California poppies and agave at sunrise in an Altadena, California garden designed by Sue Dadd.
Gladiolus communis ssp. byzantinus
Some byzantine glads opened while I was out of town a few days. Flowers have that unerring sense of timing, don’t they?
As I’ve written before, these bulbs are an inferior strain, in that they are not the desired deep magenta, but they’ve reproduced so prolifically there’s probably no turning back or chance of bringing in a better strain. I think it was Beth Chatto who likened the soil of her garden to a fruitcake, densely packed as it was with the years’ accumulation of odds and ends of bulbs turning up in every trowelful of soil, with some bulb or other always getting speared when digging. My soil seems to be reaching fruitcake level, too, and I toss unearthed mystery bulbs onto the paths as I work, too many to care about, whether crocosmia, Dutch iris, allium…only when it’s a lily I inadvertently dig up does recrimination grip my heart.
Whatever the depth of its color, this glad is self-supporting, takes up little room, competes well with grasses, and seems determined to stay. But I may order a few bulbs from one of the better bulb houses like Old House Gardens this fall and segregate them in a pot, just to find out what I’m really missing and if it’s worth the trouble to rogue out this wan impostor. Kind of slouching toward the real G. byzantinus. Naturalizes in the South, hardy to zone 6.
Posted in Bulbs
Tagged Beth Chatto, Gladiolus communis ssp. byzantinus, Old House Gardens
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Marina District, San Francisco
There’s a particular pet-friendly motel we like in this district near the Presidio in San Francisco, the Marina Motel, which is where we stayed for the recent garden show.
Ein with his garden show face on.
Plants are a big part of this little motel’s appeal. This brugmansia was in bloom in the courtyard, which is lavishly planted with fuchsias, geraniums, abutilon.
Through the little kitchenette’s window from our upstairs room was a view of this private garden. I tried not to look too often. Really, I did.
And, anyway, no one ever came to sit in the chairs at the table. An empty garden is…mesmerizing.
The secret language of gardeners permeated the entire trip. These banners were flying on nearby Chestnut Street, announcing Amy Stewart’s upcoming exhibit at Golden Gate Park.
Sloat Garden Center, just off Chestnut at Pierce Street, looked like a fantastic neighborhood nursery. I popped in for a few photos, meaning to go back for a thorough browse, but the weekend flew by and I never did make it back. But it was just enough time to grab this little Trifolium repens ‘Dragon’s Blood.’ (Rainy Weekend Sale 20% Off. I wonder how many rainy weekends ago that sign was posted.)
Such is the mercurial nature of city neighborhoods, the Marina District now seems to appeal more to the boomer crowd, reflected by the long line I saw waiting for Sammy Hagar to show up for a book signing at the local book shop and the nonstop foot traffic at the yoga center, but it does have relatively quiet streets perfectly suited for late-night dog walks, some good groceries and bakeries and a couple movie houses, and is just minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge. (Which is another reason why we started staying here years ago, for easy access to the plant nurseries in Marin and Sonoma Counties just over the Bridge, like the now defunct Western Hills.) The Mission district is where all the new restaurants are opening, and we did eat at Frjtz’s on Valencia in the Mission Saturday night, known for its frites and huge variety of dipping sauces. Perversely, I ordered mussels, washed down with Belgian beer, Lindemans Framboise Raspberry Lambic. My husband said the mussels smelled like cow dung. I admit, they weren’t the best mussels I’ve ever had, but I thought that smell was briny, not Bandini Mountain. A brief walk through the Presidio, which left military jurisdiction in 1994, opening up over 1400 acres to mixed commercial and public use overseen by the Presidio Trust, was the highlight of the trip for Ein. Exploring this enormous old military base at twilight, the pungent scent of eucalyptus underfoot and in the air was unmistakable, overpowering.
Just some quick travel notes.
Wyatt Ellison Metal Work
Somebody sign this man up now to do whatever he wants with an exhibit at a 2012 garden show.
Flora Grubb Gardens currently has a good selection of his work, where I snapped these photos over the weekend.
Images frrom the website Wyatt Studio:
Geometric globes
Morocco totems
Tetris nesting tables and Chaos sculpture
Poppy
Posted in design, garden ornament
Tagged Flora Grubb Gardens, garden ornament, metal work, Wyatt Ellison
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Garden Show Road Trip 2011
Smashing two of my fingers in a car door just before leaving San Francisco hasn’t helped to speed up the process of posting a few measly photos from the show. Not quite the airtight excuse, since having two fingers turning gothic shades of purple and inky blue didn’t prevent me yesterday from planting nearly the entire flat of plants brought home from the show and several nurseries we visited. (I highly recommend making little protective condoms from rubber gloves to protect injured digits while planting. And this year I will get a tetanus shot.) There is an excellent little video by Cindy McNatt and MB Maher making the rounds, and Floradora’s posts are very comprehensive, with the added bonus of getting a designer’s point of view. As for me, it seems I did nothing but buy plants and, judging by the meager output of photos, paid very little attention to the exhibits. The exhibits were all solid, beautifully executed, not ground-breaking, but the show overall had great fizz to it, a good layout with lots of outer buildings and tents to ease the claustrophobia of the crowds in the main hall. And lots of great plants for sale. Geraniaceae and Digging Dog are where I parted ways with most of my plant show money.
