DryStoneGarden

For the past year, the Clinton campaign has reminded me of Grey Davis (victorious and then recalled). It turns out she is more like John Kerry (loser). Donald Trump reminds me of George W. Bush (the worst terrorist attack in our country’s history, two failed wars, Katrina, the worst financial meltdown since the great depression), but it’s possible he will be more like Schwarzenegger (struggled to pass legislation, rode around in Humvees). Supporters and detractors of them can ignore or interpret that as they choose. Personally, I never liked any of them.

I was getting ready to start posting again and I have a couple of posts half written, but it’s going to take a little while before I am ready to move forward. Leaving my garden after ten years, moving to a cabin in the foothills felt like the end of an era; Tuesday night exacerbated that feeling. My head hasn’t quite embraced the new one.

Instead of stonework and plants and gardens, after Tuesday I feel like posting photos of cowshit. This was a cowshit election with a cowshit result. The place I’m living has two cows, Pedro and Pearl, so I have a good supply to photograph. It starts out dark and gross, but it fades to gray, and in the end it helps the grass grow green. Maybe our politics will be the same.

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“It ain’t the leavin’ that’s a-grievin’ me
But my true love who’s bound to stay behind” Bob Dylan

We’ve moved. Our garden is no longer ours. One of the underlying facts of the garden has always been that we were renters, and now our landlord has given us the boot so his daughter can live there. Which is okay. As this year’s Nobel laureate says, don’t think twice it’s alright.

We moved out a couple of months ago. The new place where we’re living is quite different from the old one, and I’ll have some blog posts about it at some point. I also might do a retrospective on the ten years at our former garden, but I’m not quite ready yet. Moving, after ten years in one place, has been a lot of work and I’m still catching up on everything. In the meantime, these are a few photos from the garden as I was doing my final walk-thru. It looks a little sad and barren — a potting area with no pots in it, a veggie garden with no veggies, perennial beds with the perennials lifted out — but maybe the new tenant will fill it with plants and it will bloom again. I had a lot of fun with it, with luck I’ll have as much fun with my next one.

After the Meadowfoam has finished, the other wildflower display in our front garden comes from Seaside Daisy, Erigeron glaucus. I wasn’t originally a fan of it, and in fact I only have it in my garden because I bought a dozen for a project but got cold feet and brought them home instead. I didn’t know what to do with them so I planted them, and since then, I’ve come to appreciate them, a good habitat plant with a long bloom season. I’ve gone on to use it in a few different plantings, with pretty good results.

I’ve used a few of the different cultivars as well as the regular species, but I’m still figuring them out. I thought I knew which ones I was growing here, but I remember them having pink flowers and these don’t look pink. Occasionally on overcast days they take on a pinkish cast, but most of the time they are whitish with a blue tinge. Maybe I got rid of the pink ones and that’s why I like them now?

There’s two different ones, one that hugs the ground with smaller flowers, another that sprawls a bit, with larger flowers held on longer stems.

The sprawling, larger flowers are maybe a little pink or lavender, but not as pink as I remember.

In any case, the color works with the Campanula, as well as the white Philadelphus microphyllus, blue Brodiaea, and the faded pink Allium unifolium. More harmonious than I was expecting. It’s one of my least deliberate plantings, but I’m enjoying it.

I also went out to the Bouverie Perserve in Sonoma. It’s a 535 acre preserve that’s only open to the public for guided walks a few times a year. It’s a great property. I’m glad I got a chance to see it.

I had heard about the Bouverie Preserve on a list of places to see California wildflowers, but I may have been there late for the peak bloom. I saw dozens of Calochortus amabilis, one of my favorites, and a nice patch of Chinese Houses, another favorite, so I wasn’t disappointed. I also saw Blue Dicks, a few Clarkia purpurea had opened, and a lot of Owl’s Clover was scattered throughout the grasses.

Instead of wildflowers, it was a great place to see oaks. Beautiful oaks.

One of the trails ran along a creek that still had water flowing at the end of April. The tapestry of ferns alongside the trail was even better than the oaks and wildflowers.

