DryStoneGarden

Sweet Peas and Garden Pleasure Lily

I’ve mentioned before that we like cut flowers to have in the house and also give away. We don’t have enough space for a cutting garden, so we grow sweet peas, which earn their keep by fixing nitrogen and producing a lot of flowers in a small space. We had a white vine which finished months ago, but our purple vine is over ten feet tall and still going upwards, still in full bloom. For a while we could stand on a chair to cut them, but now the bulk of the flowers are too high even for that. It’s not even particularly ornamental any more; it’s more like an actual pea vine when the bottom of the plant is in decline, but the top is still too productive to take out of the garden. I’m not sure what happened to make it so vigorous.

sweet peas

Sweet peas in a few combinations are below. (more…)

Hello Neighbor!

For three years, there’s been a fifteen foot tall cactus in our neighbor’s yard, six feet away from our back door, but Anita and I never noticed until it bloomed. To be fair, most of the plant is behind a garden shed and fence, and we have to stand in rather contorted positions to view or photograph it, but I would have expected us to notice it before now. Though, this is a phenomenon I’ve observed before; some plants just are low-profile until they bloom. Hellebores, for instance, usually manage to stay below the radar and avoid detection until they finally bloom. I didn’t expect the same thing to happen with a fifteen foot tall cactus.

the view through our fence

Mimulus cardinalis

Our wet monkey, Mimulus cardinalis, has started blooming. There are two kinds of monkey flowers, ones that like wet soil and ones that like dry soil. The dry monkeys (also sometimes called sticky monkeys, preferably with a faux-British accent) are starting to get listed as Diplacus, instead of Mimulus, which makes some sense to me, even though the switch also causes some confusion. There’s not really anything similar about the wet and dry types — not the foliage, the form, the habitat, the cultural needs, and not the flowers — so I’m not sure how they got grouped together in the first place. Las Pilitas has a page devoted to the various monkey flowers that talks about the differences. I’ve grown a few different types of wet monkey flowers, but the only one in our garden now is the scarlet monkey flower in our bog planting.

Colocasia Black Magic and Mimulus cardinalis

Our bog planting is set inside an old cast-iron bathtub dug into the ground and covered over with mulch. The idea is that the water drains more slowly than it would in open ground, so we don’t have to irrigate these water-loving plants as often as we would otherwise, a way to keep our garden low-water without excluding all the plants we’re interested in growing. We filled it with 2/3 soil and 1/3 compost, which is a ton of amendment by our standards. The only outlet from the tub is the open drain at the bottom and we water it the same amount and on the same irrigation zone as the moderate-water section of the yard where we have the blueberries, the mock orange, the heucheras, the astilbes, and our young citrus tree, plants that you wouldn’t normally expect to share an irrigation zone with a colocasia, which is often grown directly in ponds and fountains.

Black Magic stems

Colocasia “Black Magic,” aka Elephant Ears for its big leaves, is a very cool plant. It’s in the low part of our yard, so we don’t have a good view of the black stems, though the stems are my favorite feature of the plant, even more so than the leaves. We also have Yerba Buena (Satureja douglasii) and Yellow-Eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium californicum) hanging out under the colocasia, and a canna growing behind it. This is the third summer for the planting, and the colocasia has steadily increased, while the canna seems to be fading.

Stream Orchid, Epipactis gigantea

Last month the Stream Orchid, (Epipactis gigantea) was the main bloomer in the tub. It still has a few blooms, but it’s mostly finished now. Not a showy flower, but interesting up close.

Stream Orchid, Epipactis gigantea

Epipactis gigntea and Mimulus cardinalis

I feel like the scarlet monkey flower doesn’t even have the same color tone as most California natives. It’s more like the nasturtiums which come up as volunteers in our yard. A yellow one recently came up in the bamboo behind the bathtub, so we’re hoping it will ramble out into the monkey flower patch before the monkeys stop blooming. It’s a little surprising to me that a California native would combine so well with colocasias and nasturtiums, but I guess I should know better by now. Photos of wet and dry monkey flower buds (the one similarity I find between the two kinds), the yellow nasturtium, and a raunchy close up of the stream orchid are below. (more…)