DryStoneGarden

Brodiaea

I’m a pretty loyal California native planter, but I had my confidence in one of the native bulbs, Brodiaea, shaken recently. We’ve been planting “Corrina” and “Queen Fabiola” for a couple of years, and they’re good small bulbs for our area — they have lovely blue flowers, they don’t take much space, and they don’t require any irrigation, you just fall-plant and walk away. But then a friend of mine said they looked like Agapanthus. Ouch.

agapanthus

That might not sound like a big deal to non-Californians, but around here agapanthus is the omnipresent strip-mall/sub-division/highway-median plant. Plenty of gardeners from other areas seem to like it — for instance, Garden Design magazine recently featured a French garden named Le Jardin Agapanthique, which to me is like naming it the Privet Garden — but it gets no love here. The flower is okay, I guess, but the foliage is too glossy for our landscape; it looks plastic and fake next to the more silver and gray foliage of other low water plants. I sort of respect the plant’s bomb-proof toughness — I once dug a bunch out of the ground and dumped it all in a pile in the sun in the middle of summer and three weeks later it was still blooming — but I’ve demoed a lot of it, and I find that it’s always heavy, it’s always full of snails, and it always leaves behind nasty wormlike white roots. My apologies to any agapanthus gardeners out there, but I don’t like it.

So it’s kind of disturbing to think that Brodiaea resembles agapanthus. Do other people see the similarity? There’s a photo of the Brodiaea foliage below, and, upon reflection, the leaves are actually kind of glossy, and the fact that they flop over and then turn brown doesn’t sound like much of an improvement over the agapanthus. But Brodiaeas are pretty. Maybe I like agapanthus more than I admit? I’ll still plant the Brodiaea — the Van Engelen catalogue just came, 100 bulbs for $10, such a deal — I just think I’ll have a faint touch of sheepishness when I see it in our gardens for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

Sidalcea malviflora, checkerbloom

Our Sidalcea malviflora (checkerbloom), grown from seed, surprised us when the different plants put out different shades of flowers. They’re just about done blooming for the year. We don’t water them, so they’ll go dormant and disappear at some point and then come back with the rains.

Paeonia californica, California peony

The California peony is blooming at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden in Berkeley. I’d never seen one blooming before. To quote Las Pilitas, “You need perfect drainage, a very green thumb, and luck with this one.”

Paeonia californica, California peony

Deborah Small’s Ethnobotany Blog has a beautiful photo of one growing wild.

— Addendum —

California Peony going dormant

A photo of the peony going dormant in early July.

Allium unifolium

We’ve been starting to add California native bulbs to our home garden and our landscape plantings, and so far, Allium unifolium is one of our favorites. A lot of the native alliums require perfect drainage and a summer dry period and would be difficult to source even if you thought you could get the growing conditions right. A. unifolium, though, is easy to find and grow; we read that it’s supposedly the most clay tolerant of the alliums, and so far that’s been the case. Also, because it’s considered garden worthy (the Dutch like it) and not just for native purists, you can actually find it in sufficient quantities to make an impact in a large garden, where it will spread somewhat aggressively if it’s happy. It’s beginning to bloom in several of our gardens now.

Allium unifolium in our garden

We were recently at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden for their native plant sale, and I took pictures of the alliums that were blooming. The bed’s aesthetic (three foot high bed of stone holding 4-12 inch high plants) is more for collectors than for casual visitors, but it has some interesting stuff, of which Allium crispum sounds like the best bet to try in a garden. The Pacific Bulb Society has a good info page for North American alliums. Far West Bulb Farm also has photos and info and might be a source for some of them. I put photos of four alliums and the raised bed below. Read the rest of this entry »

golden mummies & aphids

Please excuse the rather unpleasant photo. Aphids are gross, but golden mummies are one of the best things I ever learned about IPM.

We’ve had a couple of outbreaks of aphids this spring, first with the lupine when it put out a big flush of new growth and now on our kales as they begin to bolt. Golden mummies are the brownish, mummified carcasses of parasitized aphids; wasps lay their eggs in the aphids and the larva eat the aphids from the inside, leaving the dried husks. If you aren’t familiar with them, click on the photo and you should be able to see the difference. In the garden, another way to tell the difference is that aphids move and mummies don’t.

When you see an outbreak of aphids, the presence of golden mummies is one sign that natural predators are present. Count the aphids and golden mummies on a leaf, and, if the outbreak includes at least 10 percent golden mummies, the natural predators will deal with the outbreak for you. Spraying would kill the natural predators along with the aphids and therefore be counterproductive, though aiming a spray of water against the aphids to knock them off (which actually kills a large percentage of them, while not harming the beneficials) is okay if you want to speed the process. 

In the photo, I count 14 golden mummies (mostly on the right, but three in the population of aphids on the left) and estimate about 100 aphids, so our IPM is working. Our earlier outbreak on the lupine was the same way, and it resolved itself without intervention.

ryan 4/22

the wisteria shower

I swear this is the first time I’ve ever posted to the internet a photo of a man taking a shower.

This is our wisteria shower. Most of the year it’s a bamboo shower, but in April we get to shower with wisteria blooms cascading around us. It’s wonderful. On a spring evening, with the fragrance of the flowers and the dripping leaves and the steam rising, it’s a total immersion. We encourage guests to try it. They are initially a bit skeptical, but they become hooked as soon as they try it, and we’ve even had a friend ask to come over specifically for the experience.

Last year we got a better bloom, and two years ago a frosty winter had the wisteria absolutely covered in blooms. This year it’s enough to enjoy, but I want more. It’s an old, well-established wisteria with plenty of space to ramble so we’ve been slack about pruning it, but this year we’ll probably motivate. Wisteria is best pruned twice a year to create spurs and it’s generally a good idea to stay on top of your vine, show it who’s boss. The Monster, in Sierra Madre, CA, is the most extreme example of what happens if you let your vine run wild. That wisteria, a single Chinese vine planted to cover a house, eventually swallowed up the house and caused it to be demolished, took over an entire acre of land, has an estimated weight of 250 tons, blossom count of 1.5 million per year, branches over 500 feet long, and is listed as one of the seven horticultural wonders of the world. The town now has an annual festival celebrating it.

Our wisteria isn’t quite at that level, but it’s one of the great features of our garden. We have two vines in our yards, a younger Chinese vine, Wisteria sinensis, and the Japanese one over the shower, Wisteria floribunda. Chinese wisteria is the more commonly planted variety around here, but the Japanese one is more fragrant and has longer flower clusters, so we’re glad it’s the one over the shower. Our landlord is the one who planted the wisteria, and he did it before he even added the porch, let alone the shower, but it turned out really well. I think one of his motivations for the shower, beyond mere aesthetics, was that the bathroom is old and somewhat poorly ventilated and it would generally be a good idea for the house if we showered outside, but, whatever the reason, he added a great feature to the house, one we’ll probably try to recreate in any other house we might ever move to.