Groundwork

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Denise

Great name for a garden blog (or coffee house, dance company). The term has stuck with me since first
reading it used by Gertrude Jekyll in her color theories for gardens.

I can’t locate my Gertrude Jekyll compendium at the moment, but I believe she used the term
“groundwork” in a painterly sense, as in to lay a foundation of grey and glaucous foliage against which
other colors will always reap the benefit by juxtaposition.

Jekyll’s exhortation to lay down a good groundwork is never far from mind when I look at the blue-grey
leaves of the succulent Senecio mandraliscae, the Blue Chalk Sticks, in the front gravel garden. It is
pure balm for the eyes, which want to linger on its soothing, icy blueness. Focusing on another color
after drinking in that cool blue gets the color receptors, rods and cones, firing on every cylinder. For
sun, this senecio is a very worthwhile plant getting lots of use here in zone 10.

Both senecios mentioned here would make great components for containers of mixed succulents in
colder zones, filling out quickly to contrast with slower growing rosette types (but watch out for vigor
matching vigor).

There no longer seems to be much need for convincing astute gardeners of the value of leaves when
planning their garden. Many of us have so absorbed this truism that our little gardens can look like
contenders for permanent installations in the hubba-hubba spring flower shows now opening across
the temperate world, where every leaf is a rich flambe or brulee, melba and bordeaux. Horticultural
appetites are in danger of being whipped up into a constant craving for dessert in the garden. And
who doesn’t love dessert? In zone 10, where tender succulents are grown outdoors year-round,
available in every color and shape imaginable, it’s easy to overindulge. I like the way a simple swath
of blue can cleanse and refresh an overstimulated palate. Remember, we live with these plants
all year, unlike colder zones who can take a breather and put the display to bed for the winter.

Though I’ve never grown a hosta in my life, I imagine the blue-leaved types would make good
groundwork, as does Festuca ‘Elija Blue’ for sun. Crambe maritima, too, if you can keep the
snails away, though more of a specimen than a carpet. Helicotrichon, Nepeta, and Stachys,
the lamb’s ears, are also appreciated for their recruitment as groundwork.

Okay. Ready for a little experiment? Blink and clear the cones with this:

Photobucket

Now slowly scroll to this deep orange gazania:

Photobucket

Any tingles? The succulent two photos above is Senecio vitalis, Narrow Leaf Chalk Sticks, which is more blue-green
and of a shrubby growth about 2 feet high. Both these senecios want to cover a lot of ground in frost-free zones but
take cutting back well, which thickens them up. Both are excellent “groundwork” succulents against which to show off
prized agaves, echevarias, crassulas , and make a wonderful background for the flowering iceplants when in bloom or
gazanias, arctotis, osteospermums.

S. mandraliscae in back, Graptoveria “Fred Ives,’ and Oscularia deltoides.

Photobucket

Where’s a photo stylist when you need one to handle snail-eaten leaves and jacaranda tree debris? This particular
northwest location has every advantage for good strong growth, except for the tree litter constantly raining down.

Posted in essay, Plant Portraits, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Boundaries

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Denise

I’m constantly accused of not respecting boundaries, of letting plants take over spaces which some
people feel should properly remain under the control of humans and not the plant kingdom. That
a sight which gladdens my heart, a pathway seeded with Spanish poppies, should be considered by
others a weedy, unkempt nuisance takes me by surprise — every year (ha!)

Papaver rupifragum lighting up the pathway at dusk:

In spring I always welcome the Last Days of Pompeii look, that teetering on the edge between control and
disorder, cultivation and neglect, which to my eye infuses a timelessness that’s otherwise not always easy
to attain. By early summer, I’m wondering where I left my machete.

Agave ‘Mr. Ripple’ broods over this eternal conundrum.

(Photos by MB Maher.)

Posted in agaves, woody lilies, MB Maher | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Type G Personality

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Denise

Although the science behind the Type A and B personality theory seems to have become largely discredited,
I believe there is a strong case to be made for the Type G personality. (Type G’s, you know who you
are. Don’t make us examine your fingernails.)

