These gazanias were pulled up last spring to make room for the manfredas, but obviously some roots escaped my trowel.
whoa. I’m rubbing my eyes after looking at just two flowers. Imagine fields of them in South Africa.
I have to say I do like how the manfreda’s spots pick up the red in the gazania.
What they say about good bones for faces and houses applies to gardens too. Good bones will see you through some tough times. I’ve posted just a couple photos on this sweet little house and garden before. The front facade is entirely of glass, so one can’t be too obnoxious with the camera under such circumstances. But walking Ein on the park across the street from this house a couple days ago, I noticed that the landscape was being worked on, and heaps of aloes and agaves were strewn on the walkways. I gave the leash to Marty and looked closer. The house was empty. No more George Nelson bubble lamps or butterfly chairs on the balcony. The house had sold! And what on earth were the new owners doing to the garden? Did they have a deep-seated aversion to desert plants? If so, I needed to talk to them about those enormous Yucca rostrata ASAP.
Yucca rostrata March 2012, presale
March 2012, presale
“One of my favorite houses on the street opposite our bluff walk. Yucca rostrata, butterfly chairs, and George Nelson bubble lamps. Note glimpse of baby blue piano through the window.”
Leaves, leaves, extravagantly shaped, juicy leaves. It’s all about the leaves with succulents. Or is it? There are a couple kalanchoes in bloom now I’ve been noticing around town, Kalanchoe luciae with striking vertical spires, and Kalanchoe orgyalis, with lime green candelabras hoisted over its copper spoon leaves. Subtle blooms? Maybe. But in flowering, these plants become shape shifters that present entirely new outlines in landscapes where there’s no danger from frost.
Of the two, the leaves of the flapjack kalanchoe are by far the attention grabber. You rosy-cheeked devil.
This is a selfie from my garden of Kalanchoe luciae ‘Fantastic,’ the variegated sport of K. luciae, but I’ve been noticing the flapjacks coming into bloom all over town.
The flapjack kalanchoes, K. luciae and K. thyrsiflora, are distinguished from each other by the shocking pink color rimming K. luciae when the weather turns chilly. (Chilly but not frosty.)
The bloom spires also have subtle differences. San Marcos Growers discusses the differences and shows comparative photos here.
As the bloom stalk elongates, it acts like a flag pole, sending chunky, earthbound leaves aloft at intervals like pennants. Or flying flapjacks.
Either way, it’s a very different look for this succulent, turning the plant into a tiered, fleshy pagoda.
The solitary spire in my garden. Mature clumps are the most striking, with multiple spires.
The variegated ‘Fantastic’ is so new in nurseries, I wasn’t sure what to expect as far as blooms.
As far as the Copper Spoons plant, Kalanchoe orgyalis, I’ve passed this shrubby succulent up for sale countless times.
I’ve always admired the fuzzy, cinnamon-colored leaves and the two-tone effect, but throw in some finely drawn, chartreuse floral architecture and now you have my undivided attention.
The Copper Spoons kalanchoe was mass-planted under a magnolia in a parkway/hell strip. I’d never seen mature specimens of this succulent before, just a couple leaves in 2-inch pots.
I have nothing but admiration for the designer who made the commitment to repeat multiples of this succulent under the magnolia. Maybe it wasn’t as difficult a decision for them as it would be for me, but that simple gesture really sold me on this otherwise almost nondescript plant. Thank goodness we’re not all rabid plant collectors. Though I did note a few aeonium and some newly emerging bulb foliage. It’s so hard to resist complicating things, isn’t it?
Almost any succulent can be grown as a single, spectacular specimen. The Copper Spoons succulent really shines when planted en masse.
I did admit the blooms were subtle. After all, what initially drew my attention to this little hell strip was not the kalanchoe.
a very polite and well-timed rain arrived after the Thanksgiving holiday, sometime after midnight.
On Wednesday I brought in chairs that summered in the garden for holiday duty.
The new rain gutters gurgled musically as they efficiently carried rain away from the 100-year-old foundations, a happy ending to the month-long gutter ordeal.
(Marty fell off the roof, ass over tea kettle, but amazingly emerged with only muscle soreness for a couple weeks. Thank you, gods of calamity!)
