the High Line in June

For about five days in mid-June a small group of us toured gardens on Long Island, NY, with the last day, Sunday, dedicated to visiting the High Line and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which seemed a perfect ending to the trip. I’d never visited the BBG before, and the High Line had opened a new extension since my two previous visits. But facing daunting logistics, including having to leave Brooklyn late on Sunday and find my way to a new hotel near JFK for the one night before the 6 a.m. flight on Monday morning, and squeezing in returning the rental car at some point, all these details broke me and I opted not to go. Instead I drove from Long Island to the hotel near JFK, checked in, drove to JFK to return the rental car, took the Air Train and then a hotel shuttle back to the hotel, where around 4 p.m. I called Marty (my husband) to let him know I had triumphantly mastered all these details, including navigating through some horrific New York traffic. Marty said well done, stay where you are, find something to eat, and don’t miss the 6 a.m flight Monday morning.

I then called MB Maher (my son) to deliver the same triumphant account, and he said, Are you crazy? You’re in New York and skipping the High Line?

I protested that it was 4:30 p.m., I was exhausted and hungry, having eaten nothing but raisins and peanuts all day, that the High Line’s website said the park closes at 7 (which I misread. It closes at 11 p.m during summer), and there was no way I could make the push to see the High Line this late in the day. Mitch wasn’t at all impressed with my recitation of timetables and repeated the Are you crazy? bit again, and I had to admit, yes, I would be crazy not to go.

So I found the hotel concierge, and within eight minutes of asking him how this cab thing worked, I was sitting in one and heading into Manhattan. Very slowly, in horrific traffic. In Los Angeles a cab ride experience comes along about as frequently as Haley’s Comet, and I had absolutely no frame of reference for suitable behavior, his or mine. My cab driver had never heard of the High Line, so I handed him my iPhone with a map. On the way, moving incrementally in mostly stalled traffic, I had grave doubts that the cab driver and I had successfully negotiated my destination and was certain only of the utter folly of the entire misadventure. But the traffic did ultimately thin out and before sunset we were in Chelsea, driving under those unmistakable railway trestles. I was chagrined to have doubted the driver, even though only in silence, tipped him heavily ($70 total), and arrived at the High Line by 6 p.m. And, yes, I would have been crazy not to go.

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Doubly crazy because the eremurus were still in bloom

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As were masses of Knautia macedonia

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Pink astilbe shockingly paired with orange milkweed

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With the sedums just coming into bloom

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Eryngium

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Baptisia alba and liatris just coloring up

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So exciting to see Dalea purpurea in bloom. I just tucked a small dalea into my own garden.

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Echinacea species, maybe E. pallida

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Stachys ‘Hummelo’

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I have read that some locals consider the High Line too successful, and accuse the park’s gravity pull of distorting the surrounding neighborhood.

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The resulting construction boom I’ve been reading about since the park opened is everywhere in progress, and the park does become clotted with people at its narrowest walkways. But I haven’t been among this many excited people since the last hockey game I attended. There is an unmistakable sense among the strollers that they’ve arrived at a very special place and are participating in and affirming something truly wonderful. Camera phones clicked and visitors marveled at common plants like echinacea and other robust prairie plants and grasses that held their own against Manhattan’s skyline, something the typical park fare of bedding plants could never do. The dynamism of the seasonal plantings continually offers up new associations and perspectives and endless plant/city “combinations,” to use garden writing vernacular.

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Eremurus, dalea, and liatris

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Are the gigantic leaves inula?

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I’m not sure what allium has been planted, but it’s lovely even with the color drained away

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It was a hot, sticky New York evening, but the subway was icy cool on the way back to the hotel, and I was tucked in my room with a cold can of Fosters for dinner by 10 p.m. I did make the early flight (just barely) and settled in a middle seat between two largish men. Catching up on movies seemed a sensible option, and a choice offered was Steven Soderbergh’s lastest film Side Effects — small scenes of which were filmed at, yes, the High Line. This park has definitely arrived.