When my Type G personality is in the ascendancy, I can come up with some really odd stuff for the garden.
For the last few years, I’ve been playing with height. Since I’m no artist, the results can be disappointing.
In fact, I’d largely given up and had taken most of the experiments apart. I wanted no more hanging
baskets to knock my head into and keep watered. I craved simplicity again, a trait that runs counter to the
Type G personality, so it’s a continual see-saw between the two.

Moss was a big part of these experiments. I had mossed hanging orbs planted in succulents that proved too
difficult to keep moist. There was candelabra and crystals and whatnot. For me, it is very difficult
to see the line where a project crosses over from the sublime to the silly. And too many projects in a
small garden can be a simple case of overegging the pudding.

One hanging basket with aeoniums, sedum, and Santa Barbara daisy was taken down and plopped in exasperation
on the top of a wrought iron plant stand. The stand is about 5 feet high and has about five pockets, including
the top-most shown, to hold pots. At one time, it held five pots of Sedum ‘Angelina.’ So hard to keep small
pots watered, though. I tried mossing the pockets and planting directly into the moss. More watering issues, as
the moss tends toward impermeability once it’s dry. So the wrought iron stand has been left vacant, a difficult
state for the Type G personality to endure for very long.

Even though just a temporary solution for the aeonium basket, I noticed how the ribs in the basket mirrored the
wrought iron ribs and liked the effect, so it’s stayed in place all winter. I’ve had a pot metal finial kicking around
used in various iterations of Type G projects, tried it the center, and didn’t hate that either.

Now with the daisies blooming, I’m liking it even more, and have seeded the Purple Bell Vine, rhodochiton, in the ground
at the base, for this vine’s amazing ability to drape and swag. It just needs the aeoniums to fill out a bit, don’t you think?

Photobucket

Posted in essay, garden ornament | Leave a comment

The Jasmine and the Snowman

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Denise

After working in front of a computer 40 hours the last four days, I was in desperate need of a walk.
Coat, coffee money, and a camera were found and I headed out the door.

Reading other garden blogs, I’m beginning to realize there’s no place like home.
I mean, really, there’s no place like Southern California.

This snowman was framed in an archway of jasmine, which is now in bloom all over town, but
you’ll have to take my word for it. I was nearly hit by a car trying to get both jasmine and
snowman in the frame.

Photobucket

You have entered the land of the overgrown houseplant.
The raw materials for a great garden are everywhere.
What would be escapees from Logee’s Greenhouse in colder climes lurk on every porch
and in every garden the year-round.

All the coveted cordylines and phormiums, agaves and succulents of every stripe, camellias and
bougainvilleas, mostly grown in a careless jumble. Aloes squished up against chainlink fence.
These may be the cosseted darlings of gardeners in single-digit zones, but here in zone 10 they
meet indifference and even abuse. Plants elsewhere prized for their structural qualities are
thoughtlessly strewn about, and gardens may sometimes seem to have more in common with
an overturned jewelry box. It can be a very disordered horticultural universe.

But everywhere is evident the fact that people seem to be compelled to grow plants, no matter how
haphazardly or with how much or little forethought, and interesting things do happen.
For example, check out what this Ficus repens is up to in this alley.

Photobucket

I startled a passerby by gasping out loud at the sight of a potted 8-foot tall sansieviera,
the mother-in-law tongue, seen through the window of a violin shop.

And here’s Cuphea and Salvia ‘Hot Lips’ collaborating for hedging.

Photobucket

Photobucket

Salvia ‘Mystic Spires’ oblivous of his fall-blooming status in other climates.

Photobucket

I glanced at a New Yorker article this morning about the exotic animal species proliferating in Florida,
and the same is true for plant species in Southern California. And I don’t mean in the sense of being
overrun by exotic species, though that is sometimes the case and a genuine cause for concern. I’m
talking more in an aesthetic sense, the tumultuous confusion of bloom and leaf from all over the world.

On this half-hour walk today I found in bloom:

Abutilon, aloes, azaleas, brugmansias camellias, ceanothus, cuphea, euphorbia, euryops, hollyhock,
jasmine, justicia, lavender, rosemary, osteospermum, roses, salvias, strelitzia.

