Remember the old surfing movie The Endless Summer, where summer is chased around the globe? Well, I do. My older brothers took me to all the surfing movies.
You can see where I’m going with this…it’s summer in Australia, and that’s a fact.
one of the grass trees of Australia, Xanthorrhoea australis, photo found here
photo from Botany Photo of the Day
Back to our regular hemispheric reporting (sigh…)
Ages and ages ago (last July in fact) a bunch of us garden bloggers visited gardens in Northern California at last summer’s meetup known as the Fling. For the temperate Bay Area, it was an incredibly hot day, and we were all slightly wilted as we trooped into the Testa-Vought garden, designed by Bernard Trainor, where the gracious hosts offered refreshments and bade us to cool our feet in their pool. At that point, we were probably all dangerously close to begging for bathing suits. Not surprisingly, this was a garden I had to be pried from and forcibly scooted back onto the bus by our patient tour organizer, landscape designer Kelly Kilpatrck of Floradora. Amazing how quickly we revert to kindergartenish behavior when there’s a bus involved. Eventually, I did put down my glass of wine and made some lame attempts at photos. What I really wanted was to forget the camera entirely, have another glass of wine, and learn how to play the game of bocce.
The Testa Vought garden had quite a few Australian plants, like acacia and grevillea, many selected by the owner, who according to Trainor is a hands-on plant devotee.
Never mind any of my other sunstruck photos because there’s a new book out on this designer’s work, “Landprints; The Landscape Designs of Bernard Trainor,” text by Susan Heeger, photography by Jason Liske and Marion Brenner. There’s so many interesting homes on design blogs now, but more often than not my reaction is predictably: How could such exquisite taste be so indifferent to what’s outside the house? For those who consider the landscape a low priority, this book is a primer on how, in the right hands, the landscape design just might change your life.
Photo on the book’s cover
Mr. Trainor was the speaker at the November meeting of the Southern California Horticultural Society. The Aussie accent is barely perceptible now, but his boyhood spent surfing and sailing the Morningside Peninsula south of Melbourne, where silver banksia (Banksia marginata) presses in on coastal trails, is ultimately what attracted him to the western coast of North America, and specifically another peninsula, the Monterey Peninsula. Many of the following photos accompanied Mr. Trainor’s talk.
Testa-Vought garden
The “meadow” pool. After this project, many of his clients are now clamoring for a meadow pool of their own.
What looks like native scrub/chapparal planting is all the work of Trainor, which after settling in is sustained on rainfall alone.
In this garden, Trainor had to persuade the stone masons that leaving pockets for plants would not destabilize the stairs.
Though the book predominantly documents properties of extensive acreage, with insistent views of land, forest, ocean and sky, here’s an example of Trainor at work in a small space.
On the bigger properties, low walls frame views, slow winds, and guide the eye, but are rarely used to completely enclose or isolate one from the surrounding landscape.
(The next Fling for 2014 heads to Portland!)
By November my garden has turned into a curiosity shop of oddities and seedpods.
Like the racks of antler-like blooms on tetrapanax, seemingly more blooms than leaves this years after I clipped away some of the sunburnt foliage.
Limbing it up allows for maximum shovage of other plants.
(I may have just invented that word shovage, but if you’re participating in Carol’s Bloom Day in November, I know you’ll understand the concept.)
Such as shovage of this mangave, a gift from Dustin Gimbel, which is just about at the base of the tetrapanax near the path
And indoors the rooms become altered in November too. The house is beginning to look like a natural history museum, with vases filled with stalks of nubby stuff like dyckia seedpods
A tender salvia new to me, Salvia curviflora, was brought home from Annie’s Annuals this summer. Many of the Mexican salvias just grow too large, so their time in my garden is often limited to a couple seasons. And from what I read, this one won’t like very dry conditions. But when they bloom this freely at a small size, it’s worth growing as an annual.
Besides, it’s my job to trial every hot pink salvia I come across.
Just like last fall, Nan Ondra’s strain of chocolate-colored nicotiana is roused to life by the cooler temps.
Pennisetum ‘Sky Rocket’ and the yellow form of the firecracker plant, Russelia equisetiformis, are keeping things bouncy and fluffy outside the office. A lot of the various succulent offsets are finding their way here, as have most of the potted agaves, which I can view from my desk. (More shovage.) Just occasionally there’s more gazing at plants than working on the computer.