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a much anticipated visit to the garden of Shirley Watts

I’ve been home for over a week, but I left my heart in….okay, not my heart, because that’s solidly esconced here at home in the LBC, but I think I may have left my sensorium in San Francisco. On the nearby island of Alameda to be exact, in artist and garden designer Shirley Watts’ garden, which undulates and swirls with cultural references, both pop and classical, science, language and poetry, but in teasingly subtle and allusive ways. Shirley has that rare gift of making a space look undesigned, inevitable. Lush and moody, the garden doesn’t give up its secrets all at once and welcomes and rewards the inquisitive. Intimate and intensely personal, humble really in its refreshing lack of assertive, California-style hardscape and “garden features,” it enfolds and envelopes, quietly offering up much to stimulate the eye and mind or just a tranquil place to become lost in thought. Confident, playful, simultaneously artless and artful, relaxed and rigorous, it’s a garden that asks you to peer in closer, look behind, into and around, that engages as much as it restores. A Joseph Cornell shadowbox of a garden. I’ve been wanting to see this garden for ages, and fortuitously Shirley and Emmanuel graciously agreed to open their home and garden Thursday night for a pre-Fling reception. I’ll change the Fling channel soon, I promise, but couldn’t resist offering a look at Shirley’s garden in repose, sans partiers, the prequel to Thursday night. Photos by MB Maher, who also paparazzi’d Thursday night’s festivities here.

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If there’s any doubt that this is the home of a supremely confident artist, constantly tweaking and playing with symmetry and classical expectations, the back view of the recent addition clarifies matters. The black pots are terracotta painted with chalkboard paint.

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A bracing juxtaposition to the exterior view of the addition is the traditional wainscotting, carpets and chandelier of the interior.

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The home and garden of a woman informed by and comfortable in any century.

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Rosa glauca tapping at the window

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The lanterns send out their glowing messages at night, whether fanciful images of coleoptera

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or words from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Don’t all garden makers veer dangerously close to the same impulses as Dr. Frankenstein?)

Below are some of my photos from Thursday at the kick-off party

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shoes of MB Maher

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Leslie Bennett of Star Apple Edible Gardens and one of the nicest people at the Fling. Swag from the Fling included her new book, The Beautiful Edible Garden

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Behind the vellum, the wooden sculptures and a screen filled with mussel shells.

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Though she doesn’t make a big deal of it, Shirley is a superbly knowledgeable plantswoman with a great eye for layering the plants of a garden down to the smallest detail. Everyone asked about this plant, Mathiasella bupleuroides, rare and not easy to grow (don’t ask). Shirley claims the opposite, that it’s not formidable at all, and said it’s been blooming like this since February. Mathiasella is a designer cocktail of a plant, equal parts angelica, euphorbia, and hellebore.

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Mathiasella bupleuroides, over 5 feet in height

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A wavy-leaved mullein, possibly Verbascum undulatum

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Calla lily tangled in a succulent’s bloom

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I saw this mimulus later on the trip at Annie’s Annuals & Perennials

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Begonia grandis

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One of the hallmarks of Shirley’s work is the subtly elegant use of salvage. She doesn’t hit you over the head with repurposing, but tucked away against a fence you might discern a screen of abstract shapes, the cast-offs from an industrial machinist’s template.

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A rose that reminds me of the Austin rose ‘Othello’

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To scent an open summer window, Nicotiana sylvestris

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A rusted urn filled with Echeveria nodulosa

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When acanthus blooms, a garden instantly becomes timeless

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Possibly the serrated leaves of Eryngium agavifolium

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The owl Emmanual liberated from the Reims cathedral in France

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The visage of Orlando Bloom broods over the garden. Shirley is fearless in sourcing pieces for her garden design work, and provenance can include old movie billboards.

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I’ll close with some images of a garden Shirley worked on for a client that shows traces of the same themes as her own garden. Photos by MB Maher.

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Along with her garden design work, Shirley has recently been acting as co-curator of an ongoing collaboration between artists and the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley entitled “Natural Discourse.” You can search AGO for posts related to Natural Discourse, such as this one here.

To read more about Shirley Watts’ work, check out Stephen Orr’s Tomorrow’s Garden and Zahid Sardar’s New Garden Design, both listed with Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts.

(Edited 7/10/13 and reposted. Shirley confirmed the rose is indeed ‘Othello’ and that the owl “did not come from the Reims cathedral. It came from a 17th century villa across the street from where Emmanuel grew up. They were tearing it down for condos.”)

