pod love

Garden bloggers have been giving it up for flowers, for leaves. How about some pod love?
I know it’s a little early in the season for seedpods for a lot of gardens, but I happen to have dried-up, dessicated plant life on the brain after last week’s ferocious Santa Ana winds.

And I also just happen to have some nice seedpods to share.


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Courtesy of Acacia podalyrifolia

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I’ve been shaping this young shrub/tree at the front of the house, and it’s coming along beautifully.

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The long, wavy pods, silver with cinnamon-brown interiors, perform entrancing twists and spirals in the breeze.

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Sharing the pod love.


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Plectranthus ‘Emerald Lace’

Loree is talking about her favorite plant of the week today, and Pam is discussing the virtues of beautiful leaves, which of course set my eye wandering critically over a heat-ravaged landscape to find a suitable entry.
Needless to say, I was coming up bupkis. I must have walked by this plectranthus a dozen times before pausing to give it serious consideration as a contender.


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Plectranthus ‘Emerald Lace,’ the only one of the “suitcase plants” brought home from Long Island, New York, last summer that’s still kicking.

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Years ago I inexplicably dragged home an enormously heavy iron pipe that I swear will never be moved again. Filled with soil, it functions as a holding area/plant hospital.
Into this wide-mouthed pipe go small cuttings, odds and ends, and sometime last year this plectranthus, which I now realize has filled it entirely. It sits against the north south fence line, which offers the best chance of shade for cuttings. If you take a right turn as you face the plectranthus, you’ll enter a narrow potting area that fills the small gap between the back of the garage and the fence. Turn left and you’ll cross the length of the garden and end up at the compost pile in the northeastern southeastern corner.

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Just a couple weeks ago I slipped some cuttings of an aeonium that had burned in the first heat wave into the “plant hospital.”

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I think I’ve found my entry. With crimped leaves that look cut by pinking shears and mimic the silvery-green patterns of Cyclamen hederifolium, this overlooked plectranthus deserves a little recognition.


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Bloom Day May 2014

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Thank goodness, unlike me, some like it hot, such as Dalea purpurea, the Purple Prairie Clover. Zoned only as far as 8* and not recommended too far south, so zone 10 was a gamble as far as lack of winter dormancy. It might not be long-lived here, but it’s putting on a good show for a young plant. (*to clarify, for zones 3-8. I’m always concerned about a plant’s winter chill needs and heat tolerance.)

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I duplicated how I saw it planted at the Highline, close in to the walkway to admire its outline, but I’ll probably add more amongst the phlomis and other shrubby stuff. The bees will thank me profusely. Its deep tap root handles dry conditions beautifully. You can imagine how much water it’s getting planted amongst agaves and succulents, which is next to none. The legume family is full of such interesting characters. There’s a white form too, Dalea candida, but I’m fine with magenta.

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A succulent I like as much for its flowers as leaves, Cotyledon orbiculata var. flanaganii

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This annual grass doesn’t reseed much, but every bit of it is a treasure. Briza maxima

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Gomphrena ‘Fireworks,’ planted last fall, exploded into growth with the heat.

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Wonderful little pelargonium whose name I’ve misplaced, gets clipped back when it encroaches on Agave schidigera ‘Shira ito no Ohi.’ (If you need cuttings, just ask. And then let me know if and when you ID it. Possibly P. trifidum?)

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More heat lovers, gazanias and gaillardias

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Various iterations of self-sowing nicotianas shrugged off temperatures over 100, a rarity here a mile from the ocean, where we’ve previously never felt the need to install air conditioning in this old drafty bungalow.

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Solanum pyracanthum wintered over and got an early start in spring.

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Most worrisome was anything spring-planted, like this Glaucium grandiflorum

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But except for some sad heat damage on the big-leaved agaves, we all limped relatively unscathed through the second record-breaking heat wave of May 2014. My survival strategy for the next one involves researching old camping cots on craigslist. I’m planning a camping theme for the east patio. I haven’t slept outdoors in quite a while. When life deals you heat like this, might as well have a weenie roast.

So it’s finally here, May, the month that Carol dreams of all year. Some gardens are already cooking on all burners, some just waking up, but it’s all chronicled on May Dreams Gardens, where Carol hosts our Bloom Day reports the 15th of every month, or thereabouts.

Posted in Bloom Day, Plant Portraits, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Potted’s wind chime revival

Relax, I’m not going to talk about the astonishing heat wave we’re having but something light and buoyant.

First, remember Ned Racine’s initial, fateful meeting with two-steps-ahead Matty in the movie Body Heat?

NED
You can stand here with me if you want, but you’ll have to agree not to talk about the heat.

(So she throws his words back at him at their second meeting, at the same time inveigling Ned into her home while the husband is away on business.)

MATTY
You’re the one that doesn’t want to talk about the heat. Too bad. I’d tell you about my chimes.

NED
What about them?

MATTY
The wind chimes on my porch. They
keep ringing and I go out there
expecting a cool breeze. That’s
what they’ve always meant. But not
this summer. This summer it’s just
hot air.

(Amen, Matty.)

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So I’m not going to talk about the heat at all, but wind chimes. Wind chimes are what I’m interested in today, this very hot minute. I think wind chimes are due for a revival. They’ve been relegated to the whimsy ghetto for far too long. Procrastinating on Etsy, hoping to find something inspired by Alexander Calder maybe, I found lots of chimes made of bike gears, keys, and kitchen utensils, some of which were surprisingly appealing. But the two examples above from Potted are some of the nicest I’ve found so far, although the one on the right is technically not a wind chime but a spiral mobile.

Keeping it light and buoyant this week.

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dishy tillandsias

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From a garden on the Los Angeles Garden Conservancy Open Days tour last weekend.

