Only the first day of spring, yet garden show season has already arrived in many parts of the country.
MB Maher was in attendance today at the preview to this year’s San Francisco Flower & Garden Show.
Just a couple photos to whet, not spoil, the excitement.
Have you guessed the name of this designer/nurseryman yet?
(Hint: An American meadow gardener was let loose in the exhibit hall.)
Sculptures by Bay Area artist Marcia Donahue.
see you there.
Insubstantial Sisyrinchium bellum, Blue-Eyed Grass, is an elusive subject for the camera due to its habit of shutting its petals around “magic” hour, that pre-sunrise/post-sunset window when a photographer can rarely go astray. Still, it’s an utterly charming denizen of path-side plantings. Modest, self-effacing, unobtrusive, all those old-fashioned virtues are embodied in this California native.
Its neat and tidy evergreen grassiness would hardly be worth a mention all year, but for the morning in late winter when the slim leaves are topped with starry blue eyes winking up from the pathway’s edge, where there was nothing but green the day before.
This little relative of irises will never command a room, but it also will never be an obnoxious trouble-maker like Ipheion uniflora, a blue-flowered menace of a bulb which blooms here about the same time. Like the quiet person at the party that unexpectedly scintillates on closer acquaintance, that is the delicate appeal of Blue-Eyed Grass.
High winds.
And then there’s the dodge of leaving projects directly underfoot so you’ll theoretically have no choice but to finish them. Does this trick ever work for anyone else? I just end up with a lot of stuff underfoot. Like these old iron cafe chairs I fished out of the mulch pile to be repainted for extra summer seating. A giant fumitory, the ever-weedy Corydalis heterocarpa, has other designs on them while I take my sweet time getting around to repainting them.
Pam at Digging runs this show, the Foliage Followup that follows every Bloom Day. There are a core group of bloggers that have agavemania of the worst kind, and I don’t think Pam would take exception to getting tagged with that label. So this agave is for you, Pam, a new Kelly Griffin tissue-culture hybrid, Agave pygmaea ‘Dragon Toes.’ Out of a group of maybe eight agaves, I ultimately chose the slightly smaller agave with the extra pup. It’s embarrassing to admit how long this decision took. At least five solid minutes of sober and methodical deliberation. Two slow-growing agaves or a slightly larger single slow-growing agave? Hmmm….no contest, really. Agavemania in its basest form feeds on quantity.
An agave from last summer’s cactus shows, A. parrasana ‘Fireball,’ might be my favorite for the moment.
A wrought iron stand keeps the really prized agaves out of the reach of their worst enemies, snails and slugs.
Still haven’t found a suitable spot in the garden for Aloe peglerae, but its protected spot on a plant stand under the eaves seems to suit it fine for now.
Prostranthera ovalifolia ‘Variegata’ has just started blooming tiny lavendar bells. A shimmering shrub that always seem to die young in my garden.
Visit Pam’s blog to discover the astonishing array of beautiful leaves March has on offer.
A dead car battery after work has me skidding and sliding to make the Bloom Day deadline. Some of the new plants I ordered for spring became candidates for March Bloom Day literally right out of the box. Like this Tibouchina granulosa ‘Gibraltar’ from Plant Delights. This photo was taken the day after it arrived and was unpacked.
Every spring this wisteria surges over the fence from a neighbor’s property, an invader in the southeast corner of the back garden quietly determined to throttle my smoke tree in its tendrils. Something borrowed and blue (okay, bluish-lilac) to admire when in bloom, but I’m always grateful that it’s somebody else’s problem the rest of the year. The more I hack it back off our fence, the better it blooms.
Just brought this one home last weekend, a Proven Winner’s selection, Didelta carnosa ‘Dawn.’ The radioactive chrome yellow daisies must be endured for a brief time, when things will hopefully quiet down to just some fine-looking succulent, silvery leaves and chartreuse bracts. Bought on a whim but looks promising.
Begonia luxurians has been blooming the past few months, though I never think to grab a photo for Bloom Day.
Always a few mystery plants in bloom, like this unnamed, green-flowered begonia just in time for St. Patrick’s Day.
Mystery senecio
Scrophularia calliantha from Annie’s Annuals & Perennials planted in fall started blooming late February. A big, boragey, salvia-esque plant with exacting water needs even in a large container.
The annual toadflax, Linaria reticulata, a good choice for a zone 10 winter, seen here with the spears of Senecio anteuphorbium.
Angelica pachycarpa.
Lots of salvias in bloom now, including ‘Wendy’s Wish.’
The ‘Drakensberg Carmine’ gerberas have been prodigious bloomers over the winter.
March will probably see the last of the coronilla blooms.
