Contributing to the The Fall Color Project this year, hosted by Dave at Growing the Home Garden, won’t be as easy as stepping out the back door and taking a photo of the smoke tree ‘Grace,’ now dearly departed since August, who semi-reliably colored up beautifully in fall, written about here. Cotinus ‘Grace’ December 2010 [...]
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August is always a truth-telling time in the life of a garden and a good month to take a snapshot of it. The hoses have been deployed this week to deep water the trees and soak the now bone-dry soil. Most irrigating up to this point has focused on containers and new plantings, but the [...] Quote of the week: “I can’t believe I burned down a tree older than Jesus,” philosophized a 26-year-old woman who torched a 3,500-year-old bald cypress known as The Senator last January, one of the 10 oldest trees on earth, while smoking a meth pipe in the tree’s hollow trunk. Orlando Sentinel story here. Update on [...] Still very dry and breezy, but the violent Santa Ana winds have subsided. The Huntington Garden remains closed pending cleanup of fallen trees, and parts of Pasadena are still without power. The Los Angeles Times this morning has a photo gallery up of the aftermath of the 140 mph winds, including this: I shut [...] It occurred to me belatedly after Sunday’s post that it wouldn’t have killed me to slip a “Happy Mother’s Day” message at the end of the post. “Ambivalent” is a $2 word for how I feel about holidays. (And pretty much everything else.) Of two minds. Especially those holidays that coincide with spring and summer, [...] I’ve been eagerly anticipating the moment when the smoke tree Grace drops her leaves, at which time we have a pruning date scheduled to rein in her exuberance. Planted as 4-inch rooted cutting in the northeast southeast corner, she’s now a tri-yard, multi-trunked tree, and both neighbors on either side have taken saws to her [...] Starring Cotinus ‘Grace.’ Here glimpsed through a frame of chains (This Year’s Folly). A confusion of smoke trees. The tropical Euphorbia cotinifolia is in the foreground, just now leafing out in June, a self-sown seedling from previous E. cotinifolias. Multi-stems give this very brittle, fast-growing tree strength to withstand strong winds, not [...] This is about as basic as it gets, squirting water out of a garden hose. Very inefficient and ineffective, yet I grab a hose practically every day, however briefly, to at least water the pots and new plantings. And as a quick spritzer sometimes to humidify the air. And sometimes just for the sheer goofy [...] |
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