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on the tour; chasing variegated chimeras

A garden I visited on Saturday decidedly belonged to a devotee of the variegated leaf. (It takes one to know one.)
The infatuation wasn’t apparent at first glance. This was a mature garden, well-treed, bambooed and shrubbed.
But after every twist and turn, in every shady nook, another splash, blotch or stripe of variegata lurked, awaiting discovery.
Variegation has multiple sources, and one of my favorite for wordplay purposes is chimeral; a plant composed of genetically different layers.


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Fallopia japonica ‘Variegata,’ the Japanese Fleece Flower

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Acanthus mollis ‘Tasmanian Angel’

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variegated monstera, the Swiss Cheese Plant

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variegated alocasia

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Even a variegated pine, growing in a large container, Pinus wallichiana ‘Zebrina’


Rare in nature, variegated plants are lovingly preserved and propagated by lovers of the outrĂ©. Seems like everyone has an opinion on variegated plants, whether it’s a preference for white on green or yellow on green, or no blotches, please, just stripes. I personally can’t stand that Polka Dot Plant. And there will always be those that shun them as an abomination of nature. But shady town gardens just wouldn’t have that same sparkle without them.

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Agave parryi ‘Cream Spike’


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This is such a sweet agave for containers. Under a foot across in ultimate size, it is nevertheless a busy little mother. Just before its photo, I had cleaned out the offsets it produces so freely, which I’ll grow on to size in the front gravel garden. I did the same thing for Agave ‘Dragon Toes’ yesterday, another beautiful agave on the wee side. I wouldn’t mind at all having sweeps of these compact beauties. San Marcos Growers discusses provenance, nomenclature controversies, and hardiness on its site here. I don’t see this agave too often in nurseries, despite its propagation by tissue culture and all those pups it produces. When it finally made the local nursery circuit last year in a small (cheaper) size, I pounced.

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It still surprises me that snails glide their delicate slipper foot over spiky, barb-leaved agaves, but they do, as seen in the damage caused to a few central leaves.

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I’d recommend a smooth-sided container that easily releases the mother plant so those pups can be nabbed as soon as they appear.

edited 2015 to note that this agave is gaining acceptance under Agave applanata ‘Cream Spike.’

Posted in agaves, woody lilies, plant nurseries, Plant Portraits, pots and containers | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Schefflera actinophylla ‘Soleil’

I’ve recently added the houseplant section to my itinerary when visiting plant nurseries, a group of plants I’ve mostly been ignoring, so there’s basically no category of plants now that goes uninvestigated. Let me just say that this is an approach that can really blow up a plant budget. Often I find the usual suspects, the spider plants, aglaonemas, spathiphyllums, but occasionally I’m surprised, as I was by this schefflera. Not checking in on houseplants frequently, for all I know it may be commonly available. It’s been a few weeks, but the leaves still retain that incredibly waxy sheen, an effect I assumed was produced by a spray of some sort, and maybe it is. The lemon-lime leaves and red petioles are what turned my head. I haven’t decided yet to keep it or make a present of it for Mother’s Day. It might be best to give it away, because I do seem to be amassing an embarrassing amount of gold-leaved plants.

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If I do keep it, here in zone 10 this houseplant is going to be more of a porch plant, where it’s sitting now in almost complete shade until a late afternoon shaft of setting sun grazes it for a short time.
Dappled early morning sun and afternoon shade might be a better choice.

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And I don’t see why plants can’t have a bit of styling for their portrait too.

Schefflera actinophylla ‘Soleil’


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shop chair plant stands

Marty grabbed these two tall, slim shop chairs from a salvage yard in Gardena for cheap today, as a future sand-and-paint project. In the meantime, I think I’ve found two new plant stands.

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on the tour; Passiflora vitifolia

The self-guided Mary Lou Heard Memorial Garden Tour stretches from my hometown in Long Beach to about 50 miles south, as far as San Clemete and Mission Viejo. For much too short a span of time, but long enough for so many to become diehard devotees, Mary Lou had the best selection of plants in the South Bay, very much in the style of Annie’s Annuals & Perennials up in Richmond, California, which I think was still wholesale when Mary Lou closed her doors. I was there, along with dozens of other admirers who came to offer our warm thanks that day she closed in 2002, too sick and weak to keep the nursery open any longer, and she died very soon after. Maybe one or two others have tried, but no other local nursery of its kind, with a passion for plants that dared to resist mass-market tastes, has succeeded since the day she locked the gates for the last time.

There were a couple houses on the tour about a mile from me, so those are the ones I chose to attend and drop a stipend in the donation jar for Mary Lou’s favorite charity, The Sheepfold.


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Lazy sloth that I am, freeway driving holds no appeal after a busy workweek. But it was well worth attending the two close to home last Saturday, if only to see this vine in full, heat-aroused glory.
The owner didn’t know its name, but it’s got to be Passiflora vitifolia, the Grape-Leaved Passion Fruit.

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Also goes by Crimson Passion Flower, and why wouldn’t it?

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Buds and bracts were seductively rusty in tone, backed by lush and healthy leaves. It was overall just a stunning vine that the owner admitted was too much for its small trellis to handle. The owner also said never again to opening his garden for a tour. Battling the effects of the heat wave pre-tour had frazzled his nerves. The rest of the garden was in a style that the owner characterized as cottagey, with unhappy roses that had fried in the strong sun, but enormous and healthy, mite-resistant fuchsias for the shadier areas, both some of Mary Lou’s favorite plants, so I know she’d be pleased. And people clamor to have their gardens on this tour, so even if some drop out there are plenty waiting in line. Mary Lou’s legacy tour is still as strong and vibrant as its namesake.


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