Posted in artists, garden ornament, garden visit, MB Maher, pots and containers, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

scenes from the garden 7/6/13

There’s an unspoken Upstairs/Downstairs, front garden/back garden dynamic at home, as I suspect there is with most hands-on gardens. Most of the front garden isn’t tinkered with much anymore, needs little attention, more of just keeping an eye on sizes. I rarely think to chronicle the front garden, and the dyckias bloomed this year without a single photo. But the light was especially burnished last night. Just to the right of the phormium there once grew an enormous leucadendon, something I’ve been mulling over since touring Bay Area gardens full of members of the wonderful Proteaceae family such as leucadendrons, leucospermums, banksii, proteas. There was once a large leucadendron in the back garden too. I miss them both. In the front garden the leucadendron grew much too large for its position, but in the back garden it was removed for a different reason. That reason revolves around the constant tension between the tantalizing beauty of shrubs and other big, long-term plants and wanting to retain space for the spontaneity of ephemeral self-seeders, new plant enthusiasms and acquisitions. One approach produces eventual boredom and the other always brings some regret. For now, I seem to prefer regret to boredom, but that could easily change.

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Phormium ‘Alison Blackman,’ Agaves ‘Blue Glow,’ Furcraea macdougalii, assorted sotols, aloes, dyckias, succulents. Not much work or attention is needed with the front garden. (Kind of an “empty nest” feeling here.)

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At the site where the leucadendron once grew to a size of 6X6 feet in the front garden, Echeveria agavoides and Dymondia margaretae are covering the ground on a much smaller scale and injecting some breathing room into the plantings. I did tuck in a tiny Euphorbia atropurpurea here, just brought home from Annie’s Annuals & Perennials. All last summer I chased this plant locally from cactus show to cactus show after seeing it at the Huntington. I’d given up on finding it but then there it was at Annie’s, bless her exotic plant-loving heart.

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The back garden is where I change things up every year, try out new plants like this tall, sticky-leaved Cuphea viscosissima, started from seed this spring, or combine familiar plants in new ways.

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Remember that tree that toppled mid-June? This green aeonium and a couple ‘Blue Fortune’ agastaches were just moved into the vacuum. Even aside from falling trees, the back garden is in constant flux and frequently gets churned up with new plantings.

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The small purple buds mingling with the agastaches are from Calamintha nepeta ‘Gottlieb Friedkund.’ I’ve grown calamints before, but I don’t remember them having the dark purple flower buds as on this one, Calamintha nepeta ‘Gottlieb Friedkund.’ I keep breaking off a leaf and sniffing it, expecting it to smell like a mislabeled oregano, but it’s the unmistakably minty scent of a calamint. Digging Dog is where I ordered mine last fall. I’m smitten by this one and would love a bigger swath of it.

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Eucomis have started to bloom, another plant designated for the back garden so its leaves can die back gracefully.

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Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.” – Virginia Woolf, The Diary, Vol. 2: 1920-1924

In writing those words, Woolf was probably thinking of the children doctors advised her not to have, but I always find them useful in any situation requiring critical honesty.

I never like to pretend that things I haven’t got are not worth having. A bigger garden, for example, would be very much worth having, but I think I can hum along just fine as things stand, with very little boredom and manageable regret. Travel for me always results in turning over choices and tapping them for soundness. But coming home I’m always reminded that to have any garden at all is such an amazing gift.

Posted in agaves, woody lilies, Bulbs, garden travel, garden visit, plant nurseries, Plant Portraits, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Garden Bloggers Fling 2013; Matt Gil Sculpture Garden

Second garden on Friday, designed for a work/live fabrication studio and sculpture display space in a light industrial neighborhood of San Francisco. We are an avid bunch, craning necks, snapping cameras, firing off questions (my bad habit). I have to constantly check an impulse to blurt out a question and query myself first: How would I feel if this were my garden and I came face to face with me as a garden visitor? God forbid. But it is just so exciting to see these special gardens that questions tumble forth. And by special I mean wholly individual responses to climate, topography, and the space one has to work with — all the really important variables. After all the ink spilled on formal/informal and all the other garden principles drilled into us by books and public parks, seeing the imaginative responses of garden artists to the circumstances they find themselves in is unbelievably refreshing. And liberating. Bay Area gardens whisper seductively: Do what you want, where you want, how you want, and as best fits available resources and how you live, work, and play.

Amen. And then let us come visit, please.

