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Maintaining Ornamental Grasses

California fescue & striped agave

California fescue, Festuca californica, in February

To illustrate how to maintain grasses for Anita’s class, we took photos of the process with one of our California fescues (Festuca Californica). The first photo is in late February with the grass full of fresh growth from the rains. California fescue is a cool season grower, so its growing season starts in the fall and ends in the spring after it blooms.   (more…)

Brodiaea Agapanthaflora?

Brodeia

Brodiaea

I’m a pretty loyal California native planter, but I had my confidence in one of the native bulbs, Brodiaea, shaken recently. We’ve been planting “Corrina” and “Queen Fabiola” for a couple of years, and they’re good small bulbs for our area — they have pretty blue flowers, they don’t take much space, and they don’t require any irrigation, you just fall-plant them and walk away. But then a friend of mine said they looked like agapanthus. Ouch.

agapanthus

agapanthus

That might not sound like a big deal to non-Californians, but around here agapanthus is the omnipresent strip-mall/sub-division/highway-median plant. Plenty of gardeners from other areas seem to like it — for instance, Garden Design magazine recently featured a French garden named Le Jardin Agapanthique, which to me is like naming it the Privet Garden — but it gets no love here. The flower is okay, I guess, but the foliage is too glossy for our landscape; it looks plastic and fake next to the more silver and gray foliage of other low water plants. I sort of respect the plant’s bomb-proof toughness — I once dug a bunch out of the ground and dumped it all in a pile in the sun in the middle of summer and three weeks later it was still blooming — but I’ve demoed a lot of it, and I find that it’s always heavy, it’s always full of snails, and it always leaves behind nasty wormlike white roots. My apologies to any agapanthus gardeners out there, but I don’t like it.

So it’s kind of disturbing to think that Brodiaea resembles agapanthus. Do other people see the similarity? There’s a photo of the Brodiaea foliage below, and, upon reflection, the leaves are actually kind of glossy, and the fact that they flop over and then turn brown doesn’t sound like much of an improvement over the agapanthus. But Brodiaeas are pretty. Maybe I like agapanthus more than I admit? I’ll still plant the Brodiaea — the Van Engelen catalogue just came, 100 bulbs for $10, such a deal — I just think I’ll have a faint touch of sheepishness when I see it in our gardens for a while. (more…)

Sedum Spathulifolium

Sedum spathulifolium

Sedum spathulifolium

Our Sedum spathulifolium (stonecrop) has started blooming. I like the flower buds better than the flowers, which are a bit too mustardy for my taste.

Sedum spathulifolium

Sedum spathulifolium

In our garden we have it in containers. I keep accidentally knocking off little pieces of it, which I then put in potting soil to root and make new plants. I now have six little sedums in thimble pots and stubbies, a couple of which are preparing to bloom. We planted spathulifolium in a couple of gardens last year, but we tend to reserve for extreme sites where it takes a while to establish and spread, so the plants aren’t really photo worthy yet.

Sedum spathulifolium

Sedum spathulifolium

The Fleming garden has the best planting of it that I’ve seen, cascading down the slope between the rocks. It can be hard to get plants to survive, let alone thrive, on a slope that steep, but the spathulifolium clearly likes the extreme exposure; easy to see why it’s one of the main California natives that appears on green roof plant lists, like the one for the Academy of Sciences Building. I have several more photos from the Fleming garden below. I wish I’d been there when the light had been more amenable to photos, but I don’t see a way to fix that, other than to wait for our own slope-planted plants to spread so I can photograph them at the optimum hours of the day. (more…)

Seed Grown Sidalcea Malviflora

Sidalcea malviflora, checkerbloom

Sidalcea malviflora, checkerbloom

Our Sidalcea malviflora (checkerbloom), grown from seed, surprised us when the different plants put out different shades of flowers. They’re just about done blooming for the year. We don’t water them, so they’ll go dormant and disappear at some point and then come back with the rains.

California Peony

Paeonia californica, California peony

Paeonia californica, California peony

The California peony is blooming at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden in Berkeley. I’d never seen one blooming before. To quote Las Pilitas, “You need perfect drainage, a very green thumb, and luck with this one.”

Paeonia californica, California peony

Paeonia californica, California peony

Deborah Small’s Ethnobotany Blog has a beautiful photo of one growing wild.

— Addendum —

California Peony going dormant

California Peony going dormant

A photo of the peony going dormant in early July.

Naturalized Meadow Foam, Limnanthes Douglasii

Pt. Reyes meadow foam at the Tilden bot garden

Pt. Reyes meadow foam at the Tilden bot garden

Tomorrow is the Bringing Back the Natives Tour and I will be certain to visit two particular gardens on the tour, the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden and the Fleming garden, two of the states oldest and best gardens for California natives. The are great gardens on any day, and right about now is the time when they look their best.

The Fleming garden is the absolute must-see garden of the tour. It goes way beyond what is typical of a residential or native garden, and I think it’s especially interesting to also see the botanic garden on the same day. I don’t know exact history of either garden, but I do know that Jenny Fleming was involved with the botanic garden to some extent throughout the years, and her garden feels like a condensed, concentrated form of the botanic garden at a private home, with a lot of similar plants and combinations. Luke Hass, who does the maintenance for the Fleming garden, has a couple of articles about the garden on his website. RootedinCalifornia has some recent photos and the tour’s website has others. It’s an amazing garden that has to be seen in person to be appreciated.

meadowfoam and stream orchid

meadowfoam and stream orchid

Both gardens are over fifty years old, which makes them unique places to see native plants used in Bay Area gardens. Often times on native tours it can be boring to see the same plants at every garden, but in this case it’s interesting to compare how the plants are used in the two settings. The naturalized plantings of meadow foamLimnanthes douglasii, are a good example. In the Fleming garden it’s intermingled with stream orchid, Epipactis gigantea, while the Tilden garden has the yellow form, Pt. Reyes meadow foam, Limnanthes douglasii var. sulphurea, with Maianthemum. Meadow foam is an annual, but it’s growing in a way that only happens in a mature garden.

meadow foam and maianthemum

meadow foam and maianthemum

Partly as a result of seeing it at Tilden and the Fleming garden, I have it at my house as well, in the veggie garden in between some of the edibles and in our outer garden where it is growing up through the Snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus. It’s not the prettiest plant after it finishes blooming, while you wait for the seeds to form, but the flowers are charming and it combines really nicely with other plants.

meadow foam flower with snowberry foliage

meadow foam flower with snowberry foliage

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