DryStoneGarden

The Garden

I took some photos of the garden on Wednesday during a break in the weather. Something about the light misting rain made everything look like spring had begun. The foliage on the plants was green and happy, and now today, three days later, a number of new plants are in bloom. The first Sisyrinchiums opened, the first of the species Tulips, the first Oxalis cultivar, the first of the Bearded Irises, and the first Cal Poppies on the block opened next door, with ours sending up buds. I was wondering if the warm dry January might have brought an early spring, but looking at a post from last year it seems that the plants are leafing out on a similar schedule, and looking at last year’s March bloom day post I think the bloom times are nearly the same. I’ll be able to compare on bloom day, and I’ll probably do a post later this month when more things have leafed out.

Favas, Parsley, Chard

The veggie garden liked the February weather, the alternating rain and sun, and the abundance of worm juice produced by the rain. The favas were planted earlier this year, and as a result are blooming earlier too.

Chaos

Our shadiest bed is now devoted to three blueberries and chaotic mix of Yerba Buena with reseeding Miner’s Lettuce, Mache, and Cal Poppies.

Rocoto Pepper

I havent been giving the Rocoto Pepper enough credit for its ornamental value. The peppers have been the most consistently bright thing in the garden all winter. There used to be more of them on the plant, but the last couple of storms have knocked a lot of them to the ground and we’ve been of course harvesting them. The red ones are hot, so we rarely use more than one of them in a single dish. Last winter the plant went mostly deciduous, but this year it didn’t drop any leaves. If it were rising out of a denser planting it would look great.

Rocoto Pepper

New Zealand Tree Fuchsia and Tasmanian Tree Fern

The New Zealand Tree Fuchsia has about a dozen flowers but they have the same green to red coloring as the leaves and you can’t see them unless you’re up close. It had flowers for last months bloom day, but I didn’t notice them.

Ribes sanguineum, Colocasia Black Magic

I like how the Ribes looks with the Colocasia and the bamboo. A lot of the woodland natives look rather tropical when surrounded by all of the bamboo in our garden.

Ninebark Leafing Out

The ninebark leafed out after the Ribes sanguineum ‘White Icicle’ in the shade but before the seed-grown Ribes sanguineum in the sun. The Ribes sanguineum opened its first flower yesterday.

Tulipa saxatilis

And its nice to see the first of the species Tulips opening. They are a week earlier than last year, but I think that’s because they are naturalized this year. Last year was the first time I planted them and they have about doubled in number. Pretty nice.

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…)

Before -- June

‘Having a casual, wild, productive, diverse, beautiful vegetable garden is frankly a lot more fun than watering and mowing and pouring pesticides on our lawns.’ Fritz Haeg

Another collection of photos from last year, shots of a lawn-to-vegetable-garden conversion we did. Before this one, we hadn’t had good success installing veggie gardens for clients. We’ve incorporated them into larger designs and helped with ideas for the layout and so forth, and a lot of our clients have already had an area of veggies somewhere in their yards, but the couple of veggie gardens that we had personally installed and planted just ended up being neglected and later converted to ornamentals. Veggie gardens seem to require a certain amount of personal involvement and DIY spirit; you have to really want to go out and dig and weed and plant, and the sweat equity of the installation seems to be part of the motivation for following through and making it a success. Anyways, with this garden we did the layout and the lawn conversion around the beds, and left the installation and planting of the veggie beds to the client. It was a lot of fun to go back and see what got planted and to hear about the harvests.

After -- Late June

The installation was actually pretty simple and easy. We dug out a little bit of the grass in the corner near the gate, but for the most part we left the lawn in place and just put the paths, boxes, and plantings on top of it, laying weedcloth in the places where we wanted gravel, cardboard where we wanted plants or veggie boxes. The clumps that we did dig out we buried at the bottom of the raised beds underneath cardboard. None of the grass has come back, without using any chemicals or hauling any of the grass to the dump.

Late June

The raised beds are prefabbed from a company in Oregon, just plopped down on top of the lawn and filled with soil. The client is a good carpenter and would have normally built the boxes himself, but the logistics of the project were much easier with them ready-made. It’s a pretty slick design (the boards are modular, the pins that hold the boards in place can also serve to anchor hoops or stakes, the wood is a rot-resistant hardwood) and installation took only a couple of hours, one of those things where it’s easy to copy the design but even easier to just buy it. A nice aspect of this site was that putting the veggie boxes on the diagonal made them orthogonal to north.