I try to look at all this plant wealth through the eyes of someone who has endured a real winter,
through plant-starved eyes, not my own that have become so accustomed to such a surfeit of
riches that it takes something more to arouse them.

And occasionally I am stopped in my tracks. Look at what someone has set in motion on their
porch with an urn and some succulents, made sublime by California’s native ceanothus now in full bloom.

Photobucket

Photobucket

More plants and people finding each other. And so it goes.

Photobucket

Posted in essay, The Hortorialist | Tagged | 2 Comments

Dog’s Breakfast

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Denise

British slang dating to about the 1930’s, meant to convey an unholy mess of dribs and drabs, a hodgepodge. Although
origin is uncertain, it seems likely to have dated from the morning someone, possibly slightly hungover, dumped last night’s
fried rice and then their breakfast of left-over scrambled eggs into the dog’s bowl, uttered those fateful words, and then
headed back to bed, their place in history now secure.

See where this is headed? Yes, it’s that kind of post, dribs and drabs. But there will be a dog making an appearance, a
rather in-need-of-a-bath dog, who in keeping with our theme has actually eaten the cats’ breakfast. Here he’s taking a deep
sniff of some basil Pesto Perpetuo, possibly as a chaser to the bland kitty pate.

Photobucket

After that deep draught of basil, he will elegantly back up out of that tight spot without knocking over a watering can,
and then immediately scan the garden for the whereabouts of Joseph, the alpha male cat, his nemesis, seen here making
ready for ambush.

Photobucket

My garden is the perfect size for corgis and cats, and it’s always satisfying to watch them meander down its paths.
Garden paths are ideally able to accommodate two people walking abreast or one person pushing a wheelbarrow.
In my garden, a person and one corgi can comfortably navigate some paths. Other paths are for solitary use
only.

Photobucket

Every morning we fan out into the garden, each in pursuit of something unknown to the other. Our paths criss-cross
as we respectively track color and spoor. For me, it was the cobalt blue of Salvia cacaliifolia. What did they find, I wonder.

PhotobucketPhotobucketPhotobucket

Posted in creatures, Ephemera | Leave a comment

Waking Up to White

Posted on March 8, 2010 by Denise

Sometimes I seem to be sleepwalking when planning the garden. For example, how could I not have noticed this build-up of white-flowering
plants?

White valerian, agrostemma, diascia, Geranium maderense, arctotis, gaura, foxgloves.

True, it surprised me this morning doing a tally, but I know it’s really not so much a choice as just an avoidance of the pink varieties of these plants.

I find a lot of my color choices are arrived at in just such an oblique fashion, more out of avoidance than preference. In a small garden
such as mine, color selection will involve a lot of compromise, what you can get away with, what your zone and soil and proximity to other colors
will actually allow. Far better to worry over shape, volume, movement and, in such a long growing season, leaves.

But for summer, for now, it’s still about flowers. First and foremost, it’s about finding your indispensable flowering plants. In my zone 10 garden,
the crocosmias, coreopsis, verbascums, alstroemerias, kniphofias and gaillardias are indispensable for summer, and these plants are predominantly
orange and yellow, hence the avoidance-of-pink strategy.

I am well aware that this runs counter to many other gardeners’ approach, that many actually practice an avoidance-of-orange
strategy(!) There might be a bit of orange avoidance in my dim past as well. But truth be told, there simply aren’t any pink-blooming plants
that are as worthwhile in my garden. For example, those stalwarts of summer borders, echinaceas, don’t perform well here, and spring does not
arrive in a delicate pink haze of dogwoods, spiraeas, dicentra, weigelas, deutzias or what have you. Zone 10 likes its colors hot.

The strong magentas I don’t mind as much with orange and yellow, but never a soft pink. And I’m not entirely sure I could do without the
mule kick magenta gives anyway. So is that the real reason why I’ve resolved not to mind the clash with orange?

I”m not sure I want to probe that bias any further. Because your own garden is the one place to flaunt your bias, isn’t it?
Especially when truly hideous mistakes can be buried before the year’s out. But I have no quarrel with colors matched in saturation, such as
strong oranges with deep pinks. And deep blue, purple, burgundy, chartreuse, gold — all to my eye are happy with orange and yellow.

