Foliage Follow-Up February 2011

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Denise

This Salvia canariensis var. candissima from Annie’s Annuals is furrier than the species and has been incredibly difficult to photograph. Ever since I read a recent trashy news story on how beauties like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe shaved their faces of any peach fuzz for the camera (Huffington Post here), that photographic challenge now has some context and makes a little more sense to me. The dusky pink blooms and bracts have a similar character to Salvia sclarea var. turkestanica. I moved it so many times last year that it never bloomed, so have dedicated quite a bit of sunny garden this year to this salvia, which will inevitably become ginormous.

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I’ve found extremely fuzzy plants difficult to capture, for example, as opposed to succulents, which practically photograph themselves.
(Unnamed graptopetalum.)

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Ligularia tussilagenea ‘Argentea.’ This ligularia/farfugium would seem to be pushing variegation to an unhealthy extreme, with some leaves in total photosynthetic denial, possessing no discernible pigment at all.

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Brachysema praemorsum ‘Bronze Butterfly.’ Far Out Flora visited the Santa Cruz Arboretum’s Australian section and gives some background on this Australian shrub, which grows in my gravel garden among agaves, phormiums, grasses, and succulents. It’s past time for brachysema to be reintroduced to nurseries again. A tough, mid-sized shrub that never looks disheveled.

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Melianthus major ‘Purple Haze,’ recently planted from a gallon.

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I love the way this tetrapanax wants to join in the conversation, almost climbing into the chair to take a seat at the table.

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Euphorbia characias ‘Silver Swan.’ There are so many variegated varieties of E. characias now, it’s hard to recapture the excitement when the ‘Tasmanian Tiger’ roared into nurseries then pitifully mewed and faded away in gardens. This ‘Silver Swan’ has been a very strong grower so far.

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Pam at Digging hosts the Foliage Follow-Up on the 16th of each month. Branches and bark are welcome too.

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Bloom Day February 2011

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Denise

What was I thinking, sleeping in on Bloom Day?

Getting straight to the point…

Grevillea ‘Superb’

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Pelargonium echinatum

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Abutilon

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Anigozanthus

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Salvia chiapensis

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Ammi majus

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Tulips

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The first flower of Salvia iodantha wagneriana in honor of Bloom Day. Thanks, Carol!

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Second Look (Erodium pelargoniflorum)

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Denise

Little plants like this erodium, that wouldn’t rate a second look in summer, for a brief time have the field to themselves in early spring.
So many modest spring bloomers like this erodium are described as “charming,” which sounds like a tepid compliment from the politely underwhelmed, but after a mostly flowerless winter perhaps it’s wise to be charmed by degrees, not flabbergasted all at once. Spring is when I’m more than willing to crawl up close to the little charmers, insect-like, to investigate details of bloom. By summer, I wouldn’t enter the gravel garden except on well-shod feet, possibly with machete in hand.

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This erodium is generally described as a perennial for zones 7-9, but its character in the gravel garden is that of a spring annual, blooming and flourishing as long as the soil retains vestiges of moisture from the winter rains, then disappearing entirely in summer. If kept watered, it would bloom and be presentable much longer. Sheets of seedlings re-emerge with a vengeance with the next winter storm, and new plants bloom again in spring. A fierce reseeder, this Storksbill, Heron’s Bill, member of the geraniaceae. Nerines are thickening into clumps nearby for fall, so I’ve kept this erodium’s spread to a minimum this spring.

The palmate leaves are hirsute and sticky debris-catchers.

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I wonder if I will ever outgrow the astonishment stage of gardening, perpetually astonished and glad for the bounty reseeding plants liberally fling about the garden, when they settle in and get happy, when the garden story writes itself and you play more the role of the attentive editor, a kind and patient Maxwell Perkins to the fecund chaos of Thomas Wolfe. (Look Homeward, Erodium!) Gardens with much more moisture might have something to fear, but a couple sweeps with the hoe after winter rains keeps this exuberant fellow in line, the fibrous roots pulling up easily out of the gravel before the larger tap root matures.

