DryStoneGarden

Wow

To my complete astonishment, the highlight of my day yesterday was the Lowes parking lot in Concord. It has the biggest, bloomingest, most successful wildflower meadow I’ve ever seen. I have some cynical thoughts about it — it was probably done to appease environmentalists or the planning commission, it was probably amended with all the damaged bags of Miracle Grow, Monsanto probably supplied the seed mix — but it was impressive nevertheless. Not something I expected to see at a big box store.

Tidy Tips, Layia platyglossa

Tidy Tips predominated in the bio-swale, Chinese Houses on the berms.

I had never been to Lowes before and it turned out to be even more like Home Depot than I expected, but my hat’s off to whoever is responsible for that meadow.

Tidy Tips, Baby Blue Eyes, Alyssum, and African Daisy

Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflora

It’s seeding time for California wildflowers. It’s mid-October and the recent rains have germinated the reseeders, both wanted and unwanted. We always start some in potting soil this time of year, so that we can direct seed the wildflowers we want and then use the potting soil starts to fill in any gaps where the direct seeding failed. One of the ones we’re starting this year, after a couple of years break, is Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflorus. We started it in a couple of gardens three years ago and hadn’t really thought about it since then, but this year we noticed that it naturalized pretty well in those gardens and that it keeps blooming until quite late in the year, all the way thru September in the garden where it gets some supplemental water. Also, we saw a thick patch of it in the Botanic Garden at Tilden in July, looking good when most of the other native annuals were done, made us want to plant some more of it.

Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflorus, at Tilden

We also started California Wind Poppy (Stylomecon heterophylla), which we grew for the first time this past year, Blue Flax (Linum lewisii) which isn’t an annual but functions a bit like one, and Clarkia bottae. The rest of the wildflowers will just be whatever reseeds.

Sierra Lily, Lilium kelleyanum

I was up in the east side at a great time for wildflowers. One area that really impressed me was at Agnew Meadows in Devil’s Postpile National Monument. In one place, a boggy meadow beside a stream, I counted a dozen different wildflowers in full bloom within a twenty foot radius, and I was impressed at how well the colors all complimented each other, purple-blues contrasted with yellows. I saw the same flowers growing together in various combinations at many of the other meadows and streamsides in the monument and the national forest, but because they were all present at once in Agnew I started to think of them as the Agnew Meadows wildflower mix, like it was some seed company’s wildflower packet. For a moist cottage garden at high elevation, I reckon you couldn’t do much better.
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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.

Dichelostemma (I think capitatum, though possibly congestum, we’re not botanists and lose track of that kind of thing sometimes) with a California poppy, Eschscholzia californica.

meadowfoam and stream orchid

meadow foam and maianthemum

Tomorrow is the Bringing Back the Natives Tour. The Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden and the Fleming garden, both on the tour, are two of the states oldest and best gardens for California natives, 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. The two gardens are somewhat linked, besides the fact that they are both in the Berkeley hills; I don’t know exact details of the histories of either garden, but I do know that Jenny Fleming was involved with the botanic garden, and her garden is sort of like she made a condensed, concentrated form of the botanic garden at her own home. 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.

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 a lot of the same plants at every garden, but in this case it’s interesting to see similar plants used in both settings. The naturalized plantings of meadow foam, Limnanthes 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. The meadow foam is an annual, but it’s growing in a way that only happens in a mature garden.

Below, I put more photos of meadow foam below: the Pt. Reyes form naturalized among some aspens at the botanic garden, the regular form naturalized in our vegi garden without anything interplanted, two flowers of the regular form popping up through a snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus, in our garden, and the regular form with the stream orchid again. It grows naturally in vernal pools, so all the plants it’s combined with can take wet spring conditions. It’s not the prettiest plant after it finishes blooming, while you wait for the seeds to form, and it’s kind of weedy looking even while you wait for the flowers, but for now it’s looking really nice. (more…)