Some mornings the poppies do an especially fine job of arranging their blooms throughout the gravel garden.
Orange notes from Papaver rupifragum and dyckia
(I know I keep referring to this bit of garden as the “gravel garden,” which it mostly was at one time, though now the ratio of plants to gravel has increased in favor of plants. Still, it’s an easy point of reference.)
Friday’s Clippings is a handy blog closet into which accumulated stuff can be shoved at the end of the week, things I want to refer to again that might be of wider interest. And speaking of odds and ends shoved into storage to be mostly forgotten, these cardboard cutouts were found during a recent garage purge and their photos taken before the recycle truck took them away forever. These Four Characters In Search of a Garden Party are the perfect poster people for Friday’s Clippings.
I meant to comment on this nice piece on trees last week from The New York Times on April 11 by Jim Robbins entitled “Why Trees Matter,” with some interesting facts like “when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called ‘Forests Are Lovers of the Sea,’ fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.”
What a poetic name for an environmental action campaign, instead of defense/resource council this and that. Yes, the NYT is now paywall-protected, but up to ten articles each month are available to nonsubscribers.
Also meant to be included last week was a gardener position available with the City of Long Beach, mainly just offered now for informational wage purposes, since the position closed today.
City of LB job: Job Title: GARDENER I-II
Closing Date/Time: Fri. 04/20/12 4:30 PM Pacific Time
Salary: $15.12 Hourly
$1,213.75 Biweekly
$2,629.80 Monthly
$31,557.60 Annually
The 23rd Annual Southern California Spring Garden Show runs April 26 through April 29, 2012, at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. I’ve heard rumors that garden designer Dustin Gimbel of Second Nature Garden Design and the blog non-secateur will be designing an exhibit for the show. Can’t wait to see what he’s been up to.
“Among the largest single uses of these compounds is application to maize seed; production of maize for food, feed and ethanol production represents the largest single use of arable land in North America. Maize planting reached unprecedented levels in the US in 2010 and is expected to increase. Virtually all of the maize seed planted in North America (the lone exception being organic production=0.2% of total acreage) is coated with neonicotinoid insecticides.”
Work cancelled at the last minute today, the message on the phone said, so there I was in a Culver City business center parking garage with nothing to do.
Driving around Culver City, I mulled the situation over and considered my options. Head home and back into rush-hour traffic or to the Culver City branch of Rolling Greens, Los Angeles’ “predominant live plant nursery for professional landscapers, landscape architects, production designers, and in-the-know home gardeners.” (I think I’m included in there somewhere, maybe the last category if we substitute “half-ass” for “in-the-know.”)
But every style of garden ornament and container is represented, whether Balinese, French, Italian, Mid Century Modern — truly an exhaustive selection of styles and kinds of pottery, some of gigantic proportions. Lots of salvage and vintage garden furniture too.
The nursery side of the business doesn’t try to dazzle with plant rarities, but instead offers a very solid selection for mediterranean gardens.
And at ground level.
Aloes, furcraea, Kalanchoe thyrsiflora, Senecio mandraliscae, Dichondra argentea.
One of the most successful public plantings of succulents I’ve seen around town. It’s been at least five years since I last visited this address and saw the early stages of these plantings, and it was a delight to see them again today, still beautifully maintained, obviously the work of an adoring plant geek. This type of detailed planting is so easily overrun by the vigorous spreaders like Senecio mandraliscae and S. vitalis, but there’s a watchful eye at work here keeping the mature plantings in balance and proportion.
Incredible variety and detail for for intimate revelation.
But in large enough swathes to read as gorgeous, abstract ribbons of color from upper stories.
With hidden ponds and streams to discover throughout the labyrinthine gardens.
An exciting, energizing view, whether at ground level or from a tenth-story window.
Really brightens up a workday.
Grasses and agaves, yes, of course, solidity and movement, so why not grasses and aloes?
A youngish Aloe marlothii and the evergreen cold blue steel blades of Blue Oat Grass, Helicotrichon sempervirens.
x Fatshedera lizei, rinsed clean from the rain.
Pathway lined with succulents, echeverias and aeoniums, fresh growth of eucomis in the background.
Dark green, thyme-like mat grower is Frankenia thymifolia.
April deserves a thorough Bloom Day post, but if I’m to get this in before midnight it’ll have to be brief. A big change here is that the poppies of Troy, Papaver setigerum, are over sooner than I’d like. I expect them to last at least all of April. The past two mornings countless confused bees have been aimlessly circling the air space once filled with poppies in bloom. The last rainfall was followed by ferocious winds which battered and ultimately flattened the poppies, so they’ve been pulled from the crevices in the dry-laid brick terrace in which they self-sowed, and now it’s like they were never there. Poof, and the terrace is once again just an ordinary terrace instead of a meadow of swaying, buzzing poppies. And it seems the garden has no other flowers to tempt the bees, though the hummingbirds are finding plenty to keep themselves occupied. Last pre-rainstorm photo of the poppies.
Papaver rupifragum in the front gravel garden, in a more protected spot, was safe from wind damage. And possibly the leaner soil here may have helped them to grow a little tougher.
The last of the Dutch iris, too, this one ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ hands down my favorite. Dark, smoky, moody.
Albuca maxima, a summer-dormant bulb from South Africa, flower stalks about 3 feet high, growing in the front gravel garden which gets little supplemental irrigation.
Always a surprise to have a grass bloom as early as Stipa gigantea. The albuca is just a few feet away, and fall-blooming nerines grow in this part of the gravel garden too, another bulb that requires summer dormancy.
Pelargonium ‘Splendide’ with an unidentified sedum species
Peachy thunbergia, just a little snail-chewed.
I prefer the clear orange of this Orange Clock Vine, Thunbergia gregorii.
