DryStoneGarden

For the past few weeks, Anita and I have been enjoying a wildflower planting in the new medians on Carlson Ave near our house. For years Carlson was an oddly humped road that had such a steep cross-slope near the sidewalk that the car door would hit the curb before it opened all the way and bicycling felt treacherous. To fix that, the city had to lower the street more than two feet to bring it down below the sidewalk, and in the process they also had to lower all of the utilities. The entire project took more than two years, involved all kinds of blocking of cross-streets and traffic, and was hugely inconvenient. But all is now forgiven, as far as I’m concerned, because the city added a median to the street and filled it with twelve blocks worth of wildflowers, many of them native. I’m happy to have my roads blocked if it means I get to drive and bicycle past wildflowers.

So far, I’ve seen California Poppies, Bachelor Buttons, Tidy Tips, Baby Blue Eyes, Alyssum, Lupine, and a few Snapdragons blooming, and there is a lot of Clarkia waiting for next month.

Hmmm…. Be careful what you praise on the internet. The same day that I put this post up, the city weedwacked all of the wildflowers. I’m guessing the planting grew too tall and was blocking visibility, but the city might also be ready to plant trees now. Farewell (to Spring), Clarkia, we never saw you bloom.

— Coda — Apparently an elderly driver got into an accident because of the reduced visibility caused by the wildflowers. Unfortunate for him, and for the wildflowers.

View from the New Office

Happy Bloom Day. This is the view from our new office. I still need to stucco the exterior, so I haven’t really gone through and photographed it for a post, but we’ve been moved into it for about a month now. It’s not a large office, and right now it’s full of stacks of paperwork for our taxes. There are worse things than doing taxes and bloom day posts in a garden office.

Coastal Cal Poppy and Blue-Eyed Grass

Lots of poppies are blooming throughout the garden, mostly yellow-tinged coastal ones in the outer garden and red-tinged ‘Mahogany Red’ offspring in the inner garden, with a few regular orange ones showing up in both areas.

Mahogany Red Cal Poppy and Variegated Iris

Meadowfoam and Cal Poppies

We have meadowfoam blooming in several areas. During construction of the office, I relocated our bathtub bog planting to the outer garden. It get the roof runoff from office now. When I moved the tub, I replanted everything. Mimulus cardinalis came roaring back right away. The Colocasia has been slower to recover, but it’ll start muscle up out of the mimulus soon. A surprise appearance was meadowfoam. I had grown some of them in the tub its first year, but they got out-competed and disappeared until I turned the soil and replanted everything. I’m sure they’ll get out-competed again, but it was nice to see them this year. Kind of funky to see them growing through the agave sitting in a container in front of the tub.

Calocasia Black Magic, Mimulus Cardinalis, Meadowfoam, Agave

Ninebark with some older Heuchera maxima flowers

The Iochroma has been in full bloom for several weeks now. I’m really happy with how it grows up through the spicebush as if it were all one plant, giving it a longer bloom season and making for a more evergreen shrub. The flowers are a different tone of red, but peak at different times of the year.

Iochroma with Spicebush Leaves

Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Spicebush

And the best thing in our garden right now is the plein air shower. Our Wisteria is a Japanese variety, W. floribunda, so the bloom stalks are long, fragrant, and they open slowly. We’re about a week away from when the flowers hang so low they brush against you and get in your hair and it feels like you’re bathing in flowers. It’s already pretty fantastic, though.

Wisteria Shower

Later today, I’ll probably take another break from taxes to post a list of everything in bloom in the garden. My thanks to Carol at MayDreasGardens for creating and hosting Bloom Day. April is always one of the best months to surf around on bloom day, so click through to her blog for tons of links.

Dicentra formosa amidst Oxalis oregana

We don’t have a many deciduous plants in our garden, but for the last couple of years I’ve made a note of when each of them leafed out each spring. I didn’t really know how much variation there would be from year to year. So far, there hasn’t been much. Comparing last year, 2011, and the year before, 2010, I’d say everything has been remarkably consistent. And not just the wake up times for the plants, the garden itself has stayed consistent, with every plant on previous lists still growing in the garden except for the Indigofera which we took our during construction on our shed. A couple of Currant bushes are the only new deciduous plants of note.