July

November

December -- Favas Newly Planted in the Front Bed

There’s an architect, Fritz Haeg (he has a blog while he is in Rome on a fellowship), who has made lawn-to-veggie-garden conversions a big focus of his career. He has a book, Edible Estates, Attack on the Front Lawn, and there’s an interview on the ASLA blog from shortly after I did this project. Clearly, he doesn’t work in deer country, or his attack would include 8-foot-high fences, but it’s great to see someone really promoting the idea of changing lawn to edibles as a political, cultural, and environmental act.

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.

Trachycarpus fortunei on the left, Brahea edulis on the right

Our client at the cracked pot garden recently went through her garden ID’ing all of the plants, a task which was harder than you might think because it was originally planted by a horticulturalist with a love for variety. There are six kinds of lavender, for instance, and both Julia Phelps and Dark Star Ceanothus, two of the most similar forms of Ceanothus. The plant list for the garden is about as long as the list for my entire planting career, or at least it feels that way. Anyways, in the process, we were trying to ID the palms in the garden, a new horticultural task for me. I’ve never planted a palm and don’t know them well, though I’m starting to appreciate them; they might be my favorite element in this particular garden. They look great with the mix of foliage, and in particular with a couple of California natives, the mounding forms of Fremontodendron and Ceanothus.

Brahea edulis

I really like the combination of the Brahea edulis with the low, mounding form of Fremontodendron, F. californicum decumbens. Both plants have a prehistoric look to them.

Blue Mediterranean Fan Palm, Chamaerops humilis cerifera

Another nice native with non-native combo, the Blue Mediterranean Fan Palm against the the dark green foliage of ceanothus behind it.

Trachycarpus wagnerianus?

According to the original plant list, one of the Trachcyarpus specimens is T. wagnerianus, the (relatively) dwarf species of windmill palm. I think this is the one. It’s smaller in size than the others and it’s sited where I would expect to find the dwarf planted, but I don’t know enough about palms to be sure.

I also don’t know what this one in a container is, something dwarf and slow. It looks good against the Chondropetalum behind it. Quite a few other plants were figured. Among others, we ID’ed the aster-family shrub I showed in April. It’s a Shrub Aster, Felicia fruticosa, a good plant to know. It’s quite the show-stopper when it blooms.

Lobelia Queen Victoria

The word on the street is that this summer has been the coldest and foggiest in the Bay Area in 39 years. I can believe it; it has been so foggy and windy at our house, I started wearing long johns last week. The plants in our garden don’t seem to mind as much as I do. I don’t notice any particular lack of flowers, and the usual late-summer suspects are all blooming. I missed last month’s bloom day, but most of the same plants are still in bloom, with the Lobelia and the Stargazer Lily being the two main ones that hadn’t quite opened in mid-July.

Stargazer Lily

In June we accidentally let our containerized native lilies dry out, so they declined to bloom this year. The Stargazer is in the ground, so it’s flowering nicely.

Indigofera

The Indigo Bush, Indigofera heterantha, behind the Stargazer is our reliable summer-blooming shrub. It has been happy this year, with none of the aphids that appeared on it last year around this time. The ornamental oregano at its feet hasn’t seemed to attract as many honey bees as usual, probably because the weather has been so chilly.

Western Spicebush, Calycanthus occidentalis

The Western Spicebush is our other summer blooming shrub. It has been going for several months now, with lots of seed heads, flowers, and new buds. It loves the graywater from our laundry machine.

Rocoto Flowers

The Rocoto pepper is also enjoying a long season. The flowers aren’t very noticeable from a distance, but I like them up close. I don’t think people with sunny vegetable gardens can appreciate how happy I am to find a pepper that produces so well in our foggy, part-sun site.

Coyote Mint, Monardella villosa

The Coyote Mint, Monardella villosa, also has a long bloom season in our garden. And the Beach Primrose, Camissonia cheiranthifolia, has been going for a while. It’s doing a nice job of sending flowers out into some of the other plants around it.

Dudleya plant, Camissonia flower

Thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting bloom day. Click through to find links to tons of other blogs showing off what they have in flower. Below, I have a list of our other plants in bloom.
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