a Greene & Greene rebirth and other tour notes
There was a small tour of five local historical homes on Sunday presented by Long Beach Heritage. The star of the tour from a rarity perspective was this Greene & Greene, one of only three here in Long Beach. Even on such a small tour, I only managed to see three of the five houses. Must build up some tour discipline! It’s just that these old houses and gardens have so very many stories to tell…
Some houses in my neighborhood contributed panes of the old “wavy” glass for the restoration of this “National Historic landmark…this 1904 house survived by moving three times. Designed by the Greenes as an oceanfront home for Jennie A. Reeve…the house is one of the brothers’ earliest ventures in Arts and Crafts style. Moved to its current location in 1924…Henry Greene was rehired to design a significant two-story addition and garden. The house is currently under restoration.”
I’ll say it’s under restoration. History-making, monumental, meticulous restoration undertaken by the current owner, a restoration architect, using the original Greene & Greene plans, which include not only plans for the built-ins, but the furniture, fixtures and landscape as well. There are only a few of the original decorative items and light fixtures left. The original porch light is temporarily on loan to the Huntington while the house is restored. All other decorative fixtures, and there were over 100, have long since disappeared during the house’s various moves — no one seems to know how or to whom, but someone was made very rich by the pillaging. The floors are quarter-sawn oak, the built-in cabinetry and mouldings Port Orford cedar, which due to its rarity arrives in well-spaced, restoration-prolonging shipments. With restoration still underway, the Reeve house was completely empty, lath and plaster still exposed in some rooms, which provided a fascinating look at the painstaking process of restoration. Completion of the house is estimated for the end of this year, but there’s still the furniture, fixtures and landscape to be finished.
No interior photos were allowed in any of the homes, only the exterior. I was excited that a couple homes on the tour were reputed to have extensive gardens.
This enormous garden belonged to a home on the tour that sat on three lots, but its allure now is mostly its ghostly state of disrepair. There were mature fruit trees, overgrown roses, daylilies, agapanthus, the garden seen through this glassed-in outdoor patio draped in jasmine.
At one time in its past, an oil derrick was moved onto the property and pumped for one day. The docent kept repeating this story with no other explanation. Why just one day? Was it removed because of the nuisance factor, or could they tell the well was dry after one day? Many of the homes here still sell with their mineral rights.
Other survivors were ropes of epiphytic cactus.
And a collection of succulents on the back steps
The kitchen garden was still in active use.
A Spanish Revival home on the tour had a sweet courtyard, viewed here from a secret garden
The courtyard opened off the back door and also led through a doorway to the front of the property
Along with an armoire for storage, there was a massive brick fireplace, a small fountain, low-light plants like the fiddle-leaf fig and staghorn fern.
the arched doorway leading to an inner graveled garden
the secret garden
Just outside the walled courtyard on the path to the street, a chair is nearly hidden by bougainvillea. The swath of green on the left is Salvia spathacea, so it’s obviously a hummingbird-viewing station, right?
Before heading home, a quick stop for a nearby parkway abloom in Salvia clevelandii and Salvia canariensis.
Salvia canariensis is one of my favorite salvias and ruled the garden last summer. This parkway was double-wide, so it had all the space it needed. With lavender, artemisia, stachys, nepeta
A lush gift for insects, birds and the neighborhood to enjoy…and the occasional itinerant tour-goer.
scenes from the garden 6/3/13
Some of the cast of characters this summer. First spikes of Teucrium hircanicum. Shaggy grass is newly identified Chloris virgata (thank you, Maggie!)
The peachy ‘Terracotta’ yarrow lining the path are beginning bloom too. The white umbels belong to Cenolophium denudatum. I’ve already noticed a self-sown seedling. Sown just last fall with seeds from Derry Watkins.
Self-sown Verbena bonariensis is already up on its hind legs.
I love me some summer daisies, and buttery yellow Anthemis ‘Susanna Mitchell’ just nails it for me as the quintessential daisy of summer.
More daisies. The first blooms of the ‘Monch’ aster, a daisy often making desert-island lists, 10-best-perennials lists. A remarkably tough plant, even in perennial-averse zone 10.
I never thought I’d see clouds of thistly eryngiums in bloom in my garden. Give them space and sun on their basal leaves, and the clouds will come.
I’m a chronic shuffler. Pots gets shuffled and reshuffled constantly. Succulents like the ‘Fantastic’ flapjack plant, Kalanchoe luciae, get to summer in the ground once the leaves have toughened up and are of no more interest to snails.
