Summer has officially begun, and the garden has come such a loooooooong way from where I started when we arrived in summertime last year. Here’s the obligatory reminder photo from December 2019. We had been in Chile for less than two weeks, and I had made my first trip to the nursery to fill in some of this blank canvas. I really couldn’t have imagined how much growth, greenery and life would take over in just one year (or how much time I would have to devote to cultivating it).
And here we are in January 2021!
My Chilean family showers me with accolades over my garden, but conditions here are so amenable to growing that it feels like it would be harder to kill the plants than to have them flourish. Having also gardened on the east and west coasts of the U.S., I can say with confidence that it is much easier to cultivate a beautiful garden on the west coasts of the Americas.
Argyranthemum 
Fuchsia
Hydrangea & dimorphoteca 
salvia leucantha
I did lose a large dimorphoteca plant from this side of the garden when we took a week-long trip to the south of Chile (post in the works). When we came back it was shriveled and dry and I haven’t been able to bring it back. The space that it occupied will fill in with summer herbs, but it was sad to lose such a full and mature flowering plant.
lime tree 
bougainvillea
Check out the posts Springtime in the Garden for photos from the spring and My Countryside Garden for fall photos and the full story of how the garden came to be.
True Story: Chile 