A view of the sepals as this little erodium fills in around the base of a large restio.

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Would I bother to buy seeds and sow this erodium every year? Honestly, possibly not every year. Honestly, possibly not at all. There are so many good spring annuals to choose from, countless kinds I’ve tried and then forgotten because they don’t share this erodium’s generous nature. Good leaves, interesting flowers, clumps to about a foot in height, blooming in the earliest days of spring, and managing all this by itself, with minimal intervention from me, all these traits together make up this erodium’s charm. And it’s the perfect complement for wet winter/dry summer Mediterranean bulbs, more of which I’ll be adding to the gravel garden.

I wrote about this erodium last February, but besides the above reasons, another reason to take a second look at this erodium is because it seems to be generally mislabeled in seed catalogues. What I call E. pelargoniflorum may in fact be E. trifolium, which seems to quickly lose vigor and is not reliably perennial, all of which describes my erodium. I’m told Erodium trifolium does not have hairs in the foveole, and if I knew what a foveole was I’d explain further. The salient point I’m making doesn’t change, however, that whatever its identity, this erodium can be grown as an annual, with expectations for it to bloom well the first year after sowing. If anyone wants to try seeds of the erodium I’m growing, send me an email.

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Bromeliads in Winter

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Denise

Bromeliads like this Vriesea gigantea are wintering outdoors in this frostless garden. Maybe this bizarro winter I should knock wood and say this historically frostless garden.

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This fast-growing vriesea from southeastern Brazil is temporarily kept in a small pot to tuck into larger pots, but its future massive size will require other arrangements. Bromeliads are relatively new to me. Some are grown more for their fantastic plasticine foliage, others for an incredible inflorescence in shapes and colors that bring to mind the plumage of tropical birds. I currently have maybe five, chosen more for foliage, always trying to find them in small sizes since they fetch exorbitant prices when large. They are much more “other” to me than succulents, utterly strange and mysterious, but apart from requiring shade are just as easy on the maintenance schedule, and just as dangerously collectible.

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Most bromeliads are epiphytic, and soil is really only necessary for stabilizing the plant. Soggy roots are to be avoided. The central cup of leaves is kept filled with fresh water. Incredibly easy glamour. The soft light of winter is rarely too harsh for these shade lovers, and I can play with them quite a bit, planting them in the ground among grasses, full sun/overcast skies, for several months, then repotting them again as spring nears. I carelessly left a neoregelia and aechmea in the ground during the rainy month of December, a cavalier attitude that could have had disastrous consequences, but they’re fine.

On a reasonably warm February day in the 70’s, setting this vriesea into the larger container with aeoniums and coprosma conjures an instant scene from summer. Those old cordyline leaves don’t look very summery, but the bromeliad does enjoy the increased humidity from the surrounding plants. One look at my hands would tell you how dry it’s been.

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Tulips Can Be Had Cheap

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Denise

It takes a flower of infinite grace to withstand being turned into a potted ubiquity at every neighborhood nursery, grocery store, and florist shop, which is where I’m bumping into tulips this month. Growing them for myself is an intensely personal experience, one that exists outside the bounds of commerce. Nothing can cheapen it. And of all the plants that we bemoan have seen ruination from hybridizers (like the “falls” of irises that antithetically stand out straight from the bloom like propellors), the more outre tulips become, fringed and doubled, the more we covet them, such a long association have tulips and people had interfering in each others’ lives.

Last year it was a couple pots, this year five. Next year, double that.

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Eryngiums, House & Garden

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Denise

Sometimes the house quietly slips into a “Grey Gardens” mode, such as when a vase full of eryngiums turn spidery and dessicated, and I still can’t bear to throw them away. These were bought at Christmas, when I splurged on cut flowers. Hard to imagine they were once shiny metallic and intensely blue.

