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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.


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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.


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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?!)

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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.

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

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Here’s to half-empty weekends, please.

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

The Stuff of Nightmares

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Denise

The mood: Moving through the garden in that dreamy, rapturous state that a gardener effortlessly attains when
perusing spring growth early in the morning, usually trailing the hem of a robe on clammy bricks while drinking a
steaming cup of coffee.
.
The object of desire: The cineraria which has just opened aster-blue flowers at the top of 4-foot lush stems and leaves
and is snuggling into the shimmering embrace of a golden duranta growing at the base of the smoke tree ‘Grace.’

This isn’t the dumpy florist’s cineraria, but the species, Senecio stellata, elegant and tall in stature. I’ve been eagerly
awaiting its bloom, expecting tints somewhere on the magenta/purply/blue spectrum. On a garden tour in Orange County,
California, last spring, photo below, I had seen this cineraria seeding in shade under some shrubs and then tracked down
a source of plants to Annie’s Annuals. Apparently, San Francisco, California, is the only place on earth where the
unadulterated species flourishes, and Annie had selected a strain to sell called Senecio stellata ‘Giovanni’s Select.’

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The horror: Never-before-seen scale creatures on my golden Duranta repens.

The duranta, unless cut back hard like the treatment I give mine, has orangey-golden berries in fall. But what was
studded on my duranta that morning, as I pressed close to admire the cineraria beneath, was the stuff of nightmares,
and I recoiled in horror and fled. That was a couple days ago.

Since then, the shock of discovery gradually turned to sober plans for eradication. At first they appeared to resemble
fungal spores, possibly an attack brought on by the recent rainy weather.

So which was it, fungus or insect? Inspection under a loupe wasn’t much help. To my untrained eye, they looked
more like tiny sand dollars. Their arrangement on the branches was typically that of scale, but it was certainly the
creepiest looking kind I’d had the good fortune to never have encountered before.

Today, armed with loppers, all infested branches were cut out from the center of the shrub. Outer branches
seemed unaffected. Hopefully, sunlight and good air circulation will be the best disinfectant.

With the infestation now under control and in the trash bin, the cause of science seemed to have been most cowardly
and shamefully neglected. So I grabbed the camera and, steeling myself, took a few photos of the
unidentified horrific scale pest in situ in the trash bin for ID purposes later. Then headed straight for the shower.

And so that this doesn’t become the stuff of your nightmares, I’ve made viewing purely optional and have instead
provided a photo of a more pleasant subject, the first bloom on Scabiosa ‘Fama.’
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Pleasant dreams.

Posted in creatures | 2 Comments

Miracle on 28th Street

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Denise

A minor miracle, just an urban meadow.

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This is a large medical complex that has been undergoing lots of construction and expansion of new hospital wings. The meadow,
although just adjacent to the entrance, is slightly below grade and ringed with big plants like phormium and strelitzia, so unless
you’re on the sidewalk, it remains unseen from the street.

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A decomposed granite path winds through the center.

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Anigozanthus, kangaroo paws, is planted on the perimeter at this viewing area. It will be interesting to see how these bulky perimeter plantings mitigate the lack of interest the meadow will hold in its off season, which would seem to be the intent.

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A glimpse of the Purple Orchid tree, bauhinia, to the left of the corrugated palm trunks.

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One of Nancy Goslee Power’s favorite plants, strelitzia, the Bird of Paradise. I confess it has never been one of mine, most likely a simple case of familiarity breeding contempt.

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I could find no information on this meadow, how or why it was planted, if it’s temporary or a permanent feature. Although deceptively simple in appearance, a meadow can be tricky to get started. This one had a few bare patches where germination was poor. Although lupines and California poppies predominate, there was clarkia, gilia, dimorpotheca.

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But oh, those lupines!

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March of the Tulips

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Denise

They are a bit regimental in appearance, aren’t they? I’m not sure I’d want to accentuate that
trait by lining them out with geometric precision in bedding-out schemes. I prefer to see
these little soldiers cavorting with fennel and linaria and Buddleia ‘Silver Anniversary.’

From Tulips’ Progress on the 19th of February:

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A little too early for snapshots this morning, the 23rd of February, but here’s the color progression.
I flicked off some aphis from the tulip on the far left and inflicted irreparable damage on the tender petals
with that careless fillip. Oops. Perhaps a small jet of water next time.

But I am glad for the forethought last July to imagine the thrill a couple dozen tulip bulbs would give
seven months later, a display powered by winter rains alone.

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And edited 2/28/10 to include the now fully saturated ‘Beauty of Apeldoorn,’ classed as a mid to late hybrid Darwin tulip.
The Moroccan toadflax/linaria in the second photo color-echoes the streaks of magenta now visible in the tulip in full bloom.
What rule dictates spring has to be gentle pastels anyway?

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Further edited 3/6/10 for the denouement:

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