As always, profuse thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting our Bloom Days each and every month.
As someone who has had the same Vilmorin Andrieux prints of oversized vegetables in the kitchen since we moved in 20 years ago, I’ve always admired artists who respect vegetables.
The Design Files recently did one of their signature, long-form interviews on Australian glass artist Amanda Dziedzic that has all the breadth and detail required for understanding how Amanda arrived at the moment in her life where she was able to create works of glass such as this:
“The biggest influence in my work as a whole is nature. I think plant life is fascinating. Probably the most beautiful design out there. The pattern and colours found in plants will always inspire me.”
The series of work with vegetables is a result of a “six-week residency at reknowned glass studio Northlands Creative Glass in Lybster, Scotland earlier this year.”
These bell jars were a collaborative project Amanda undertook with The Design Files for one of their upcoming open houses
The bell jars with their wooden bases
If I had to choose a favorite, it just might be these stoppers.
We all have our favorite months in the garden. Our sentiments aside, the November garden continues sending out dispatches, oblivious to any seasonal bias.
dispatches from plectranthus
tillandsias
and cryptbergias
urgent communications from Echeveria gigantea
Candy-corn-colored Morse code from Mina lobata, Spanish flag
Smoky signals from Verbena bonariensis
Subtle messages from pelargoniums and aeoniums
And then there’s evergreens like Corokia virgata ‘Sunplash’ that couldn’t care less what time of year it is
And November is always a good month to talk up agaves. Ever-gorgeous Agave lophantha ‘Quadricolor’
Agave geminiflora
Favorite season? Agave ‘Mr. Ripple’ shrugs those enormous shoulders with exquisite indifference.
It’s when things quiet down in November that I notice how the patio off the kitchen is book-ended with Agave ‘Blue Flame,’ and marvel at how I managed to pull off a bit of symmetry
Agave desmettiana ‘Joe Hoak,’ still pristine in November before mollusk season starts in earnest. I’m hoping the five pups I potted up will be of good size in time for the December flea market.
Southern California Horticultural Society sent out a “Coffee in the Garden” invitation to its members for a late October visit to Donivee Nash’s garden in Arcadia, redesigned by Judy Horton in 2009. Participation in hort. society events in the past always seemed to founder on the anticipated sludge of freeway traffic, but this one was 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on a cool, foggy Sunday. Most of LA would still be gently snoring under the covers, I reasoned. That I ended up being an hour and a half late as a consequence of the 710 freeway shutting down when two semis caught fire just stiffened my resolve to attend as many such events as possible, whenever and wherever, because there’s really no grace period on the freeways anyway. Arriving late and rattled, I fell in with a group following the designer Judy Horton around the garden, trying to gauge what topics had been covered so I wouldn’t annoyingly repeat the same questions. If I did, Ms. Horton was gracious enough not to let on.
The Garden Conservancy provides some illuminating background on the Nash Garden in their Open Days Program from April 2013:
“Donivee Taylor Nash was brought up in Delaware surrounded by the rich culture of nineteenth-century estate gardens—Winterthur and Longwood included. She brought these gardening roots to this 1938 New England-style saltbox thirty years ago. Although the house and landscape have grown and changed, its park-like graciousness is still very much in evidence. Donivee is a collector of beautiful specimen plants; over the years she added roses and perennials to the existing English-style gardens. She added a poolside pavilion (a miniature version of a Beatrix Farrand design at Dumbarton Oaks) to the west end of the pool, which is a cool oasis in hot summers. In 2009, when the couple wanted to unify the backyard and reduce water consumption, they called upon well-known garden designer Judy Horton who accomplished the transformation of their landscape. Out went much of the lawn, in came eighteen trees, including a sycamore grove to screen the tennis court, a birch grove underplanted with hundreds of Japanese anemones, and a mixed grove surrounding an antique Japanese lantern. A fig tree garden was added east of the tennis court, and an olive terrace south of the house. Mediterranean plants are now artfully planted near the living and dining rooms. The golden rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) still shades the patio as it has for decades, but now is accompanied by a fresh palette of lavender, silver, white, and chartreuse.”
In its current form, this is a mediterranean-inspired garden that celebrates the light that pours in and bathes the earth 33 degrees north of the equator.
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with this brilliant light all my life.