The inclusion of the robust Waverly salvia in the garden is on again/off again as I experiment with other salvias, but for amount of
bloom there really is none better, and this year there are two big clumps. More white. And there’s the Orlaya grandiflora
I’ve been writing so much about, an annual umbellifer beloved for it’s small stature and long bloom season. More white again.
So all in all, that adds up to a lot of white.


Photobucket

Add in the three Buddleia ‘Silver Anniversaries’ I’ve dotted through the border, which bloom in, of course, white,
and it’s going to be a chilly garden this year. Even though unplanned for, it’s kind of exciting to contemplate.
Heck, every spring is exciting to contemplate.

And even with all this white, there’s lots of color. For example, the dusky bracts on the Waverly salvias
blooming amongst potted agaves.

Photobucket

And as for pink, I like it strong anyway, such as the vivid pink in Salvia chiapensis, shown below obscuring Evie’s pretty face.

Photobucket

This is one of the best sages for me, and I wouldn’t be without it, no matter what its color.

Photobucket

But it’s going to be difficult keeping track of Evie this summer with all that white.

Posted in agaves, woody lilies, creatures, essay | Tagged | Leave a comment

Pelargonium ‘Chocolate Mint’

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Denise

For eating, it’s dark chocolate, please, and hold the mint.

For the 5×5 plot of ground under the Chinese Fringe tree, Chionanthus retusus, this Chocolate Mint will do.

Photobucket

Thought to be a sport of P. tomentosum. The small white flowers have been sacrificed, since I’m already
snipping the ends off runners to keep it from becoming scraggly and to contain it in its allotted space.
That remarkable dark splotch will probably fade once the fringe tree has leafed out and cast its shade
and the cooler weather gives way to the warmth of summer.

Photobucket

But what’s really remarkable is that I’ve let one plant, and an ordinary one at that, do the job and have not
sandwiched ten in that small space to fight and cancel out each other’s potential. This burly pelargonium
has grown up and through the carpet of leaves left in situ and will manage through the minimal irrigation it
will receive in summer, a Persian carpet of green and red. The air space between the pelargonium and the
bottom of the tree canopy is a sculptural prize not to be ruined by the intrusion of fussy planting.
(It wouldn’t hurt to remove the Christmas lights now either.)

At one point, I had two roses, ‘Mme Alfred Carriere’ and ‘Elie Beauvillain’ to climb up the tree, bulbs, heucheras and
who knows what else. The outline of the tree was ruined, and it was a ghastly mess of ripening bulb foliage and
small-leaved plants that couldn’t compete with the fringe tree’s leaf litter. (Full disclosure: There remains a
golden-leaved silver lace vine, Polygonum aubertii, planted under the tree, at the fence line. And that’s it, I swear.)

I think I just may be getting the hang of this gardening thing. It’s a matter of simple math. Divide desire by ten.

Posted in Plant Portraits | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

March is Women’s History Month

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Denise

Let’s keep to the theme of horticulture, shall we? And just to make it easy, we’ll choose a
famous and flamboyant practitioner of the garden arts, Vita Sackville-West, creator of the
garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. I doubt there’s a gardener alive who is ignorant of Vita’s
contribution to horticulture or hasn’t placed visiting Sissinghurst on their short list of must-see
gardens.


Photobucket

A noblewoman precluded by gender from inheriting her dynastic home Knole, a loss she suffered acutely from her
entire life. A diplomat’s wife, accompanying her husband, Harold Nicolson, on his assignments to Persia, where she
botanized and collected bulbs and hated playing the proper wife of a British civil servant.

A lover of women, most famously Virginia Woolf, who loved her in return but could not help but admit Vita wrote
with a “pen of brass.” Nonetheless, Virginia admired her fearlessness, the striding into drawing rooms of London’s
upper classes in jodpurs and pearls, and immortalized her friend in her own book Orlando, the account of a nobleman
yes, man, whose life improbably spans centuries and gender, just as Vita straddled the past and the present,
the crested and cloven, in mind if not body.