Natives

Dicentra formosa has been leafed out for about 3 weeks, Dicentra ‘Bachanal’ is leafing out now
Ribes ‘White Icicle’ has one remaining bloom cluster
Calycanthus occidentalis is leafing out, leaves are out but not near full size
Ninebark leafed out at the start of February and has fit’s first flower bud opening, the same schedule as last year
Snowberry has been in leaf for about a month, it started leafing out soon after the ninebark
Mimulus cardinalis has been in leaf for a month, I moved its tub and replanted it and it has come roaring back, I also replanted the stream orchid, but it is just poking up through the soil
Clematis ligusticifolia is leafed out, about a week earlier than last year, the volunteer in a pot has been leafed out for over a month
native asters are leafed out
Phildelphus microphyllus is leafing out
Acer cirnatum, young and in a container is dormant
Amelanchier alnifolia in containers is still dormant
Allium unifolium has buds
native lilies are a foot tall and have been up for several weeks
not a deciduous plant, but I ate the first woodland strawberry this weekend

Non-Natives

the fig is leafed out and has a bigger spring crop this year, about 10 figs
the Chaste tree has leaf buds opening
Acer palmatum from seed has been fully leafed out for several weeks, Acer palmatum ‘Japanese Sunrise’ is mostly leafed out
the neighbor’s Chinese Pistaches are budding, our more sheltered one is not
the Walnut Tree is budding
One of the young Eastern Redbuds has some flowers, the other 2 are dormant, mature ones in the neighborhood are blooming
the Fruiting Mulberry, in a container, has leaf buds opening
Astilbes are still dormant, leaves beginning to appear on the 3rd of April
both Black Currant bushes (transplanted in December) are budding

Our Fig Tree

For the plants that are still dormant, I’ll probably come back and add final leaf-out dates.

Welcome to a wet bloom day. I haven’t posted since last month. I don’t usually go bloom day to bloom day without a post, but it’s my busiest time of year. This week’s storms have given me a reprieve from work and have made our garden wet but happy. It’s still early for the garden to reach full bloom strength but a lot of plants have woken up. Most of the deciduous plants are in leaf or budding. The ninebark behind the Huechera was the first, coming into leaf around the beginning of the month and inow getting ready to open it’s first flowers. I thought that might be early, but it did this at the same time last year. I’ve tried to find things that might be early in our garden, but so far everything is close to its regular schedule.

The species tulip, Tulipa Saxatilis, is on the same schedule, but it has doubled in quantity since last year. They’ve taken a beating in this week’s storms, but they were probably the best thing in the garden last week.

The Doug Iris I photographed last month still has a bloom most days, but now we also have a couple of non-native irises blooming too.

The hellebore was blooming last month too. It’s in a container that sat next to the post our Clematis grows up, and last year a tendril of the clematis found its way into the pot and layered itself. We haven’t decided what we’re going to do with it: plant them both together somewhere, pull the clematis out and plant it, or discard the clematis. I like the clematis, but it’s just this kind of behavior — propagating itself in another plant’s container — that makes it hard to find a suitable home for it. In the meantime, the foliage looks pretty beside the hellebore.

Both of our hardenbergias are in full bloom.

Our Drimys winteri is blooming for the first time. I planted this a couple of years ago and more or less forgot about it. After taking the photo, I couldn’t remember what its name was. I saw these years ago in Chile, but had never seen the flowers before. Supposedly they’re mildly fragrant, but I couldn’t tell today with all the rain.

The poppies in our veggie garden these days seem to all be children of Mahogany Red. We used to have ‘White Linen’ and some pink ones from a mix. I’m pretty happy to have these red ones as the enduring variety. There are some other plants in the garden blooming, mostly looking wet and rather bedraggled from the storms. I’ll post a list later.

My thanks to garden blog impresario Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting bloom day. Click over for links to over a hundred other blogs posting about what’s blooming in their garden.

Iris douglasiana

This’ll be a short bloom day post. We don’t have a lot in bloom, but things are starting up with the promise of more to come. This past week saw several plants open their first flowers. We have our first Doug Iris, first Cal Poppy, and first Daffodil. The Tree Coreopsis, Ribes ‘White Icicle,’ and the New Zealand Tree Fuchsia have been blooming for a couple of weeks. One of the Sidalceas has had a clutch of flowers for the same amount of time. And the ever-bloomers have flowers, Alyssum, Geranium ‘Bill Wallis,’ Calendula, and the Iochroma. Of the deciduous plants, the Ninebark broke leaf at the start of the month and the Snowberry is breaking leaf now. That’s early for the snowberry, but right on schedule for the ninebark.

Coreopsis gigantea

Thanks to Carol for hosting bloom day. Click over to MayDreamsGardens for links to many more blogs showing off their flowers.

I really like this photo by a photographer from the UK. It’s great how it plays with my eye, but also how it seems to satirize or exploit the practice of painting tree trunks white. He has more photos on his website.