DryStoneGarden

Various Plants with Woodland Strawberry Groundcover

This bloom day we have a lot blooming, mostly in our outer garden, including Alliums, Sidalcea, and Campanula in the photo above, plus Hebe, Columbine, Salvia and others in full bloom off-camera. The inner garden has some things in bloom, but in transition between the first wave plants like the California Poppies and the Meadowfoam which already finished, and the second wave plants which are mostly just budding. The inner garden will probably go back to being the star by this time next month.

Carla with Poppies Blooming Last Month

Last month, I took a photo of the garden’s newest inhabitant posing courteously beside the Cal Poppies, but for some reason it didn’t make it into the post. This month she mostly seems to pose on top of the blooming plants, in this case Snow-in-Summer, rather than beside them. We actually have three different patches of Snow-in-Summer, and each of them seems to be the most comfortable at a different time of day, so Carla moves between them as the sun moves. Past dog inhabitants of our garden have also really liked to lie on the Snow-in-Summer, so it’s not just her. Those past dogs were fosters, but Carla is ours for keeps. Overall, she’s been pretty nice to the garden, which wasn’t originally designed to with a young dog in mind.

Carla with Poppies Cut Back This Month

Dicentra Bachanal

The garden has been accumulating Bleeding Hearts over the last couple of years to where we have almost a dozen now, mostly in containers. “Bachanal,’ above and in the foreground of the second photo with Carla, is the darkest, and the rest are the straight species but vary in how much pink they have. The one below is the palest, with just a touch of color.

Dicentra formosa

Blue Dick, Dichelostemma capitatum

I dumped some Blue Dick seed in a few containers of potting soil a couple of years ago, and this year they’re putting out their first few flowers. One of the easiest plants I’ve ever grown from seed, but slow. Next year they should be mature enough to make a decent show. The native alliums have reseeded a bit in our yard and we’re getting our first flowers from the volunteers this year.

Allium unifolium

Allium christophii

Some of the biggest flowers that we get all year are blooming right now. This non-native allium, A. christophii, has pom-poms bigger than my fist, and several kinds of hybrid Irises are going. There would have been some of them in that first photo at the top of the post, but they were cut for a Mother’s Day bouquet that Anita made. I handed off the bouquet and then realized I should have photographed it to add to this bloom day post. Ah, well.

Dutch Iris

Matillija Poppy aka Fried Egg Flower

The first Matillija Poppy opened this weekend.

Exterior Wrapping

Also our first Breadseed Poppy. We have a lot of them for some reason this year, in several parts of the garden. They’re more like a gift-wrapped package than any other flower I can think of, tissue paper on the outside and Fabergé egg inside.

The Prize Inside

My thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for being the creator and host of Bloom Day. Click over to her blog for links to tons of other bloggers showing off their flowers.

‘I never liked color.’ Wilfred Thesiger

I’ve been watercoloring quite a few of my evenings lately. It’s been fun; there’s improvement, though watercolor’s definitely one of those things that takes a minute to learn and a lot more than twelve weeks to master. The sketch above is from the class field trip to the Legion of Honor Museum. We were there to draw from the artwork, but I thought the building itself was impressive, like it was waiting for Stanley Kubrick to come do one of his slow tracking shots through the halls. I’m learning watercolor for on-site sketching and possibly for the drawings we do for clients, but much of what I did in the class was working off black and white photos.

The ones below are all copied from photos by Wilfred Thesiger. A little random, but I had to do something, but I’ve loved his photos for years. He was the last of the old-school desert explorers and one of the all-time great travelers. Arabian Sands about his explorations of the Empty Quarter of Saudia Arabia is one of the great books of travel literature, The Marsh Arabs, about his years living in the marshes of Iraq is also great, and the compilation, The Last Nomad, is one of my favorite books. His writing describes the landscapes and cultures with an amazing clarity, and the photos certainly don’t need any coloring efforts by me. There’s a selection of photos here, but really his work is best appreciated in an old-fashioned book with text and images together. Both the photos and the writing have a stark black and white expressiveness that I fascinates me. They aren’t gardening or design books, but there’s a lot of good stuff about landscape in them.

I don’t know a whole lot about the photos I was copying. The town above is named Shibam, in Yemen. Below is Liwa Oasis, showing that ‘oasis’ is very much a relative term.

The others are scenes from the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world.

The masked woman is from Oman. The last one below is from the marshes of Iraq, more of a drawing than a watercolor painting. We’ll see how much watercolor I do going forward. I did feel like it got its hooks into me, so these probably won’t be my last.

