is the one taking place at any given moment in my own backyard.
be it ever so humble and jumbled, chaotic, disheveled, contrary, exasperating, etc, etc.
That the show blithely carries on while I’m away is always slightly infuriating.
More on a proper show, the 2012 San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, later this week.
Good or bad, inspired or tired, garden shows are the exclamation point to spring.
March couldn’t be a better time. The obsessive examination of my own garden for signs of spring gets a little intense, and it’s a relief to look further afield.
See you on Sunday.
With surgical precision I pried this promising seedling up from the dry-laid bricks some months ago. I didn’t recognize its hirsute, corrugated leaf, so it had to be special, a salvia or verbascum possibly. By this time, all the volunteer seedlings from the garden are familiar in their early stages, and I know what to curtail and what to encourage. Or do I? Turns out what I carefully nurtured these past six months is simple, elemental borage, Borago officinalis, one of the ancient uber herbs. (Pliny said it “maketh a man merry and joyfull.”) Must have blown in or been dropped by a bird. I’ve never grown it before. Planting it in front of a golden Arundo donax was a happy accident. And I can vouch for Pliny, I do indeed feel a bit merrier upon seeing it first light this morning.
I can’t think of a better word than “obtainium” for this wealth of plants an established garden constantly offers up since reading The New York Times 3/16/12, “Building a Better Apocalypse”:
“On Chris Hackett’s personal periodic table, the world’s most interesting, and abundant, substance is an element he calls obtainium. Things classified as obtainium might include the discarded teapot that he once turned into a propane burner…”
In forming his Madagascar Insitute of anarchic Rube Goldbergists, Mr. Hackett was deeply inspired by equal parts Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (a favorite among the men in this house) and Burning Man. I like to believe that those on familiar terms with organic obtainium will be as useful post-apocalypse as those able to build jet engines from teapots. But obviously I need to venture out of my own garden occasionally to sharpen ID skills of garden-variety obtainium.
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…