Or, alternatively, bring in a talented Bay Area garden designer, as artist Matt Gil and his wife Lesa Porche did, when they asked Dan Carlson of Wigglestem Gardens to create a garden in which to display their sculptures, all of which are for sale. (And then let us come visit, please.)

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This blurry photo is the best I had looking at the upper deck from the garden, the office at ground level under the corrugated awning.
On the Fling we were split into two groups, so no more than 40 visited each garden at a time.

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The dining room window, light flooding in from the deck

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The hillside just visible through a scrim of backlit container plantings

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The view from the deck down into the garden with its low retaining wall holding back the plantings at the base of the steep, rocky hillside

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Descending the stairs, fountain at the bottom, bamboo against the hillside

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Colocasia growing in the fountain at the base of the stairs

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And stepping into the sculpture garden

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The steep hillside, which the owners eye nervously during the rainy season. San Francisco averages around 20 inches of rain per year, usually in the winter, but I was told there were two solid days of rain just before the Fling began.

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Succulents planted into the slope, shown draped here with mahonia

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Protea, Agave ‘Blue Glow’, Geranium incanum, echeverias, aeoniums, yuccas

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Further back, Geranium incanum spilling over the retaining wall, tall yellow kangaroo paws, aloes, California poppies, silvery dudleyas

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Using the Agave americana var. medio-picta ‘Alba’ as a visual pivot point. Kangaroo paws just behind. Aloe plicatilis almost out of frame in the top left-hand corner

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With grasses, aeoniums, poppies, and Agave parryi var. truncata

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Mangave and California poppies

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A potted cussonia streetside as we leave the sculpture garden and head back to the bus for lunch and frivolities at Annie’s Annuals & Perennials.
There will be no photos about the visit to AA&P, because honestly all I did was shop after lunch and the demonstration of nifty hose nozzles put on by a Fling sponsor, Dramm. Matt at Growing With Plants has a nice post on the visit to AA&P here.

Posted in agaves, woody lilies, garden travel, garden visit, plant nurseries, pots and containers, succulents | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Garden Bloggers Fling 2013; Organic Mechanics Garden


The first garden on Friday was created in the courtyard between two apartment buildings originally gifted to twin sisters by their father in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The Organic Mechanics, James Pettigrew and Sean Stout, see opportunity where others see only a dead zone of concrete and a few pittosporum. Now it’s a lush urban sanctuary brimming with salvaged and repurposed treasures, a transformed community space enjoyed by all the residents. (Organic Mechanics was also responsible for the gigantic walk-in succulent cube that was the toast of the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show a few years ago.) I’m guessing there’s something in the coastal fog that gets the creative synapses firing among Bay Area designers, just as it sends the mighty redwoods soaring taller than any other trees.

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Under your feet is no ordinary paving

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Marble salvage from a local tombstone sculptor also finds its way here

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The courtyard had a wonderful collection of plants, like this Yucca rostrata

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I’m officially on the hunt now for this gorgeous compact shrub, Leucadendron linifolium

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Agave ovatifolia

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Looks like Leucadendron argenteum to me, but I overheard discussion that this might be a banksia

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photo from SFGate

Not only was this garden a visual feast, but we were also serenaded by the raspy warblings of Simon, the 25-year-old Yellow Nape Amazon Parrot.
A wonderful beginning to the 2013 Garden Bloggers Fling.


Posted in agaves, woody lilies, artists, design, garden travel | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

favorite plant of the week: Echeveria ‘Opal Moon’

Loree at Danger Garden has been faithfully reporting on her favorite plant in the garden every week and has asked others to join in when so inspired. So many succulents dangle or trail their blooms, but these blooms are hoisted high on the elongating thick stalks of this echeveria, making it worthy of inclusion as a favorite plant. To be honest, the mauvey color of its leaves is a color I usually avoid in succulents, and one of the reasons I rid the garden of the excellent but similarly tinted Graptoveria ‘Fred Ives.’ ‘Opal Moon’ complicates the color with some grey, some blue, a blush of caramel, but it’s mainly the fleshy size of this one that makes it such a hubba-hubba attraction.


