Monthly Archives: May 2011
Venice Garden & Home Tour 2011
Buy tickets and a map at the Las Doradas Children’s Center, apply the lime-green wrist band, and we’re off on the VGHT 2011 (Last year’s post here.) Under overcast skies, thirty houses, covering several miles. Bikes would be the preferred … Continue reading
Echium gentianoides ‘Tajinaste’
Last time I wrote about this echium was for a March Bloom Day post, cursing myself for having transplanted it while it was just beginning to show flower buds. I am now relieved to report it has made a full … Continue reading
Missing Boxwood
House on the corner. Famous in the neighborhood for at one time housing local band the Cold War Kids and their legendary late-night poker parties. Bare, packed earth, a memory of lawn haunting the hardscrabble front yard. A single boxwood … Continue reading
Wispy Spring Annuals
Along with the linaria I mentioned recently, some of the other wispy spring annuals I’ve been experimenting with in pots are this Anagallis. A. monelii, the Blue Pimpernel. And a little nemesia with long spurs, N. cheiranthus ‘Shooting Stars.’ The … Continue reading
The Porch Steps Up
As garden space shrinks, the focus becomes ever more minute, with no strip of soil too narrow to remain unexploited. For example, I’m really starting to work the back porch. Every inch, as in the crevice between porch and brick … Continue reading
Warming Up
Edging into the high 80’s the next couple days here at the coast, about a mile from the Pacific, in the 90’s for the inland cities like Pasadena. The castor bean plant and Salvia canariensis are reveling in the heat, … Continue reading
Sudden Mediterranean Plant Collapse Disorder
I made that name up. But it’s true, collapse and then a swift death does come suddenly to mediterranean plants in lusty health mid-summer. Which is why I’m ecstatic that this one cutting of Coronilla valentina subsp. glauca ‘Variegata’ has … Continue reading