while. I had some spectacular mums in Colorado, or I remember them as spectacular. They aren’t usually as happy in the Texas heat, but since it is entertaining the idea of winter here, maybe it would work.

I was pleasantly surprised that the plant hung in there and finished blooming. On hot days I did have to give it some more water, but overall it did better than I expected. Then it gave me a shock. It started new buds and bloomed scarlet flowers.

I thought maybe that there was a different plant growing up from the soil, but when I deadheaded the old blooms it was obvious the bright red flowers came from the same stems. Huh. I did an internet search, and wow, is there a load of garbage about mums out there. So much worthless click bait. I gleaned that this and many other different mum color changes have happened to others, but was not able to find a reliable explanation why. Someone did mention that growers will do things to the plants to make the blooms change color, but most of the answers involved mixing up seed color, which is not the case here.

The Gregg’s Mist flower that we planted in the spring recovered from the summer heat and spread with the fall rains. We bought it because it is very attractive to butterflies, but the bees love it too!

Now the test is to see how they do over the winter. If they do well, we just might fill the whole front section of the flower bed with them. It is a Texas native.

We had a cold snap, a welcome drench of rain, and all the flowers think it is spring again. Hello Texas.

The grape hyacinth and paper whites are also stretching up their green leaves to the Texas sun. I’ve had paper whites bloom in December, but not grape hyacinths. We’ll see what they do. I should have planted more peppers.