Thanks as always to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Bloom Day on the 15th of every month.
In late 2010 Scilla peruviana won me a pair of wellies (garden boots) when I described to Val Easton of Plant Talk the upcoming spectacle of their galactic indigo blooms coinciding with the chartreuse flowers trusses of the Corsican hellebore. How was I to know the scilla would be slackers for 2011?
This year the scilla roused themselves enough to show a few blooms, but the hellebores had flopped to the ground by then, and I’ve let far too many lunaria seedlings into the mix shading the base of the scilla. Between the scilla’s stubbornness and my spinelessness when it comes to thinning things out, a photo of a bloom in a vase is the only option left for 2012. By next year we should have this all worked out…
Just two weeks’ shy of the last post on the poppies’ progress as they colonize the little path off the kitchen porch, and they’ve at least tripled in size.
The trip to the laundry shed is now a short walk into spring.
Les of A Tidewater Gardener frequently posts some of the most beautiful landscape photography to be found on garden blogs. On his blog you may be introduced, as I was, to John Irving-esque names of natural phenomena like The Great Dismal Swamp and canoe rides a la James Fenimore Cooper down local waterways. Through Les’ eye, the environs of Norfolk, Virginia, look like some of the most beautiful land and waterscapes on earth. For the second year running, Les has challenged bloggers to a Winter Walk-Off, wherein we step out our front doors carrying nothing but a camera. No car keys, just walking shoes, to document “what can be seen within walking (or biking) distance of your home.” Les is accepting entries through March 19. And there will be prizes!
Right off the bat, I have to admit we fudged and therefore forfeit any prizes. We drove. Time constraints and all. Plus, although we have walked the mile or so to this bluff overlooking Long Beach’s commercial harbor, the corgi would have been wiped out by the time we arrived, and this morning’s walk was mainly for the corgi. (He had his teeth cleaned recently and a tooth pulled, but I digress.)
One of my favorite houses on the street opposite our bluff walk. Yucca rostrata, butterfly chairs, and George Nelson bubble lamps.
Note glimpse of baby blue piano through the window.
Different house. Some of the largest furcraeas I’ve ever seen, as big as the Agave americanas further down.
Same house, a little further down from the furcraeas are sotols, agaves, rosemary, and fiery arctotis.
In bloom in a cutting garden in a parkway/hellstrip were these ranunculus, along with Dutch iris, stock, anemones, sweet peas.
From the same hellstrip, Salvia spathacea.
From the bluff, coast prickly pear, Opuntia littoralis.
Coral aloe, A. striata, from the mid-century modern/blue piano home.
One of a trio of urns planted with lemon trees flanking the stairway of an apartment building.
It may not be The Great Dismal Swamp, but hey, it’s home. Thanks, Les!
Where were we? I’ve been working at the day job like a navvy, trying to clear some time for spring garden visits, shows and whatnot. But the garden in March initiates a measured sequence of distractions, which can really mess with the most resolute work ethic. (I think “resolute” was a one-word self-description used by one of the Republican primary candidates but now can’t remember which. Romney? Strange how none of them used the one-word descriptors that are always at the tip of my tongue for them.)
Back to the much more important business of gardens. I’ve recently discovered that a good part of the front gravel garden has been planted almost exclusively in blues, greys, and yellows. Yes, at one time I apparently mustered some self-restraint.
It’s mostly succulents, grasses, and small evergreen shrubs, very few perennials except the self-sowing Spanish poppies. The orange blooms will get a fantastic backdrop here. I don’t remember consciously planning this blue/yellow-only business. I’ll have to search the back pages of the blog.
March’s Garden Design features an interview with landscape architect Andrea Cochran. The interview was emphatically not plant-driven, since landscape architecture, not horticulture, was under discussion, but this quote was a compadre thrill:
“I’m a sucker for anything in the blue-gray family…If you go blue-gray with chartreuse: home run.” To have anything in common with Ms. Cochran’s taste I count as a personal home run.
More chartreuse from Agave attenuata ‘Kara’s Stripes.’
The gravel garden now has some of the nicest looking agaves, including ‘Blue Glow’ in the first photo and a powder-blue A. potatorum below. The attenuatas can really look beat up, but ‘Kara’s Stripes’ has if anything improved over the winter.
The opposite end of the gravel garden by the driveway doesn’t continue the blue/yellow-only theme. There’s lots of breakage and damage at this end, and ad hoc replacements are made on the fly.
Recent death of a large agave provided an opportunity to try out Sideritis syriaca* here. I haven’t been this smitten with a plant since my first ballota.
Very easy on the eyes, this blue/yellow/green.
*Reddish stems on this one makes it more likely Sideritis cypria.