A large pot of this oversized figwort, Scrophularia calliantha, was moved to a spot with less afternoon sun yesterday in the narrow inner courtyard off the front gravel garden, where coincidentally it also drapes and displays itself to much better effect. In probably the reverse of what’s going on in many spring gardens, I’ve been busy removing the clutter of winter pots to streamline the garden for summer, keeping just a few large pots which hold moisture longer. I don’t yet have any big plans for summer containers but am always open to temptation.
Geum magellanicum
I’m trialing a couple new kinds of foxglove this year, Digitalis ferruginea and this one, Digitalis ‘Goldcrest,’ a sterile hybrid of D. obscura and grandiflora reputed to be extremely floriferous.
For fans of chartreuse bracts, besides euphorbias, hellebores, and ornamental oregano, there’s sideritis.
The color of chocolate cosmos but with silvery leaves, Lotus jacobaeus in its first season has already earned a permanent place in my affections.
Sisyrinchium striatum ‘Variegatum’ is almost more excitement than I can handle in one plant.
Salvia littae grows in a mad, scrambly tangle. Brittle too, so attempts to tidy it up results in broken stems. A frustrating salvia unless allowed to drape down a wall, I’d guess. Brought home from the Mendocino Botanic Garden last summer.
Salvia macrophylla. I don’t think I’ve ever grown a salvia that clothes itself with leaves right down to the ground like this one does.
White blooms of Aeonium ‘Kiwi’
Tweedia caerulea, started from seed by Dustin Gimbel. I’ve crowded my plants so they’ve been slow to bulk up.
Two storms this week, unusual for April. February is usually our wettest month.
The first storm arrived around midnight Tuesday, the other is due later tonight.
Just before the first storm, leaves were swept, tables and chairs straightened.
Later that night I fell asleep to the sound of rain drumming on these tables, a deeply satisfying “sleep song.”
Anticipating the rain on Tuesday, I celebrated with a late-afternoon trip to a couple nurseries.
(Aloe capitata var. quartzicola.)
Yes, I’m silly in love with rain, but I’m not the only one.
By Langston Hughes
April Rain Song
Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—
And I love the rain.
As road trip season begins, with the price of gas being what it is, the question we’re all asking ourselves has to be, Is the gas tank half empty or half full?
I vowed to make a road trip to the Nevada Museum of Art earlier this year when its Director of the Center for Art + Environment, William Fox, popped this image up on the screen while speaking at UC Berkeley Botanical Garden’s Natural Discourse seminar. A gabion man!
Cairn, by Celeste Roberge
Now I find that another artist at that UCBG seminar, Gail Wight, will debut her video work on slime mold, Hydraphilia, at the Nevada Museum of Art from April 21 through August 26, 2012.
At the UCBG Natural Discourse seminar, Gail gave a hilarious account of the slime mold experiment escaping the lab and oozing into the domestic parts of her house and life. As a layperson grappling with the overlay of art and science, she finds that “the obsession to make art is a neurological disease.”
At UCBG Fox spoke on the difficulty of making art in isotropic places like Antarctica, “the unnerving sense of disorientation that humans experience in flat, featureless landscapes,” a part of his “sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape,” or as he put it at the seminar: “What I do is travel around the world in extreme environments and look at how to get lost and look at the ways we deploy both neurophysiology and culture to find ourselves again.”
Both Gail and Bill are rollicking good storytellers. Bill wrote about his day at UCBG here.
You can meet Gail Wight in person at the Nevada Museum of Art on May 4, 2012. (Ask her about the runaway slime on the staircase.)
I heard this phrase a couple weeks back and thought it an instant classic, the perfect shorthand for those moments when life gets a little too fractured, too fragmented, too…out of balance or koyaanisqatsi, referring to that 1983 art house movie staple by Godfrey Reggio which takes as its title the Hopi word for “life out of balance.” When the world gets too koyaanisqatsi is precisely the moment when you’ll want to have the garden in order. So I sweep, clip, move plants, move pots, pot up seedlings, add buckets of compost, sweep some more, knowing how appreciated the work will be when the center, for whatever reason and however briefly, does not hold. A little secret — koyaanisqatsi trembles before gardens. Really.
The importance of keeping an eye out for koyaanisqatsi-fighting plants cannot be overstated.
Centaurea clementei seen in Dustin Gimbel’s garden.
Nameless kniphofia in bloom in my garden, rendered anonymous by countless moves.
Gardens, my preferred koyaanisqatsi buster.
(Thanks for the sonchus, Dustin!)
Thank you, Paris Review, for continuing Windows on the World, a wonderful “series on what writers from around the world see from their windows,” as drawn by Matteo Pericoli, first commissioned by The New York Times.
My introduction to this series was the entry by Mrs. Borges, Maria Kodama, first published in The New York Times on 1/2/11.
“A certain house in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta has a window that is doubly privileged. It overlooks a courtyard garden of the kind known here as a pulmón de manzana – literally, the lung of a block – which affords it a view of the sky and an expanse of plants, trees and vines that meander along the walls of neighboring houses, marking the passage of the seasons with their colors…” Mária Kodama
But this isn’t a series about view envy. Not all the writers’ accounts of their views are as rhapsodic as Ms. Kodama’s. I love how Marina Endicott begins the description of her view:
“By some spiral of fate and capitulation, instead of a street in the East Village or a shabby lane in London, I stare out at a suburban patio, a generous and quiet garden in Edmonton, Alberta.”
More recent windows:
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Wilmington, NC
Several years ago, Matteo began to draw New York from a new vantage point—from its windows. He asked artists, writers, politicians, editors, and others involved with the cultural life of the city to let him draw whatever they saw when they looked outside. These were collected in the book The City Out My Window (and the view from 62 White Street appeared on the cover of The Paris Review).
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