For the past few weeks, Anita and I have been enjoying a wildflower planting in the new medians on Carlson Ave near our house. For years Carlson was an oddly humped road that had such a steep cross-slope near the sidewalk that the car door would hit the curb before it opened all the way and bicycling felt treacherous. To fix that, the city had to lower the street more than two feet to bring it down below the sidewalk, and in the process they also had to lower all of the utilities. The entire project took more than two years, involved all kinds of blocking of cross-streets and traffic, and was hugely inconvenient. But all is now forgiven, as far as I’m concerned, because the city added a median to the street and filled it with twelve blocks worth of wildflowers, many of them native. I’m happy to have my roads blocked if it means I get to drive and bicycle past wildflowers.

So far, I’ve seen California Poppies, Bachelor Buttons, Tidy Tips, Baby Blue Eyes, Alyssum, Lupine, and a few Snapdragons blooming, and there is a lot of Clarkia waiting for next month.

Hmmm…. Be careful what you praise on the internet. The same day that I put this post up, the city weedwacked all of the wildflowers. I’m guessing the planting grew too tall and was blocking visibility, but the city might also be ready to plant trees now. Farewell (to Spring), Clarkia, we never saw you bloom.

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

Along with Sunday’s landscape architecture tour this weekend, my favorite native plant event of the year — the native plant sale at Tilden — is happening on Saturday. At this point I rarely buy more than a plant or two, but I like seeing everyone lining up before the start of the sale and the mad rush to the rarest plants, and of course the garden itself is amazing this time of year.

Fawn Lilies, Erythronium sp

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

The one thing on my wish list is seed of an Erythronium species. I’ve been admiring them for a while, but have never grown one and haven’t seen them in gardens much. The Pacific Bulb Society webpage makes them sound like they grow similarly to the native Leopard Lilies — slow, easy, likes good soil, and worth the wait. I would love to have a big patch of these.

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

At past years we’ve worked as volunteers and had longer wish lists of plants, but this year Anita and I will just be spectators. After years of watching the frenzied native plant shopping at the sale, last year I noticed that the alders in the middle of the sale area were watching it, too.

Alders Have Eyes

Levis Plaza

Next Sunday the 22nd, Anita will be leading a bicycle tour of a few landscape architecture projects in San Francisco. The tour goes to two hugely influential and historic projects, Levi’s Plaza pictured above, and Crissy Field, along with several other compelling spaces. You may already know these places, but this is your opportunity to see them with a beautiful and knowledgeable guide.

DETAILS:

What: Casual bike tour from the Embarcadero winding through downtown to Crissy Field

When: 9AM to noon, April 22, 2012

Where: Meet under the clock outside the Embarcadero Ferry Building

Cost: FREE! but must RSVP to contact below

Contact: Anita Bueno, abueno@asla-ncc.org, 510-282-4918

Rain cancels, call to confirm

View from the New Office

Happy Bloom Day. This is the view from our new office. I still need to stucco the exterior, so I haven’t really gone through and photographed it for a post, but we’ve been moved into it for about a month now. It’s not a large office, and right now it’s full of stacks of paperwork for our taxes. There are worse things than doing taxes and bloom day posts in a garden office.

Coastal Cal Poppy and Blue-Eyed Grass

Lots of poppies are blooming throughout the garden, mostly yellow-tinged coastal ones in the outer garden and red-tinged ‘Mahogany Red’ offspring in the inner garden, with a few regular orange ones showing up in both areas.

Mahogany Red Cal Poppy and Variegated Iris

Meadowfoam and Cal Poppies

We have meadowfoam blooming in several areas. During construction of the office, I relocated our bathtub bog planting to the outer garden. It get the roof runoff from office now. When I moved the tub, I replanted everything. Mimulus cardinalis came roaring back right away. The Colocasia has been slower to recover, but it’ll start muscle up out of the mimulus soon. A surprise appearance was meadowfoam. I had grown some of them in the tub its first year, but they got out-competed and disappeared until I turned the soil and replanted everything. I’m sure they’ll get out-competed again, but it was nice to see them this year. Kind of funky to see them growing through the agave sitting in a container in front of the tub.

Calocasia Black Magic, Mimulus Cardinalis, Meadowfoam, Agave

Ninebark with some older Heuchera maxima flowers

The Iochroma has been in full bloom for several weeks now. I’m really happy with how it grows up through the spicebush as if it were all one plant, giving it a longer bloom season and making for a more evergreen shrub. The flowers are a different tone of red, but peak at different times of the year.

Iochroma with Spicebush Leaves

Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Spicebush

And the best thing in our garden right now is the plein air shower. Our Wisteria is a Japanese variety, W. floribunda, so the bloom stalks are long, fragrant, and they open slowly. We’re about a week away from when the flowers hang so low they brush against you and get in your hair and it feels like you’re bathing in flowers. It’s already pretty fantastic, though.

Wisteria Shower

Later today, I’ll probably take another break from taxes to post a list of everything in bloom in the garden. My thanks to Carol at MayDreasGardens for creating and hosting Bloom Day. April is always one of the best months to surf around on bloom day, so click through to her blog for tons of links.