Mother of two sons (some contemporaries would suggest she was a rather indifferent mother to Nigel and Ben), she
first cut her gardening teeth at Long Barn before she and Harold bought the ruins of an Elizabethan manor house that was
Sissinghurst. It was here where they perfected their marriage of the formal and informal, where Harold laid out the severe
grid of box-lined beds which Vita filled to bursting with the perennials and old roses like ‘Celestial’ that she adored. It was
here that the white garden was envisioned in the winter of 1949, the “pale garden that I am now planting under the
first flakes of snow.”

Their own marriage also accommodated a rich interplay and complexity, affording the comforts of friendship, home, garden,
and family, his journalism, her poetry, but allowing each to pursue love affairs, in Harold’s case as in hers, with their own sex,
despite which their devotion to each other never wavered.

An award-winning poet (The Land). Recipient of the Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society.
Garden writer for the Observer, with a unique style wholly her own:

“The problem of the small garden. I received a letter which went straight to my heart,
more especially as it contained a plaintive cry that unintentionally scanned as a line of verse,
‘I never shall adapt my means to my desires.’ A perfectly good alexandrine, concisely expressing
the feeling of millions, if not of millionaires.”

And another favorite: “We All Have Walls…Often I hear people say, ‘How lucky you are to have
these old walls; you can grow anything against them,’ and then when I point out that every house
means at least four walls — north, south, east and west — they say, ‘I never thought of that.'”

(Surely the reader was bemoaning a lack of walls built with mellow 15th century brick, but
Vita’s advice is still practical, if a bit disingenuous.)

Vita died at age 70, in 1962, of stomach cancer, thought to have been brought on by the lead leaching from
the old cider press at Sissinghurst, leaving Harold bereft and utterly heartbroken. Sissinghurst was ultimately
handed over to the National Trust, despite Vita’s famously vowing to never have that shiny, hard plaque
affixed to her door.

Vita still speaks to gardeners of all means, even the castle-less, when she entreats us to “Follow my steps,
oh gardener, down these woods. Luxuriate in this, my startling jungle.”

Posted in Department of Instruction, essay, garden travel, garden visit | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Drought Buster

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Denise

Tibouchina heteromalla holding on to a raindrop. Photo by MB Maher.

Photobucket

I understand the impulse. We’ve been promised a solid day of rain, but so far it’s only been a fitful one.
Possibly more tonight. Euphorbia cotinifolia, Caribbean Copper Plant, in this case a 15-foot tree, pleads
with the clouds for more.

Photobucket

Still, it’s been a good winter for rainfall. To me, there’s nothing more dispiriting than drought.
Beyond the implications of drought for a desert city of over 10 million people, my garden and I
take a lack of rain very personally. All we ask for is just the average rainfall, 15 inches a year.
We’re not greedy.

And if grey is not your first choice for color, just shift your gaze downward, where Scilla peruviana is taking shape,
little turbines of green and a color still so dark it’s only dreaming of blue.

Photobucket

Photobucket

Posted in Bulbs, MB Maher | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Three-Quarters Full

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Denise

Day job intrudes on blogging, which is good (half full) in the sense the economy must be picking up
if I’m busier, but which is also not so good (half empty) since I can’t grab a few minutes to blog this week.
But mysteriously enough, someone has grabbed my camera and left this photo on the card. (Wouldn’t it
make a lovely watercolor study for someone with lots of time on their hands?) Sums this week up nicely.
(Edited to add: And are those ants circling the rim, something I missed in haste this morning?
Another commentary on the past workweek?!)

Photobucket

And I was admiring this morning the contrast of matte leaves with shiny leaves, as in this photo of coprosma and hellebore,
which tossed me down the rabbit hole of plant combinations, how it’s thrilling when they work, or that you once had the
presence of mind to invent them, or that they sometimes appear whether you had the initial presence of mind or not, but at
the very least you can recognize a good thing when you see it. But must leave the topic woefully unexplored for today.

The coprosma is for full sun, and this hellebore does surprisingly well in the full sun it will get this summer too.

Photobucket

For sheer high gloss, I don’t know of a plant yet that rivals Angelica pachycarpa:

Photobucket

Here’s to half-empty weekends, please.

Posted in Ephemera, MB Maher, photography, Plant Portraits | Tagged , , | 2 Comments