DryStoneGarden

In one of the gardens where I’m working this summer, all of the citrus have had the peels eaten away by some kind of animal. I’ve never seen this before; it looks really strange. The garden is near Berkeley’s so-called ‘Gourmet Ghetto’ in a relatively urban neighborhood that probably has some rats lurking about. Do rats do this? Do they like lemon zest? It doesn’t look like something squirrels or birds would do, and I can’t think of anything else that would do this.

— Update 8/30 — I asked at one of the nurseries and someone there said, yep, it was rats. Kind of gross.

I’ve mostly been hiking with a sketchbook lately, but I did take my camera on one hike, to Lukens Lake in Yosemite. It was a drizzly overcast day and I really just picked Lukens Lake because it’s only a mile from the road and I’d never hiked to it before, but it turned out to be a great destination (surprise, surprise, a great spot in Yosemite NP, right?), with some of the best wildflowers patches I’ve ever seen. I counted two dozen different species blooming in about a one hundred yard radius.

The mix is similar what I saw at Agnew Meadows a couple of years ago. Both spots are upper montane forest at similar elevations (8,100 feet for Agnew Meadows, 8,200 feet for Lukens Lake) and they might be less than a hundred miles apart as the crow flies, though Lukens Lake is on the west slope of the Sierras, Agnew Meadows on the east. Agnew Meadows has the bigger Lily, L. kelleyanum, compared to Small Tiger Lily, L. parvum, at Lukens, but otherwise many of the plants were the same.

Small Tiger Lily is, like the name says, one of the smaller lilies out there, but there’s still something about these flowers that always stops me in my tracks. They’re not much bigger or showier than Western Columbine, but they make the whole space feel like a garden.

Though Columbines are also pretty great.

Corn Lily was the dominant plant visually. I’m really starting to appreciate them, for the flowers but also the way the other wildflowers are set off against their leaves.

Lots of purple from Lupine but also Monk’s Hood (above) and Larkspur mixed in with the Indian Paintbrush (below).

And quite a few other flowers, including tons of this Aster, which I’ve never identified despite the fact that it’s so widespread. Kind of like LBB and LGB (Little Gray Bird, Little Brown Bird) and the horticultural equivalent DYC (Damned Yellow Composite) which I learned from Town Mouse, I just think of these as SKA — Some Kind of Aster. I also saw a pink flower that I don’t know; it might have been a version of Owl’s Clover. Other flowers included Meadow Rue, Monkey Flower, Viola, Angelica, Senecio, Mariposa Lily just outside of the meadows, and more. A great place to see wildflowers in July.

Happy July Bloom Day. We’re about a month past the prime season in our garden, but there are still a number of things in bloom, more than I guessed when I started out into the garden to take photos, I think because a lot of the plants are ones that I don’t appreciate as much as I should. Most have been in the garden for a number of years, persevering and blooming without much help from me, so I don’t take as much notice when they open up their flowers.

The showiest, happiest bloomer is our canna in the gray-water planter. I found this plant years ago covered with cobwebs in a pot underneath my mother’s porch. I think she put it there when it went deciduous and then forgot to bring it back out again in the spring. Beside it, the Spicebush, also fed with gray-water, is now fifteen feet tall and twelve wide and sometimes referred to as the Spicebeast. At times the fragrance from all the flowers fills the porch with their old wine barrel scent. We’ll have to prune it back pretty hard this winter, which will be a shame. I’m not sure it’s really underappreciated, but I do give it second billing to the wisteria with regards to our outdoor shower, even though the Spicebush blooms for a much longer season with fragrant flowers, stylish seed heads, and big green leaves that give a wonderful tropical feeling to the shower.

The Cal Poppies are doing a second bloom about now, especially this one in the veggie garden. It was overcast when I took this photo, but the sun is out now, the flowers have perked up, and I should probably re-photograph it. I love Cal Poppies, but I sometimes forget to appreciate how great and reliable the plain orange ones are.