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This is one of those infuriating plants that rightfully should grow in my garden but so far has refused. Maybe Ms. Willmott never discreetly scattered seeds of the eryngo bearing her name on heavy clay like mine. (The story, possibly apocryphal, is Ms. Willmott flung this seed out of her pockets while you weren’t looking, because she felt this plant would improve anyone’s garden. The ghostly progeny appeared next spring, causing you much consternation as to how it came to be in your garden. What a prankster!) But this winter there’s strong basal growth on one eryngo out of three I planted in fall, just your garden-variety Eryngium giganteum/Miss Willmott’s Ghost, which is, take your pick, biennial or perennial, depending on who’s doing the talking. In any case, this could be the year eryngos take off. (How many times have I said that, I wonder.) I’m sure once a single eryngo shakes its copious seed into my soil, a couple seeds will find some spot to their liking. Just as the poppies prefer seeding into the pavement around the back porch, not in the garden. I’m flexible and have my priorities straight. Plants first. But it’s like pushing a boulder uphill to get a known prolific self-seeder to get comfy in the garden.

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That Corsican Hellebore

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Denise

I hope I’m not becoming too tiresome about this hellebore…

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I may have mentioned it four times in the past two months, but I just cannot say enough good things about Helleborus argutifolius, zoned 7-10.
Some resources zone it even to 6. From Corsica and Sardinia, so definitely of a maritime temperament.
In late fall it launches a campaign of chartreuse enchantment that lasts all winter long.

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No flaming picotee edge or blooms stained the deepest, darkest red. But it does possess a wonderful counterpoint of leaf to flower, something that isn’t always true of hybrids that sacrifice this balance in pursuit of extravagantly colored but demurely nodding blooms that require one to bow down on cold knees to gain a glimpse of the drooping, flower-like sepals. There’s nothing demure about this outsized swashbuckler. And, yes, it’s certainly true that it will seed about, with ambitions to conquer your garden like that other famous Corsican.

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Portrait by Jacques-Louis David

It wants no part of the show bench displaying the endless variety of the many exquisite interspecies hybrids, a competition which would be this rugged hellebore’s Waterloo. The rough-and-tumble winter garden is where it reigns, in part shade or more sun than you’d think wise for a hellebore, the perfect consort for phormiums, astelias, grasses, the bulbs of spring. Amazingly drought tolerant in summer. It lends a hydrangea-esque fullness to my winter garden, for which I am its devoted subject.

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Landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power does list my humble Corsican hellebore as one of her favorite perennials in her book “Power of Gardens,” but I’m not sure it rates as high for her as strelitzia, the Bird of Paradise, or Agave attenuata, since I haven’t found any photos of this hellebore in her book so far. (You can browse through some of the book’s photos courtesy of Garden Design here.)

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The stinking hellebore, H. foetidus, also doesn’t mind the mild zone 10 winter and is a lovely plant, though it doesn’t have the size and landscape impact of H. argutifolius. The H. argutifolius hybrid ‘Silver Lace’ has been a dumpy disappointment, no more than a foot high, flowers buried under its pale leaves. What is the point, I ask you, when the species can make muscular, evergreen mounds of serrated, tripartite leaves up to 4 feet high? Loyal to the Corsican, I’ve never been inclined to collect the myriad crosses, some including H. niger (nigercors), since I simply can’t imagine anything better than the species.

This simple, shrubby, robust Corsican has made a complete and utter conquest of my heart.

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Yuccas Do

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Denise

And how. Then keep on doing some more.
Agaves get all the love, while yuccas just quietly get the job done.

Yucca filamentosa, probably ‘Golden Sword,’ name tag lost long ago. Hardy to zone 5.

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Habituation

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Denise

Every so often I come across a word that tunnels straight into the murky recesses, boring into that dank station in the brain where rusty thoughts rumble around and bang like aimless cars in a railyard. Thoughts with otherwise no timetable for arrival, no destination known. Just knowing such a word exists is enough to set one of those idle railcars in motion, rumbling down the track and into focus

An opportune moment to pause for a photo of The Atocha, Madrid’s astonishing, jungly, former railway terminus, from “The Ten Most Impressive Railway Stations.”
I could plan entire trips around gardens, railway stations, and libraries.