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Echeveria ‘Opal Moon’

I brought home Loree’s favorite plant this week, Alstroemeria isabellana, from Far Reaches Farm last summer, but it vanished during my zone 10 winter. It may prefer the rainier winters of Portland, Oregon. I am nursing along one of its relatives, a bomarea, in a container that’s never allowed to dry out. Maybe I’ll be able to report on it in an upcoming “favorite plants” post, fingers crossed.

Posted in Plant Portraits, succulents | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Occasional Daily Photo 7/1/13

The garden continued its beguiling ways while I was away, offering up new studies in green and blue, umbellifer and thistle, as the samphire, Crithmum maritimum, sent up blooms through the eryngium that just gets bluer and bluer every day.


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Crithmum maritimum and Eryngium planum

Thanks to photographer MB Maher for briefly (and spontaneously, I might add) taking over the reins of this runaway blog. He is most welcome to do so any time he likes. I have so many photos to sort through I feel like a python that’s swallowed a…well, something very large and nearly indigestible. Would that I had any photos to post as exquisite as those he took of the party Shirley and Emmanuel threw for the garden bloggers on Thursday night. The pros make it look so easy, don’t they? And I mean to include both MB Maher and Shirley Watts in that remark.

Posted in MB Maher, Occasional Daily Photo | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

our far-flung fling

We move too quickly to keep up. There is much to say about the team at Organic Mechanics,
photos to share of a vast and wine-fueled dinner at the Conservatory of Flowers, stories to tell
of the city itself as the county clerk swings wide the doors at the marriage office, but for the
moment the only photos we have to share come from the opening cocktail reception of this wonderful
traveling circus
hosted by the uncontrollably talented Shirley Watts and husband Emmanuel Coup and cat Fifa.
MB Maher caught wind of the party from his nearby headquarters and arrived by zipcar to document. Photos his.

MB Maher also conducted a sandal survey.

Posted in artists, design, garden ornament, garden travel, garden visit, MB Maher, photography | 12 Comments

gardens hate traveling

I love to travel, but my garden hates it.
But, theoretically, it really shouldn’t be that difficult, leaving the garden for a few days in late June.


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Most of the pots are filled with succulents this summer. Nothing too tricky.

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Except for maybe the Musschia wollastonii, which is always poised to collapse. Whether it’s exposure to harsh words or less-than-perfect filtered light requirements, it needs very little excuse to wilt. This is my second attempt with this musschia, and at this point I just don’t believe I’ll ever have the privilege of seeing its strange, lime green candelabra of an inflorescence erupt in my garden. (That’s a dare, musschia. I dare you to prove me wrong and thrive in my absence.)

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And then there’s Evie, who’s being left in the hands of an avowed cat hater.

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Two, actually. The hater of cats and this one will certainly conspire against the felines in my absence.

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I wonder if my share of the neighbor’s apricots will be close to ripe when I return.

[one week later]

I meant to post this before leaving for Long Island, New York, last Tuesday to tour gardens and nurseries, but with work to get out and trees falling down, it was forgotten. Upon return on Monday, all cats have been accounted for, and the garden looks in better shape than when I left from the thorough soaking Marty gave it. Temperatures were cool, the musschia didn’t collapse, and the gesneriad Moussonia elegans opened its first blooms in my absence. Ein developed a taste for unripened apricots and ate quite a few that fell on our side of the fence. I found his stash of pits in a small midden on the driveway. I have stories to tell of gardens in Long Island, all of which will have to wait until I return from the blogger meetup in San Francisco this weekend. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

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Moussonia elegans

Posted in creatures, garden travel, pots and containers, succulents | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Bloom Day June 2013

For a girl who couldn’t get an eryngium to bloom before, this is shaping up to be an exciting summer.

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Eryngium pandanifolium is supposedly the biggest eryngo of them all. I’ve been intently watching it develop this wicked candelabra of a bloom truss. Each morning the bloom stalk twisted in a different direction, as though it had been thrashing about during the night in the throes of birth, like H.R. Giger’s Alien. Today it was fully upright and looks like it means to stay that way. 5 feet tall and still growing. I planted it at the patio’s edge and have basically relinquished use of this little patio off the back door, removing chairs and most containers, so the eryngo gets lots of light and air at its base. Its barbed leaves sprawl onto the bricks, covering most of the patio, but what price love?