Listening to the orchestral rhapsody of rain in the gutters, on corrugated roofs, on pavement, kept me busy most of Friday morning.
I was awake at 5 a.m. today, anticipating the early morning patrol after the rain.
Prowling the garden to see what the rain brought, I found newly sprouted seedlings of Erodium pelargoniflorum. Rain makes fast work of germination.
And then I remembered I shook the seed pods of the South African bulb Albuca maxima in this area of the front gravel garden and searched for signs of germination.
These tiny strands may just be baby albucas.
In bloom it resembles a 5-foot snowdrop.
A couple of leaves of nearby Agave ‘Jaws’ provide support when it blooms. Rain-soaked agave leaves unfurl quickly, leaving ghostly imprint patterns.
What the skies looked like late Friday afternoon over the back garden. Could a day be any more perfect?
Wishing you perfection this holiday weekend. And it doesn’t even have to be a whole day. Moments count.
For the holidays, it’s okay to ditch the earnest glass orbs that imprison tillandsias the rest of the year and take a leaf from Holly Golightly’s decorating book, the one that epitomizes her insouciant glamour. The one each of us imagines Holly would have written. And of course in my book Holly writes about plants and has the savvy to know that those glass orbs are more like glass coffins than suitable digs for any respectable tillandsia. Even champagne glasses would be preferable, where they’d get more beneficial air circulation (being “air” plants and all). And Holly would want to keep things easy for moving the tillandsias around the apartment as the light and humidity changes, or to dunk in the kitchen sink once a week, or mist occasionally with water in her favorite perfume atomizer, possibly the one from Tiffany’s.
So where would Holly keep her tillandsias?
These vintage purses with that irresistibly satisfying click and snap to close, little time capsules of the art of the alluring, are a possibility.
The handle makes it easy to carry onto the fire escape to accompany Holly and Cat when they feel like singing to the moon.
I’ve got a shelf of old cameras, some in working order, some not, like the one above, which will certainly glam up the mantle with that tillandsia rakishly festooned in the gap where it’s missing some forgotten but vital functioning piece. And cameras simply adore Holly.
Sometimes it’s an incredibly useful exercise to ask: What would Ms. Golightly do?
My garden has lived through lots of them and will most likely continue to do so while I’m in charge. The latest awkward age involves a flowering agave and a young tree. Or maybe it will be a shrub. Neither the Acacia podalyrfolia nor myself can make up our minds yet. So far the Pearl Acacia is a little too beamy widthwise to prune out the lower branches and train as a tree, which will become an important issue when all the aloes I’ve planted here are ready to bloom. At that point (maybe this year?) there ideally should be a high canopy. Even so, for now I think we’re both leaning more toward shrub than tree and possibly moving the aloes elsewhere. What’s certain is that until the agave finishes flowering and expires, things will be looking a bit chaotic in this corner of the front garden. Watching the agave send that bloom stalk roof-high, I was reminded of a chat I had with a nurseryman, who felt that aloes were gaining favor over agaves with the public because they didn’t inflict such drama on a garden (flowering, death, and then a gaping blankness). I prefer to view the death of an agave as an act of creative destruction, and can’t wait til I haul out the carcass.
Here’s the awkward part, the Pearl Acacia and agave getting in each other’s grilles.
While I’ve been distracted by the flag pole of an agave bloom outside the front door, I failed to notice what the acacia was up to. Was I catching a glint of lemony yellow as I raced from the car to the back office to deal with the merciless deadlines I’ve had the past couple weeks? Nah, must be eyestrain.
Not yet two years old, planted as a small cutting, the Pearl Acacia was already budding up for a late winter/spring bloom. After all, this Australian evergreen is well know for its fast growth.
Still, it was a bit surprising to see the branches already studded with flower buds in November.
Early this morning I took a closer look at the flashes of yellow and found these.
Watching its mad dash to bloom, I can confirm that this tree/shrub’s reputation for speedy growth is well-deserved
What’s that catty old saying, “Your lack of planning is not my problem”? This beautiful, quicksilver tree reminds me of it every time I pass it now.
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.
