DryStoneGarden

Philadelphus microphyllus

Yesterday was bloom day. Our garden’s happy but messy. That storm at the beginning of the month was good for foliage and flowers, though it also spread bamboo leaves everywhere, which we still need to tidy up. The star right now is our mock orange, Philadelphus micranthus, which you can smell as soon as you come up the stairs into the garden.

Brodiaea with Nigella

Brodiaea is in bloom throughout the yard. We have two varieties; the bluer ones are ‘Corrina,’ the more purple ones are ‘Queen Fabiola.’ I always have to look it up to remember which is which.

Brodiaea with Salvia Hot Lips

Brodiaea with Dudleya

Several of the dudleyas are budding or blooming. They are all somewhat close to our walkway and their bloom stalks have a tendency to get damaged before the flowers open. This one is nicely ensconced amongst some brodiaea so it has stayed safe.

Lilium parryi

I grew a bunch of these native lilies from seed, germinating them three four years ago. They’ve been impressively tolerant of neglect, but slow. This is the first year I’m getting a significant number of blooms; last year we had a few, this year maybe a dozen. I think the leopard lily is the cooler flower, but the lemon lily is less common and also beautiful, so I tend to prize it more.

Leopard Lily, Lilium pardalinum

Scarlet Monkey Flower Mimulus cardinalis with Stream Orchid Epipactis gigantea

All of our monkey flowers are in bloom. The orange monkey and the scarlet monkey are thriving; a red monkey, Mimulus puniceus, is getting swallowed up by Matilija poppy and a hybrid monkey seems to be in decline after several years of heavy flowering.

Mimulus aurantiacus

Bloom Day is hosted as always by Carol at MayDreamsGardens. My thanks to her. Click over for links to over a hundred and fifty other blogs posting about their flowers. The list of everything blooming in our yard is below. (more…)

Ach, I’m a day late for bloom day. I haven’t been paying much attention to our garden or posting much about it lately. I’ve found myself focusing my attention more on other gardens, the ones I work in and a number of ones that I’ve visited this spring. One reason is that Anita and I have been thinking about moving. I think I’ve mentioned before that our house is only 480 square feet (many living rooms are larger than that), and it gets very small in the winter. Anita has an office but I do the design part of our design/build from home. Summer we’re able to spread out into the garden so space isn’t such an issue, but we genuinely need more space and we don’t want another cramped winter. Instead of moving, though, we’ve made a tentative deal with our landlord to build a small garden shed/studio space. I’m not sure if that would lose us our small house movement credit. Anyways, there’s an old existing shed in the garden already, and the plan is to upgrade it to a proper little structure, which I’m sure I’ll have some posts about in the future. For a while there, while we were thinking of moving, Anita and I were physically and psychologically getting ready to leave the garden, but now that we’re staying I can feel myself re-engaging. May is a great month for gardens, a lot of our plants are blooming.

Coreopsis, Triteleia, and Penstemon

Allium unifolium

The Allium unifolium has increased steadily each year. It has reseeded politely in a couple of places, with several of the volunteers blooming this year. I thinks it’s an under-appreciated, under-planted native.

Sacred Flower of the Incas

The Sacred Flower is in a container and would move with us, but tit’ll be happy to stay. Our foggy coastal sun makes it happy.

Canna and Western Spicebush

We had a mishap with our gray water planting a few weeks ago, accidentally switching the hot and cold water hoses on our washing machine, dumping hot water into the planter box. The Canna didn’t care, if anything the hot water made it happier, but the Fuchsia ‘Gartenmeister Bonstadt’ burned to a crisp. We think it will recover, but it lost all of its foliage and at least some of the wood. A gray water risk I wasn’t aware of. The Spicebush is located a little further from where the gray water comes out of the pipe, so it doesn’t seem to have noticed. It has definitely taken over the space.

I thought I might take a few more bloom photos this afternoon, but it has started raining quite hard. The list of other plants in bloom is below. Thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting Bloom Day. Over 150 blogs have posted links to their bloom day posts; I recommend clicking over to check it all out. The list of everything blooming in our yard is below. (more…)

Unidentified Freesia

Happy tax and bloom day everyone. I was set up on our front porch yesterday, enjoying the garden and the weather while I went through our receipts, and it was actually quite pleasant. Our garden is in full spring mode, with almost all of our deciduous plants leafed out and most of the spring bloomers in bud or blooming. For some reason, my photos this month mostly show stray plants that ended up in our garden after they were leftover from installations. As a result I’m a little more vague about their identities than usual. For instance, the freesia is from some bulbs that were salvaged in the process of building a path. We put them in some pots to find out their colors. Orange!

Allium unifolium, Tellima grandiflora, Dicentra formosa

Allium unifolium we can identify, though they also end up in our yard as leftovers from installations. We have them in pots and in the ground. The ones in pots are all budding or blooming, while the ones in the ground are just starting to bud.

Unidentified Allium

I don’t remember what type of alliums these are. We forced them in some containers a few years ago and then I forgot about them while they were in the ground recharging. The digging of the skunks has moved them around the yard a bit, too, so it was a surprise to me when they bloomed in a patch of Sysirinchium.