Cussonia gamtoosensis stretching towards the sun. I’ll probably plant this in the ground in fall. Which doesn’t technically break my no-more-trees rule since it’s slim silhouette should tuck in just fine, even at 10-plus feet high.
More daisies, burgundy ones from the annual Coreopsis tinctoria ‘Mahogany’
Why don’t I grow more lilies? I have a paltry two pots of lilies this summer. They have no pests here, no scourge of lily beetles.
Growing them in pots keeps them safe from slugs — and from me, since I’m constantly reworking the garden and spearing unsuspecting bulbs. Pots also make it easy to move them from sun to shade when needed and then whisk them out of sight when they’re done blooming.
So I repeat, Why don’t I grow more lilies?
Speaking of scourges, the penstemon is succumbing to that omnipresent budworm, possibly the tobacco worm, that always afflicts and distorts the flowers. (If it even is the tobacco budworm — it has no interest in my nicotiana, aka flowering tobaccos.) I was hoping that by not growing penstemon for a few years this nasty piece of work would have moved on. No such luck. And they’re too tiny to find and hand pick or, my favorite method, bisect with scissors. I’m considering BT, Bacillus thuringiensis, a very pest-specific biological pesticide that interrupts the digestive process of tobacco budworms and kills them, and only on the plant where it’s applied. It’s even approved for organic food crops. But as a devout sci-fi fan, I can’t shake the plot twists involving the laws of unintended consequences. Penstemon are otherwise such great plants here, long blooming, drought tolerant. BT has supposedly been cleared as a suspect in Colony Collapse Disorder, that harrowing threat to bees and life as we know it. Since I rarely keep up regimens of any sort, more than likely it’s goodbye penstemon.
Which brings me round again to the question: Why don’t I grow more lilies?
Posted in Bulbs, creatures, Plant Portraits, pots and containers
Tagged Achillea 'Terracotta', Anthemis 'Susanna Mitchell', Aster 'Monch', Bacillus thuringiensis, Baltic parsley Cenolophium denudatum, budworms, Chloris virgata, Coreopsis tinctoria 'Mahogany', Cussonia gamtoosensis, Derry Watkins Special Plants, Kalanchoe luciae 'Fantastic', lilies, lilium, Teucrium hircanicum, Verbena bonariensis
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the botanical bias of photographer Laure Joliet
I’d been admiring the photos of Laure Joliet long before I was able to put a name to her work. Her photos are everywhere — design blogs, The New York Times. She has a sneaky way of including plants in quite a lot of her work. And when I found her blog recently, the depth of her botanical bias was everywhere in evidence. This is just a small sample of her professional work as well some of the exquisite images she frequently posts to her blog.
Huntington Botanical Gardens, Desert Garden Conservatory
Huntington Botanical Gardens, Desert Garden Conservatory
Huntington Botanical Gardens, Desert Garden Conservatory
K is for kniphofia
These get moved around the garden quite a bit, one of the reasons I can never keep track of their proper names. This may possibly be Kniphofia ‘Glow,’ but I wouldn’t swear to it. Currently, this remaining clump is deep in the back, near the compost pile, an out-of-the-way place for experiments, yes, but also a last-chance proving ground for the beautiful but exasperating ones like kniphofia. For a plant, being moved ever closer to the compost pile is very much like placing a shovel at the ready near the plant in question, a not-so-veiled threat to clean up your act or risk being converted to compost. Threats aside, it’s also an open, sunny site that has the added advantage of hiding their copious leaves from view, which is the main reason they get uprooted so often. Kniphofias really do claim their fair share of garden real estate, and then some.
But when they’re in bloom, all is forgiven.
Just look at that demure, beseeching bend to their necks. “Why, we’re nothing but beautiful and no trouble at all!”
Haven’t we all tried that line before?
Back by the compost bin, they’ll have to duke it out with bare-knuckle streetfighters like macleaya, Arundo donax, and Japanese anemones.
Mazeltov. May the best plant win.
But just to prove I can occasionally be nice to plants and not always the severe taskmaster, here’s a kniphofia I just gave a prime location right outside my office, Kniphofia thompsonii var. snowdenii. I moved it from the front garden which is undergoing an impromptu revision as a result of planting a tree in the midst of all the sun lovers. You’ve gotta keep plants on their toes. Nobody is allowed to get complacent around here. The tree, Acacia podalyriifolia, has taken us all by surprise by growing in leaps and bounds, necessitating some reshuffling this spring as sunny conditions turn swiftly to shade under the acacia’s rapidly expanding canopy. I really should have moved this kniphofia anyway to a site with steadier moisture. It had practically none in the front garden.