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But there is such a thing, believe it or not, as too much excitement

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Hmmm, something’s missing…

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Now you see it, now you don’t. Another day, another collapse of a Euphorbia cotinifolia in my garden. I think this is the third, maybe fourth time. The rope on its trunk was tied to a nearby Argemone munita to keep the argemone from falling. There’s irony there somewhere.

Last Friday, June 14, at 2:10 p.m., I heard a whoosh, peeked out the office door, and beheld the awful horizontality. But the smash wasn’t entirely unexpected. I left this comment on Hoov’s blog Piece of Eden June 11: “I was watching my Euphorbia cotinifolia sway in the breeze yesterday, swaying from the base of the trunk, as in rocking in the breeze. And it’s listing too, so I think it’s going over soon, right on top of the anigozanthos no doubt. Control is illusion. Loved Ed Norton in khaki in that movie — loved the whole movie. (P.S. I think your pups want to go camping.)” We were discussing her pups’ love of the movie Moonrise Kingdom.

Euphorbia cotinifolia, the Caribbean Copper Tree, is widely used as a summer annual for containers, but in regions without frost it reaches tree size. This tree was a seedling, meaning it was sown in situ from a previous Caribbean Copper Tree, something I thought would give this brittle tree all the advantages it would need for stability. And it had multiple trunks, another plus. A single-trunked copper tree snapped in two during high winds. This is the third time, and I am so not charmed anymore. Marty washed the saw off with soapy water this morning. He was driving tourists on a boat through Long Beach harbor when the smash came. Sunny day, 70-ish degrees, no wind, 2:10 p.m. I worked like a madwoman to remove the tree and assess damages, and the whole mess was cleaned up by 4 p.m. Amazingly little damage was done. That Argemone munita was uprooted, of course. Some broken kangaroo paws were brought in for vases. One of the two stalks of Aeonium ‘Cyclops’ was broken at the base, which I’m trying to root again. A spiral aloe was flung out of the ground. It’s an awful thing to admit, but I was at a local nursery at 4:15 to check out replacements.

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Succulents like these aeoniums were still intact after I pried the tree off of them. Onward with Bloom Day.

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I thought there’d be just two lilies in bloom this summer, this unknown white and the copper ‘African Queen,’ both growing in pots.

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But then this regal lily surprised me by surviving in dryish conditions in the garden near the base of a phormium.

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Another surprise bulb, from a bunch of miniature gladiolus I ordered a few years ago. It somehow became churned up when the eryngium planum were planted.
Small but flashy.

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Penstemon ‘Hidalgo’ a shrubby 4-footer just beginnning to bloom

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Bloom puff on Albizia ‘Summer Chocolate.’ This tree, currently in a large glazed pot, is a possible candidate to replace the fallen Copper Tree. We desperately need shade on the office, so replacement discussions are ongoing. I’m leaning toward keeping it full sun and planting some Euphorbia ammak and Yucca rostrata.
We’ll see how much appeal that idea still has in August.

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This kniphofia is loving its new home near the compost pile and is continually throwing new spikes. It might be another case of giving a plant lots of sun and circulation at its base. Another thousand square feet of space and I bet I could get this garden stuff worked out.

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Phylica pubescens, just because this late Bloom Day post has spilled over into Pam’s Foliage Followup at her blog Digging.

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Wonderful Teucrium hircanicum. Blooms from seed its first summer. These plants were all pried up as seedlings from the brick paths in spring.

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The yellow form of Russelia equisetiformis robs it of its common name, the Firecracker Plant, but it’s a good plant in all its colors.

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Ethereal view of the Dittany of Crete, Origanum dictamnus

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Macleaya in bloom. This one’s wandering roots make it more trouble than tetrapanax.

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The last of the annual Coreopsis ‘Mahogany.’ I’ve replaced it elsewhere with gaillardia.

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The Garlic Passion Flower vine, Passiflora loefgrenii, is spilling over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, but then their apricot tree has spilled over into my garden.
I wonder who has the better deal.

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Garlic passionflower jelly anyone?

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I’m trialing three different peachy yarrows this summer. This one ‘Terracotta,’ as well as ‘Marmalade’ and ‘Sawa Sawa’

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At least the Monterey cypresses look stable enough and are making good size at the east fence. I’ve already been checking out lots of Bloom Day reports via our host Carol’s site May Dreams Gardens. There’s lots of excitement, and of a less calamitous kind, in the blogs this June.

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