Unidentified Orchid

Anita brought home this orchid after she divided my mom’s orchids several years ago. Not too bad.

Meadowfoam and Geranium Bill Wallis

Meadowfoam I planted on purpose. It’s one of our main spring bloomers, naturalized in several different parts of the garden.

Meadowfoam

Unidentified Babiana

We have a couple of different varieties of Babiana, in varying shades of purple and blue.

Cal Poppy

This Cal poppy is in the veggie garden where we’ve grown a few different strains over the years. It looks like it has Mahogany Red in its parentage. For a while I was going in a purist direction with our poppies, taking it down to just the coastal form in our outer garden, but now I’m glad I left some of the hybrids around the veggies. It’s good to be surprised when the flowers open.

My thanks as always to Carol for hosting bloom day. Click through to MayDreamsGardens to find links to over one hundred and fifty other blogs doing the same. I try to keep a record of everything blooming, but I haven’t compiled the list yet. I’ll add it tomorrow or Sunday. (more…)

Miners Lettuce with Geranium Bill Wallis

It’s a wet March bloom day, with the plants looking a bit storm addled. Our first poppy of the year opened on Sunday, but now it’s curled back up, waiting for the sun. The Sisyrinchiums, Geranium ‘Bill Wallis,’ and a few other bloomers are also hunkered down with their petals closed up. A lot of plants have buds and look like they are waiting for the next sunny day to open everything.

Species Tulip, Tulipa saxatilis

Hardenbergia

Hellebore

Freesia

Ninebark, Physocarpus capitatus

As always, my thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardensfor hosting bloom day. Click over to see what over a hundred other bloggers have blooming in their gardens today.

I thought this might be early for the ninebark and late for our Hardenbergia, but looking back at last March’s bloom day, the garden seems to be on a remarkably similar schedule. The bloom list for this year is below. (more…)

Giant Coreopsis, Coreopsis gigantea

A couple of weeks ago our Giant Coreopsis started blooming. The flowers aren’t totally exceptional, big yellow daisies with a nice color, but I’ve been waiting four years for them and this might be the bloom event of the year for our garden, in February already. For some reason I really like this plant, the strangeness of a perennial stuck on top of a succulent trunk, and it has been fun and easy to grow it even before the flowers. The key, I think, has been keeping it in a container; for the first few years it looked overly anatomical after dropping its leaves and I felt like I should put it away out of sight where it wouldn’t offend anyone. Last year it developed another trunk, eliminating that effect, and now the second trunk is the one making the flowers.

Giant Coreopsis

The Louis Edmunds Manzanita, a February bloomer, is in the ground next to it. Since I began keeping this blog and following bloom day, I’ve gotten much better at knowing the bloom times of the different manzanitas. Louis Edmunds might be my favorite manzanita.

Arctostaphylos Louis Edmunds

Daffodils and Geranium Bill Walls

That ridiculously warm and sunny January has the garden well woken up. It’s now easier to fit multiple flowers into a photo. Last month it would have been hard or impossible.

Ceanothus Carmel Creeper

February is an interesting month for flowers, so be sure to check in at MayDreamsGardens to see what other garden bloggers have blooming. Thanks to Carol for hosting.

The list of other plants in bloom in our garden is below the fold. (more…)

Iochroma coccinea

The blooms are a little thin for bloom day this November, but I haven’t done bloom day in a couple of months and I like to keep track of what’s blooming in the garden this late in the year. A few of the ever-bloomers like Alyssum and Blessed Calendula are going, plus several red flowers which don’t match each other all that well. The Iochrmoa coccinea has climbed up through the Spicebush and has put out several clusters of flowers. The spicebush itself has a few flowers and some buds, and the Fuchsia ‘Gartenmeister Bonstedt’ has foliage and flowers leaning against the spicebush too. The Iochroma doesn’t match the more pinky red of the spicebush and the fuchsia, but it is keeping its flowers carefully sequestered.

Spicebush

Gartenmeister Bonstedt Fuchsia

One of our California fuchsias is blooming too, in another part of the garden. We have two different seed-grown varieties of California fuchsia, and this one with grayer foliage is the better one. It has been in full bloom for more than a month; the other one, with similar soil, exposure, and watering regime put out only a few flowers and mostly just tends to look like a tumbleweed.

Caliornia fuchsia

And we’ve let some of the Rocoto Peppers mature to a red color. They’re too hot for us when they get this red, but I like the look of them for this time of year; they remind me of Christmas lights.

Rocoto Pepper

Several other plants are in token bloom. The Indigofera still has flowers but is winding down its bloom season, some poppies are flowering, the young Arctostaphylos ‘John Dourley,’ the geraniums in the veggie garden, a couple of Sisyrinchiums, and there are a few Meadowfoam flowers doing a very light fall bloom. That’s about it, just enough to keep the hummingbird happy. My thanks, as always, to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting Bloom Day. Click through for links to over a hundred bloggers showing off their blooms.