DryStoneGarden

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

Along with Sunday’s landscape architecture tour this weekend, my favorite native plant event of the year — the native plant sale at Tilden — is happening on Saturday. At this point I rarely buy more than a plant or two, but I like seeing everyone lining up before the start of the sale and the mad rush to the rarest plants, and of course the garden itself is amazing this time of year.

Fawn Lilies, Erythronium sp

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

The one thing on my wish list is seed of an Erythronium species. I’ve been admiring them for a while, but have never grown one and haven’t seen them in gardens much. The Pacific Bulb Society webpage makes them sound like they grow similarly to the native Leopard Lilies — slow, easy, likes good soil, and worth the wait. I would love to have a big patch of these.

Fawn Lily, Erythronium

At past years we’ve worked as volunteers and had longer wish lists of plants, but this year Anita and I will just be spectators. After years of watching the frenzied native plant shopping at the sale, last year I noticed that the alders in the middle of the sale area were watching it, too.

Alders Have Eyes

Dynamic Reflections

I managed a quick visit to the San Francisco Flower and Garden on Thursday. My personal highlight was not a garden, but rather Bee Chama Honey who comes out from New Mexico most years and has about a dozen different kinds of honey (my favorite was oak, followed by Sage/Willow and Meadowfoam). Anita was a judge at the show this year and was especially impressed at the quality of the gardens and the craftsmanship. I agree, though I thought they weren’t quite as memorable or dramatic as some other years. They were well designed and really nice and it takes a lot of effort to do such good work. I haven’t added links to all the garden creators, but you can find that info at the show’s garden creators webpage. Also there’s some cool stuff at the show’s Facebook page, including a timelapse of a nice, relaxing garden that I didn’t photograph.

Dynamic Reflections again

Dynamic Reflections had the most stone interest. Its by the same designer who did angled walls a few years ago. They’re pretty cool. There’s a heck of a lot going on in these walls, with a ceramic face, a container, various slabs and boulders, more than I would want in a real wall, but probably the right amount for a garden show. I found myself wishing more of the other gardens were more over the top this year.

Dynamic Reflections again

Savannah

Savannah was the other garden that felt satisfyingly over-the-top. It was done almost entirely with grasses, a narrow path through a tunnel of grassy foliage. It was a distinct experience, with crickets and other sounds created by a guy does garden sound for a living. It was a hard thing to do it justice in a photo, but this blurred photo sort of gives a sense of it. I felt like it was far and away the most interesting garden and the main one that offered a distinctive experience you wouldn’t see in a real bay area garden. It was also the only garden that truly felt like it was about the plants.

Windows

Windows was more about the hardscape and the design and making a real outdoor space with good attention to materials and details. It swept the awards from the ASLA, CLCA, APLD, and Sunset, all the groups that are focused on making real residential gardens.

Serenity Lounge

I liked the Serenity Lounge also.

Serenity Lounge again

Urban Habitat on the Left, Sculpture Party on the Right

I also liked the big dragon and the juxtaposition of it next to the graffiti garden. I guess there was more over-the-top things than I remember.

La Vie en Vert

The pendulum and the little gabians in La Vien en Vert are the last of my photos. There were other nice gardens — almost all of the gardens were good this year — but I didn’t photograph them for some reason. I guess I spent a lot of my time tasting honey.

La Vie en Vert again

SF Gate has a slideshow here.

This warm weather and lack of rain has me a little unsettled. I remember some winters like this when I was growing up, but that was before my gardening days and I don’t remember how it affected the plants. I guess I’ll be finding out. In the meantime, I’ve stopped at Tilden several times this winter to check out how the manzanitas are responding to this lack of a winter. I thought I could look at past photos to see if the different varieties are acting any different this year, but I couldn’t figure out anything conclusive. I think I’ve seen bigger bloom clusters in other years and I think they started blooming a couple of weeks late this year, but I couldn’t say for sure. In any case, they’re looking good right now in the heart of manzanita season.

The one in the photo below, Arctostaphylos montana-regis, has one of the best tree trunks I’ve ever seen. This little cluster of trees is probably my favorite spot in my favorite garden.

The next thing to keep an eye on is when everything deciduous wakes up. A few things in the garden had buds, but nothing had broken into leaf yet.

Last weekend I went to see the Drew School vertical garden by Patrick Blanc, the French botanist who started the current green wall craze. He designed a wall in San Francisco that was installed this past February (San Francisco Magazine did a feature with photos of when it was first installed and a planting plan). I was a little skeptical of the whole green wall thing, but then looking up at his wall — four stories high of California natives with over 100 species — my doubts evaporated. The whole thing absolutely overflows with enthusiasm for plants. Two big walls covered in natives, what’s not to love.