(When I was young and wanted nothing but to leave, it was intrusive, unforgiving, a relentless glare. Now love has the upper hand. Just keep a lime green umbrella handy.)
I love the trick of breaking free from the belt of trees at the perimeter and planting new trees forward into the lawn, adding more depth and interplay with shapes and planes.
The remaining lawn seems to become less assertive a feature in its own right and is integrated into the overall landscape as just another choice of ground cover.
The golden light of the foothills sets the fine-leaved mediterranean plantings shimmering.
Strong, smooth blades of iris pierce the gravel, which the Santa Barbara daisy Erigeron karvinskianus freely seeds into, as does Verbena bonariensis.
Ms. Horton said this supposed non-fruiting olive tree fruited this year.
The sweep of a glittering landscape is everywhere emphasized as with this choice of underplanting with Cerastium tomentosum.
Near the house the garden was full of salvias in bloom. Japanese anemones too.
Detail of the Dumbarton Oaks-inspired pool pavilion
The planting of roses fronting the property along the street speaks to the evolution of the garden from English-inspired rose garden to its sleek and lean lines today.
Having arrived late, I stayed until the coffee things had been cleared away. Some gardens are just hard to leave.
I’ve been checking out local flea markets to get a sense of how this whole thing works from a seller’s perspective, which is totally foreign to me. I still have stuff from flea markets I bought when I was in my teens but have never been a seller. All that will change on December 15, 2013, when Dustin and I will have our own stall at the Long Beach Antique Market, a combined AGO/non-secateur pop-up shop. Dustin wants to change his garden, so expect lots of his concrete orbs and buddha heads, plus new crete work. And plants, of course. Meanwhile, the flea market research is getting expensive, because I can’t stop bringing home more stuff, which is why I needed to sell at flea markets in the first place. I found these pots at the Downtown Flea, which meets every fourth Sunday, from a vendor whose card I’ve since lost, a very nice invertebrate biologist who apparently has an amazing garden that he’s promised I can visit. (I bought only one, the green with the rosette design.) I’m hoping he might stumble onto this post and leave his name and address.
This Sunday, November 10, 2013, I’ll be checking out one of the biggest in Los Angeles, if not the country, the Rose Bowl Flea Market, and hoping to draw upon previously untapped reserves of self-control.
The first bloom of the common Queen’s Tears bromeliad, Bilbergia nutans, is just so very startling when it arrives, especially if you’ve only seen it in photos before. Like drop-your-coffee-cup startling. As though David Hockney was in the garden overnight manically touching up the blooms. This bilbergia’s constituent colors are impressively shocking on a small scale, but seeing them together made me realize I’ve been actively pursuing these colors elsewhere in the garden.
The deep pink on the bilbergia just about matches the last of the nerines to bloom.
The lime green of the bilbergia can be found in Tanacetum vulgare ‘Isla Gold.’ Planted again this fall at a pathway’s edge, it’s growing well. Better air circulation and a little more moisture might be the answer. I won’t know if it gets thin and patchy again until next summer. Everything seems so much more promising in fall.
The bilbergia’s deep blue can be found in salvias like Salvia guaranitica or ‘Indigo Spires,’ or this fern-leaf lavender, Lavandula pinnata var. buchii
I found a couple fern-leaf lavender locally, when I was out searching for some more blue agastache to plant this fall. This lavender was once a really big deal, big enough to drive all the way up to Western Hills (written about here) to fetch when it arrived on U.S. shores in the ’80s. Tender and lacking the eponymous scent, but with those amazingly deep navy blue blooms and finely cut, jade green-grey foliage. Not very long-lived, it grows woody at the base and has to be renewed frequently with cuttings, which is possibly why I stopped growing it. And then it became easily available and I moved on to other plants less easily available, as is my way. I remembered it as Lavandula multifida, but the tag indicated Lavandula pinnata var. buchii. Whatever. Somewhere along the way, its name changed, or so I thought.
After watching it fill out and increase in bloom for a week or so, and realizing this was just the small, shrubby, blue-flowering answer I was looking for, I went back to the nurseries to find more. This time the label said Lavandula multifida. Now I was confused. At the hort.net site I found this remarkably pertinent discussion from 2002 by John MacGregor:
“Not surprising that you are confused. You are not the only one. The nursery industry in California doesn’t have a clue on this one.