During the wildflower season, I spent a few hours pulling weeds at a restoration project at Shell Ridge Open Space in Walnut Creek. It’s a compelling, though still somewhat nascent, project, a steep slope facing the entrance of the open space. Most of the restoration work has happened in the last few years. The plants are young and there’s quite a variety of species, including a number of beautiful bunch grasses — Poa, Nasella, and Koeleria, maybe a few others — but the biggest visual impact came from the annuals that were blooming — California Poppies, Chinese Houses, and to lesser extent a Phacelia that I hadn’t seen before, P. distans which was popular with the bees but not really photogenic or garden worthy.

I loved the big patches of Collinsia heterophylla. I tried to grow them in my garden this year, but they didn’t do well, I think because of slugs and snails.

Other areas have been more recently cleared and planted. That’s a great looking oak; it will be beautiful with wildflowers filled in around it.

There’s a former quarry across from the restoration area. From a distance the quarry shows like a scar, but it’s a nice landscape up close.

Some of the boulders display the shells that presumably inspired the name Shell Ridge.

I hadn’t been to Shell Ridge in years, so it was great to be lured out by the restoration project. It’s a pretty classic California landscape, lovely grassy hills, and I’ll be sure to go back see how the restoration project continues to progress.

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This past weekend was the Bringing Back the Natives Tour. I spent Sunday afternoon volunteering at a garden that we maintain, Carol Baird and Alan Harper’s garden in the Oakland Hills, an extensive garden on five acres overlooking Redwood Regional Park. It’s a tremendous garden and there’s a lot I could say about it, but this post just scratches the surface. I’m sure I’ll post about it again at some future point.

To give an overview, the house and garden were put in about fifteen years ago. Roger Raiche, who I have mentioned on this blog before, planted the garden, imprinting the main areas around the pool and entrance with his signature style — closely-spaced interwoven plantings, an extensive variety of plants, lots of chartreuse and variegated foliage, strong forms, bold contrasts. Afterwards, the maintenance gardener began weeding and taking out blackberry thickets on the rest of the property using the Bradley method (a quick primer: be patient, start in the area with the fewest weeds instead of the area with the most weeds, try not to disturb the soil as you work so that you won’t encourage weed seeds to germinate, and clear out weeds only as fast as you are able to establish new plants in their place), restoring a lovely section of oak woodland and making quite a bit of progress on a grassland area. She retired two years ago and we took over the maintenance, continuing to use the Bradley method in the restoration areas, as well as making some upgrades in the area around the house. The trellis in the photo above is new, recently added for the climbing rose, and I’ve done some stonework in a couple of areas, including this little basalt wall next to the parking area.

Some of these photos include flowers but more than anything this garden is a celebration of foliage. Roger Raiche’s concept was ‘Every shade of green’ and I can attest to there being just about every shade imaginable. A lot of the foliage is set to contrast, but there are also a lot of interesting ways that the colors and forms are carried from one plant into another, such as the way the green striping on the Phormium echoes the Berkeley Sedge in the photo below. At first glance the stripe looks like a blade of the sedge, and even after your eye recognizes that the stripe is part of the strappy Phormium leaf, it still looks a little bit as if the sedge’s green has been somehow injected into the Phormium. Plant design is about combining plants to create a greater whole, and this is a subtle but masterful example of that, made even more impressive to me because both plants are fairly run of the mill. I see them in a lot of gardens, but never combined together like this.

Roger Raiche was in charge of the native plant area at the UC botanical garden and he used a lot of natives in these plantings, including this clever use of Western Spicebush, Calycanthus occidentalis, to drape over a ten foot retaining wall along the driveway. I’ve never seen Spicebush used like this anywhere else; it’s effective and easy to maintain, casually matching the scale of the wall.

The majority of the natives in the garden, however, planted themselves. Anita is more involved with the restoration and maintenance than I am, so I don’t always know for sure what was planted and what came as a volunteer, but a tremendous variety of native plants were uncovered from the blackberry thickets or seeded themselves afterwards. I love the combination of plants in the photo above, a beautiful woodland mix as pretty as anyone could hope to design.

I put the other photos from the slideshow below.
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