Because here’s what a happy, mature clump looks like, photographed at Mendocino Botanical Garden 8/11. It looks quite different from my Kniphofia thompsonii var. snowdenii, but I think this is the effect of good culture and conditions it likes. And doesn’t everything look different in a botanical garden anyway, versus a small home garden where space is on a stingy budget? But there may be various forms in circulation. Confusing the issue is a kniphofia also listed as K. thomsonii, whose photo looks very similar to mine on Far Reaches Farm’s website, that I’ve also seen referred to as K. thomsonii var. thomsonii. Whatever its correct name, the blooms are more open and aloe-esque, the leaves thinner and tidier. Even in the poor conditions of the front garden, it bloomed more frequently than the garden hybrids, and the leaves stay neat and low. This one now has pride of place, sited well away from the compost bins…for now at least. Any clarification on the names thomsonii/thompsonii is most welcome.
when plants aren’t what you expected
And I mean in the specific sense of mail-ordering one plant and then receiving a different one. With plants, impostors and mix-ups can be difficult to detect. It’s not like mail-ordering a rug, which when it arrives two weeks later it’s immediately apparent that it’s the wrong color or size. In the slow-paced world of plants and gardens, the reckoning can come as much as a year later and even years beyond.
Take, for example, my hibiscus whose first bloom opened this morning.
I’m not going to name the excellent nursery from which I ordered this plant, because I’d hate to dissuade anyone from diving into their extensive catalogue listings. Everything else I’ve ordered has been accurately labeled. Nurseries with cutting-edge catalogues that try to keep the boundless appetites of plant fanatics satisfied while still managing to stay in business are bound to have a few slip-ups like this. And on the whole, the drama of mistaken identity adds undeniable excitement (such is my life).
The plant I ordered was Hibiscus moscheutos var. incanus. It was one of those mid-January, summer-starved, daydreamy purchases. (January 2012.) I was probably attracted to its silvery leaves and tolerance for dry soil. Like a cistus, its flowers were supposed to be white, not yellow, with a maroon throat. Not that the color of the bloom was important. Silvery leaves were the main attraction.
What opened today was a hibiscus with lovely, soft yellow flowers and dark green, okra-like leaves.
From the very beginning, the green leaves were a puzzle that indicated something might be amiss. Maybe they’ll change to silver when the plant matures, I reasoned. But the yellow bloom, which is slightly deeper in color than the photos depict, is the tipoff that this is something other than the hibiscus I ordered. From the nursery’s catalogue, it looks like possibly Hibiscus aculeatus, which they also carry, a native hibiscus from southern U.S. Or it could be Abelmoschus manihot.
Whatever it is, I love it. The flowers are thankfully not hybrid-huge in size but still a substantial 3 inches across, and the proportions of leaf and flower hold the promise of a graceful flowering shrub for summer. The only problem is, if this is Hibiscus aculeatus, it thrives in bogs and soggy ditches, conditions completely foreign to my garden.
For now I am carrying an extra gallon or so of water to this hibiscus, situated way in the back near the compost pile, where the hose is unable to reach this lovely mistake. About a foot and a half in height now, we’ll see how it fares by late August or so, assuming a disciplined watering program can be maintained — a big assumption.
Occasional Daily Photo 5/27/13
Driving through California Heights for a recent garden tour, just before sunset I happened upon this house, seemingly fixed in amber during the rancho period of old California. This little house sits (as does ours) on the 300,000-acre tract that was granted by the Spanish crown to a Spanish soldier, Manuel Nieto, in 1790 as a “reward for his military service and to encourage settlement in California,” a tract later broken up into five ranchos.
(California Heights, originally part of Rancho Los Cerritos)
friday flower studies
Is it Friday already?
Coreopsis tinctoria ‘Mahogany’
Large furry leaves of Plectranthus argentatus, spiky red orbs are Ricinus communis ‘New Zealand Purple, lacy gray leaves from Senecio viravira
Tiny, almost-black flowers on tall stems of Pelargonium sidoides
All together now, sing!
Let’s hope the most difficult decision to be made this holiday weekend is what to bring in for vases..
pattern seekers
That’s one thing at least we all have in common. And a craving for pattern is thankfully one of the easiest (and possibly the healthiest) to satisfy.