I did admire the streamlined elegance, the utter scientific cool of the UC Berkeley hydroponics exhibit.
Hanging glass has been on my mind for this summer. I keep this tear sheet handy, a photo by MB Maher of a friend’s studio.
Maybe using distilled water will keep the nasty calcification crusting from rimming the glass. Any excuse to play with glass beakers and flasks.
Back to the show. This rusted bedspring would be just as cool hanging on a wall, filled with tillandsias and Spanish moss.
By Quite Contrary Garden Design:
Shimmering Acacia craspedocarpa against corrugated fencing. Poor photo of a wonderful acacia.
Tierra Seca’s “Golden State of Mind.” Exquisitely stacked stone walls and Southern California river rocks on pikes.
Photo by MB Maher
Although Brian Swope intended these floating rocks to illustrate that anything is possible in California, levitating over an “energy field” of plastic sheeting, I can see them used also as an inverse visual pun, floating over rushing water, over rivulets of succulents. I much preferred Swope’s stylistic treatment to the naturalistic use of rocks in some of the exhibits, which struck me as jarringly out of place in so artificial an environment. (I cringingly introduced myself to Mr. Swope as a “minor blogger.” Sometimes the words that spill out of my mouth….)
Photo by MB Maher
From Gold Medal Winner Jeffrey Gordon Smith’s “Pi R Squared,” black plastic culverts planted with succulents, an exhibit he first built as a temporary installation on sustainability for the San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden. A wood-fired heater warms the water for the tub then roasts the veggies while you soak. Sustainable decadence.
One of the living walls from Filoli’s dovecote.
Studio Choo’s florals in repurposed wooden dynamite boxes in Star Apple’s edibles tent. Possibly from being visually saturated by succulents and livings walls, I was riveted by these Flemish Old Master tableaux vivants with crown fritillaries, tulips, and ranunculus in astonishing Persian carpet shades of russet, raw sienna, mahogany.
That’s probably enough flower photos. Congratulations to the hard-working people behind the SFFGS for a fine 2011 show,
a successful inauguration of garden road trips 2011.
Do You Groupon?
Current rainwater catchment system:
Desired rainwater catchment system, available now, half-price, through Groupon.
We’ve been dithering for some time over how to incorporate into a small lot what have been up to now bulky rainwater collection systems.
The size, the modularity, the ease of fitting into the slim, unused spaces against the garage, everything about this system speaks to us.
My plan, once the 150 gallons of rain water is used up sometime in summer, is to fill maybe just one of the tanks for disaster water supplies.
(In Southern California, we’re talking earthquakes.) Use that water on the garden in fall before the winter rains, refill with winter rain, then repeat the usage cycle.
Plant Show Weekend/Weakened
I vaguely remember promising not to post any more photos of tulips, so in my weakened state I’m violating that oath with one more photo of tulips ‘Queen of the Night,’ taken just before heading north for the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show. The tulips have no doubt been flattened by the serial storms which have been queuing up offshore like circus elephants all week. Good thing I brought wellies on this trip, because it’s been nothing but squelchy ground underfoot. Could it be this inveterate traveler is slightly homesick? Sitting in a little kitchenette motel in San Francisco nursing an Anchor Steam, grey and drizzly outside, a car brimming with plants, including the legendary Mathiasella bupleuroides, (what fabulous good luck to stumble into this one, a propagator’s nightmare, found at The Dry Garden in North Oakland), and some rusted bits salvaged from Building REsources, I’m ready to swing homeward and plant, shuffle pots, shuffle photos, and write a bit about what I’ve seen. What a homebody I’ve turned into. Funny how that happens every spring.
Do It In The Garden
The couch was occupied by a lower back temporarily refusing to face another day, so the person attached to the lower back had on the TV to ease the situation.
(Not my lower back, still capable of a good dig this spring.)
Playing on the TV was the movie from which I’m paraphrasing, Scorcese’s Mean Streets:
You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the garden…The rest is bullshit and you know it.
(The movie where I fell in love with Harvey Keitel while the whole world fell in love with DeNiro.)
Segue to Geranium maderense ‘Alba,’ still standing after enduring 50 mph winds in last weekend’s storm.
Off to the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show for a couple days.
Very murky opening sequence to Mean Streets.
Posted in Plant Portraits
Tagged Geranium maderense 'Alba', Harvey Keitel, Martin Scorcese, Mean Streets, Robert DeNiro
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Potting Soil From Flora Grubb
MB Maher is spending a lot of time in San Francisco this spring and needed to buy some potting soil for the new roots he’s putting down.
He sent back a few photos of his excursion. Nice place to buy potting soil.
Occasional Daily Photo/Poppy Pictorial
With a nod to Sports Illustrated, The Poppy Issue, eagerly anticipated by quivering antennae everywhere.
Poppies are everything I aspire to be: simultaneously modest and bold, strong but always flexible, taking up only as much ground as necessary and not an inch more, graceful, dependable, generous, etc…