First, Lavandula multifida, L. pinnata, and L. buchii are three different species. In recent years, I have bought about everything offered in the trade in this state under these names, trying to sort it out, and have received the same species from the same nursery under different names as well as different species under the same name.
Twenty-five years ago we had all three species at the Huntington Botanical Gardens (at the time, L. buchii was classified as a variety of L. pinnata). I shared cuttings of all three with various wholesale nurseries and collectors, and authentic plants of each were sold at Huntington plant sales. Apparently, along the way some of the cuttings must have been lost or the name tags of some of the survivors were mixed up (L. pinnata and L. buchii–both from the Canary Islands–are much more frost-tender than L. multifida–which is from southern Europe and North Africa). Lately, everything I have seen labeled “L. pinnata var. buchii” in nurseries is L. multifida. L. multifida is also sold occasionally as “Lavandula ‘California'” or “California Lavender” as well as under its own name. For instance, the lavender offered by Monterey Bay Nursery as “Lavandula pinnata buchii” and illustrated on their web site is actually Lavandula multifida…” and so on.
I wish I could get the fern-leaf lavender closer to Euphorbia rigida, but without some demolition, there’s just no room. Photo from last spring.
The lavender would be equally wonderful with Euphorbia mauritanica in the front gravel garden, which is building up good structure for spring bloom. But no room at the inn there either.
Until I saw the bilbergia bloom, I wasn’t aware that I’d been orchestrating these colors elsewhere: deep pink, chartreuse and dark blue.
Gomprehna ‘Fireworks,’ fern-leaf lavender, Pelargonium crispum.
(This gomphrena has almost cured me of my allium envy.)
After some fall planting, for a brief moment the garden has taken on the colors of Bilbergia nutans. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these colors next spring too.
“California is defined by its Mediterranean climate. It is the smallest floristic province in North America, but has the greatest diversity of plants north of Mexico. It includes such characteristic vegetation as chaparral, coastal sage scrub, oak woodland and grassland. These plants exhibit classic adaptations to California’s hot dry summers and cool wet winters: leaves that are small and leathery, light-colored or drought-deciduous.” – Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden
Tomorrow, November 2, 2013, is a special day indeed. Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden will host the Fall Planting Festival, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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Salvia clevelandii
Think you have other plans? Check out the extensive ceanothus and arctostaphylos offerings on their plant list here. I stopped counting the salvias at 25.
“An event at which gardeners can purchase from a dazzling range of California native plants, at the perfect time of year for planting. There will be experts on hand to help people make selections, and to offer planting and care advice. There are a number of cultivars that are unique to RSABG, and some of these will be available at the event.”
Argyroxiphium sandwicense (Silversword), photo from RSABG
Maybe you can squeeze in another oak; RSABG has 10 from which to choose. The California fuchsia, aka the hummingbird’s BFF, will be represented by 15 selections from their list of epilobium/zauschneria.
Here is where you’ll find that priceless gift for your garden from California’s exquisite botanical legacy.
Zadie Smith’s essay “Love in the Gardens,” describing complicated family relations against the backdrop of visits to two gardens, the Boboli in Florence accompanied by her father, and the Borghese garden in Rome after her father had died, gave me quite a few shivers of recognition. Not that I traveled much with my father after leaving home except for a mediterranean cruise two years before he died, and a cruise admittedly allows families ample opportunity for timely and strategic retreat. But Ms. Smith and her father had an experience similar to the one Marty and I had when navigating Florence on foot, enroute to the Boboli garden. At least they actually found the garden.
The Boboli Gardens in Florence, 2002; photograph by Chris Steele-Perkins
“In the morning, we set out. We had the idea of reaching the Boboli Gardens. But many people set out from a Florence hotel with the hope of getting to a particular place—few ever get there. You step into a narrow alleyway, carta di città in hand, walk confidently past the gelato place, struggle through the crowd at the mouth of the Ponte Vecchio, take a left, and find yourself in some godforsaken shady vicolo near a children’s hospital, where the temperature is in the 100s and someone keeps trying to sell you a rip-off Prada handbag. You look up pleadingly at the little putty babies. You take a right, a left, another right—here is the Duomo again. But you have already seen the Duomo. In Florence, wherever you try to get to, you end up at the Duomo, which seems to be constantly changing its location.” – Zadie Smith, “Love in the Gardens,” The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2013
image found here
image from Wikipedia
image of The Duomo found here.