Unknown objects found at flea market. The seller thought they may have been used in making chocolate.
plant hunting late May
I’ve been checking out local nurseries the past couple weeks, both independents and chains/franchises, which isn’t news since I do this quite a lot, but bringing a serious intent to change some of the garden late in May is news. I know a lot of gardens are just beginning to send out their personal shoppers (us) in May, but a zone 10 summer garden should ideally be settled by now, planned and planted last fall, which always gives superior results compared to a spring planting, much less a late spring planting. There should be no more fiddling with it after May, because summer will knock most new plantings on their ass. But the Diascia personata really had to go. I think it’s a good plant with great potential, maybe a bit more afternoon shade. (Grace, I think you’d love it if the leaves stay clean for you.) And maybe it’s suited for larger gardens, not because of it’s size but because it’s best seen massed, and from a distance. That pinky-coral color never stopped grating on me, which is odd because I don’t mind it on the smaller diascias. On the whole, I prefer Diascia integerrima.
As a replacement, I was leaning towards something blue/violet, in agastaches maybe, but none were to be found local, and small-sized mail order plants would be of no use this late in the season. I settled on Salvia greggii ‘Salmon Dance,’ a) because, well, there it was in 4-inch pots; b) they’re tough as old boots; c) they’re not pink; and d) as a sloppy-seconds planting, at the very least the hummingbirds will be happy. Although it’s not a conscious plan, pink continues to be purged from the garden and the reign of orange goes on.
This morning I split off some pieces from a large clump of Pennisetum ‘Sky Rocket,’ which is just getting its burgundy plumes, to fill the gap along with the salvia. This pennisetum, planted last year, thickens fast but the blades seem to top out at a relatively modest height of 2 and half feet or so. If it holds to this height, it will prove to be a valuable grass indeed. Grown as an annual in zones below 8.
Image from San Marcos Growers
And though I didn’t find exactly what I needed, as is typical of plant nursery jaunts, I found lots that I wanted. There was a cordyline I haven’t seen before, Cordyline ‘Electric Star,’ the clumping kind with subtle, phormium-like coloration. I’d have been all over this cordyline in a smaller, cheaper size.
Another surprise was Isoplexis canariensis for sale locally, exquisitely in bloom in gallon containers at H&H Nursery, under their label. Always exciting to see a plant make the leap and graduate from rare and desirable to readily available and dependable. It’s still a little early to know just how dependable or long-lived. The photo is from my garden in April, but it’s still in bloom and sending out fresh spikes. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes as ubiquitous as that other strong orange, leonotis. Keeping with my orange/warm color fetish, there were a couple kniphofias at H&H I haven’t seen available local before, ‘Alcazar’ and ‘Nancy’s Red.’ Selections like these have previously been found only in Digging Dog’s catalogue.
Also at H&H was an unusual, smooth-skinned Kalanchoe beharensis appropriately named ‘Furless.’ I still can’t decide if smooth leaves are necessarily desirable in a Kalanchoe beharensis. Checking around, I find Glasshouse Works lists something similar called ‘Baby’s Bottom.’ I had no idea there was such variety with this kalanchoe, with some leaves deeply lobed. Mine pictured above was brought home from a plant sale last year, supposedly variegated. It hasn’t shown very strong variegation so far, but the edges do seem a bit more incised and ruffled than the species as I remember growing it.
I ran into this beauty, one of the annual Chilean bellflowers, nolana, at Brita’s nursery in Seal Beach, where it was growing in the ground, possibly from self-sowing.
A big, sprawling thing, with black stems and black splotches on the flower capsules. The nolana commonly available from seed is Nolana paradoxa, but an image search didn’t produce photos showing those sexy black markings.
And I was thrilled to score a couple Digitalis trojana in bloom and hopefully ready to throw some seed around. This is one I don’t mind planting in late spring, because if it’s anything like that other tawny foxglove from Turkey, Digitalis ferruginea, it will hate hanging on sleepless through a mild winter. If it self-sows, it just might find the perfect spot, the one I never seem to find for it.
Posted in plant nurseries, Plant Portraits
Tagged Brita's Old Town Gardens, Cordyline banksii 'Electric Star', Diascia integerrima, Diascia personata, Digging Dog Nursery, Digitalis trojana, H&H Nursery, Isoplexis canariensis, Kalanchoe beharensis 'Furless', Nolana paradoxa, Pennisetum 'Sky Rocket', San Marcos Growers
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