A pair of gardeners were doing maintenance while I was there. At first I was a little bummed to see this big orange cherry picker in front of the wall, but then I realized that it was a great opportunity to find out about the wall. I mean, I see this thing and I wonder how much does it cost, how will it age, how much maintenance does it need, and who will give me one for Christmas? Watching them work, I was impressed at how easy the maintenance actually seemed. Like any other gardeners, they cut the plants back with Felcos and let the green waste fall to the sidewalk and they barely even had to bend over to work. Progress was steady. It looked quite pleasant.

The plants are essentially growing hydroponically. There’s a thin planting medium for the roots, and water mixed with nutrients drips down the wall, collects at the bottom and then recirculates. This is the first time anyone has ever tried something like this with California natives (he usually uses tropical plants), so the project was considered something of an experiment. Some species like Oxalis oregana or Mimulus cardinalis seem like reasonable candidates for a hydroponic wall, but some of the others like Artemisia tridentata and the Fremontodendron were a shock to me. It’s hard to tell from the photos, but up at the top there’s a Ribes sanguineum, a couple of bushy Mallows, and at least one Ceanothus.

The gardeners said they had done some replanting in September, but this was the first full maintenance pruning. They were cutting things back to do a one-year assessment of the planting and see how everything was growing. After a year of growth, some plants were starting to cover others. The Beach Strawberry was running all over the place, the Dudleyas were getting covered by other plants the same as they did in the Academy of Sciences green roof, the Lupines were short-lived, Penstemon heterophyllus looked like it was also going to be short-lived, but overall the plants were doing really well. The shrubs up top were growing exuberantly, maybe a little too exuberantly; the shade groundcovers down towards the bottom had the best year-round appearance. I found that in the places where the fabric showed between the plants, it didn’t bother me or diminish the effect.

Pretty healthy for a bunch of plants on the side of a building.

I definitely want to make it back in the spring when a lot of the plants have grown back in and are blooming. It really does have tremendous impact when you see it on the street.

Along with Tilden, the UC Botanical Garden has the other big plant sale in the East Bay. UC does the sale in two parts, with the sale Saturday but a members-only preview Friday evening. The preview is in many ways the main event. Anita and I got memberships this year, so we got to go for the first time. Pretty cool event, with some unusual things for sale, weird indoor plants and carnivorous plants and funky caudiciform plants I’d heard of. I realized how much I’ve just been shopping in the mediterranean and native sections of the nurseries lately.

I wandered around for a while in the native section after checking out the sale. There were fewer things blooming than I expected — irises, thimbleberry, the white form of meadowfoam, a western azalea were the highlights — but everything looked really fresh and green. The native section is always bigger and less like a garden than I’m expecting, more like the landscape of a hiking trail. The oaks are especially nice. Some photos are below. (more…)

I went to Alcatraz last week for the first time since a field trip in grade school. Wow, I should of gone sooner. It’s a fascinating spot and more than just a place to take out-of-town visitors.

The prison is of course iconic and there are great views of the Golden Gate and the rest of the bay, but also the island has some of the most historic gardens in California. They were started by the military in the 1850′s on soil brought over from Angel Island, and then various soldiers, jailers, and inmates expanded and maintained the gardens throughout the years as the island went from fort to military prison to federal prison. The gardens were abandoned when the prison was closed down and a lot of the island was swallowed up by weeds, but a lot of the tougher plants held on. In 2003 the Garden Conservancy took over the gardens and began restoring them. Many, many, many hours of volunteer labor have gone into them. Restoration seems to be about developing or preserving the dichotomies of Alcatraz: a prison garden full of escaped exotics, a weeded garden ruin, wild plants in one of the most human-built sites in California.

There are a ton of different building materials throughout the island, with various types of concrete, stone, and brick mixed and layered in funky ways reflecting the island’s transformations from fort to military prison to prison. Even in the calla lily photo there are two different types of stone. The brickwork in the photo below almost looks like a tapestry the way it is outlined by what were originally the corners of separate stone walls.

I’m not sure what plants are naturalized from before and which ones have been added by the Garden Conservancy. There’s an extensive website for the gardens, including a blog, with a lot of photos and information about the history of the gardens. Quite a few garden bloggers have visited the island; Saxon Holt at Gardening Gone Wild, Far out Flora, and Oakland Guerrilla Gardener are two of the ones I know about.

This hand-carved granite doorway was built when the prison was still a fort. In the upper corners are two pulleys from the original drawbridge door.