I mentioned in the last post that Anita is now running the veggie garden, keeping some things, changing others, and in a couple of cases bringing back plants that I let decline for one reason or another. Violas are one of those things. They were one of the first things we planted here and several large patches did well for a while before declining when the skunks began digging aggressively in the garden. Now that we have a dog in the yard, the skunks are leaving the garden alone, and the violas should thrive again. More below the fold. (more…)

Chinese Trumpet Lily, Lilium regale

Happy Solstice. Our Regal Lily opened this morning to celebrate. Most of our other lilies are open, too, with only Black Beauty still waiting to pop. Kind of nice to have some big showy flowers as summer begins.

Friso Orienpet Liliy

Corralitos Hybrid Leopard Lily

Lemon Lily, Lilium parryi

This week saw the first flower from a native I’ve been growing for three years, Yerba Mansa, Anemopsis californica. I feel like I rarely see it planted, no doubt because it’s a runner and it likes water, but it’s a nice little plant. We have ours in a container with the drain plugged. Sometimes it gets a lot of water, sometimes it gets a lot of neglect, which is probably why it took three years to bloom. Despite drying out at times, it has increased in size pretty steadily in the time that we’ve had it, growing from a single 4″ pot to fill a ten gallon sized container.

I was so happy to see it bloom that I took a picture of the bud too. Kind of a nice little flower bud, and I definitely like the flower, which develops red spots as it ages. Mature plantings seem to be full of flowers, so I’m expecting ours to be more prolific in the future. We’ll see. The plant was/is collected by Native Americans and is popular with herbalists — it’s often compared to Goldenseal — and I’ve seen tinctures of it for sale. We now have enough to start harvesting, but we give ours water from our turtle tank which makes me a little hesitant to ingest it. Below are some photos I took at Tilden when the plant first caught my interest. (more…)

Various Plants with Woodland Strawberry Groundcover

This bloom day we have a lot blooming, mostly in our outer garden, including Alliums, Sidalcea, and Campanula in the photo above, plus Hebe, Columbine, Salvia and others in full bloom off-camera. The inner garden has some things in bloom, but in transition between the first wave plants like the California Poppies and the Meadowfoam which already finished, and the second wave plants which are mostly just budding. The inner garden will probably go back to being the star by this time next month.

Carla with Poppies Blooming Last Month

Last month, I took a photo of the garden’s newest inhabitant posing courteously beside the Cal Poppies, but for some reason it didn’t make it into the post. This month she mostly seems to pose on top of the blooming plants, in this case Snow-in-Summer, rather than beside them. We actually have three different patches of Snow-in-Summer, and each of them seems to be the most comfortable at a different time of day, so Carla moves between them as the sun moves. Past dog inhabitants of our garden have also really liked to lie on the Snow-in-Summer, so it’s not just her. Those past dogs were fosters, but Carla is ours for keeps. Overall, she’s been pretty nice to the garden, which wasn’t originally designed to with a young dog in mind.

Carla with Poppies Cut Back This Month

Dicentra Bachanal

The garden has been accumulating Bleeding Hearts over the last couple of years to where we have almost a dozen now, mostly in containers. “Bachanal,’ above and in the foreground of the second photo with Carla, is the darkest, and the rest are the straight species but vary in how much pink they have. The one below is the palest, with just a touch of color.

Dicentra formosa

Blue Dick, Dichelostemma capitatum

I dumped some Blue Dick seed in a few containers of potting soil a couple of years ago, and this year they’re putting out their first few flowers. One of the easiest plants I’ve ever grown from seed, but slow. Next year they should be mature enough to make a decent show. The native alliums have reseeded a bit in our yard and we’re getting our first flowers from the volunteers this year.

Allium unifolium

Allium christophii

Some of the biggest flowers that we get all year are blooming right now. This non-native allium, A. christophii, has pom-poms bigger than my fist, and several kinds of hybrid Irises are going. There would have been some of them in that first photo at the top of the post, but they were cut for a Mother’s Day bouquet that Anita made. I handed off the bouquet and then realized I should have photographed it to add to this bloom day post. Ah, well.

Dutch Iris

Matillija Poppy aka Fried Egg Flower

The first Matillija Poppy opened this weekend.

Exterior Wrapping

Also our first Breadseed Poppy. We have a lot of them for some reason this year, in several parts of the garden. They’re more like a gift-wrapped package than any other flower I can think of, tissue paper on the outside and Fabergé egg inside.

The Prize Inside

My thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for being the creator and host of Bloom Day. Click over to her blog for links to tons of other bloggers showing off their flowers.