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As I was saying before risking derailing this little narrative with that glorious photo, which incidentally does serve to illustrate my point of seeing things in new ways, like envisioning a railway station as a gigantic tropical conservatory….

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Last week the word was “habituation.” It has a specific scientific meaning and usage, but what appealed to me was the scientist, Jonathan Schooler’s quick sketch of the word for the lay person in the magazine article:

“Habituation is why you don’t notice stuff that’s always there. It’s an inevitable process of adjustment, a ratcheting down of excitement.”
(12/13/10 The New Yorker, “The Truth Wears Off,” by Jonah Lehrer.)

And, no surprise, I’m relating habituation to making gardens, our own personal gardens to be exact. The inevitable “ratcheting down of excitement” that comes from having only one garden to view day after day, and sometimes becoming numbingly acclimated to it. Traveling, visiting other gardens, whether in blogs, books, magazines, or in person, are time-honored habituation busters, a means to see anew and clarify what the heck it was you set out to accomplish in the first place. You’d think we’d be weepy with disappointment from too much garden visiting, but my little garden never pleases me more than when I compare it to others, even gardens far superior, because at such moments I feel the most intensely connected to the ageless tradition of garden making. Being a participant in that tradition is literally and figuratively the ground under my feet.

Another disrupter of habituation is the camera. This morning I was surprised by a couple different views when trying to make the most of an early misty light rinsed in fog. One unseasonal bloom of Salvia verticillata ‘Purple Rain’ changed everything.

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Photographing the salvia from the back of the garden made me take notice of the drama of kangaroo paws against a solid backdrop.

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I know, kind of anticlimatic after that train station photo (from Wikipedia). For another good dose of anti-habituation, if you have a half hour to spare this Sunday I’d recommend watching Carol Klein’s Life in a Cottage Garden. There are some annoying ads to contend with, but Carol’s tour of her garden is just what’s needed for those of us habituated this February to our personal garden scenes of unremitting snow, mud, or just the same-old/same-old.

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Plants That Bear Watching

Posted on February 5, 2011 by Denise

Every garden probably has a few. Not exactly weeds, but tending toward the weedy, yet something about them holds you in thrall. Keeping these plants in the garden is flirting with disaster, but still you just can’t break it off. Maybe these exuberant, sassy, lust-for-life types are a bracing contrast to those plants perpetually teetering on the verge of fainting dead away. They’re dangerous, yes, but also a quick source of cheap thrills. In my garden, the following four easily fall into the PTBW category, all deserving extra vigilance for their great foliage, which is evergreen here in zone 10:

So far, tetrapanax seems reasonably well behaved. Far better manners than, say, acanthus. Maybe my heavy clay soil keeps the infamous running roots in check, but it’s only been a year, so too soon to tell. (Edited April 2011: Runners found 2 feet away.)

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Bronze fennel, Foeniculum vulgare, on the California invasive plant list. Robust and feathery, I’ve kept just one plant, don’t let it set seeds, and haven’t had any seedlings yet. So far so good, but not to be grown near wild, open areas.

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Castor Oil Plant, Castorbean, Ricinus communis, ‘New Zealand Purple,’ holding on to a few leaves through the winter. It just occurred to me that the castor oil tablets my mom gave us as kids come from this deadly plant. Weird. An escaped weed in Southern California and also meriting a spot with fennel on the California invasive plant list. No seedlings from this cultivar so far. (Edited April 2011: One seedling found and carefully transplanted. Just one.)

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Corydalis heterocarpa. Probably no more prolific than C. lutea, with similar yellow flowers, but since it grows as big as rhubarb the scope for trouble is that much greater. Truthfully, this plant has passed over into the weed category, and I no more “keep” it than one “keeps” ants in the garden, but easy enough to hoe out the seedlings. Each year the fresh leaves in spring win me over again.

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I appreciate these hooligans for keeping the garden lively, but like all hooligans, they straddle a very fine line between lively and obnoxious.

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