DryStoneGarden

Moss Rock

I was recently back at a garden where I did a day of rock work last summer, a short section of moss rock wall along a sloping path. When I built the wall, the client and I incorporated a couple of cracked pots into the wall where it tapers into the slope, and then she transplanted a number of her succulents to plant along the wall and in the pots. It’s one of our only gardens in which the client is also a gardener, and it was nice to now see how her planting has begun to fill in. The plants in the cracked pots still need a little more time to spread, but I think they already look pretty cool.

Moss Rock with Cracked Pots

The wall in the background was already there, built by the company who installed the garden five years ago. I like the choice of aloes to plant along the top of it; they do well there, and their pokiness discourages people from messing with the rocks.

One of her containers

The garden is quite spectacular and worthy of a longer post some day. There are always things blooming and I usually take a few photos while I’m there; the shots of the swallowtail and prostanthera in my last post are from this garden. When the prostanthera is done, this member of the aster family will be in full bloom. I’m not sure what it is, but I like the look of the flower buds, and when it gets going, it puts on quite a show. Does anyone know it? I would try to figure it out, but the aster family is mighty big.

Some kind of Aster

The Aster with Coleonema last May or June

Spittle Bugs in the Ninebark Buds

April is the start of spittle bug season in our garden. Spittle bugs are the little froghopper nymphs putting drips of saliva on a lot of our plants, a weird thing which I don’t particularly like, but find kind of intriguing. Apparently, the nymphs suck out the water in the xylem of the stems (as opposed to the more nutrient-rich phloem that their aphid relatives and most other sucking insects prefer), and they need to process a lot of watery stuff from the xylem to get enough nutrients; at some point these unappealing spittle cocoons evolved as a protective byproduct of all that excess water.

The nymphs like new growth and especially bloom stalks, and as April is our biggest month for bloom stalks and new growth, April is also our biggest month for spittle bugs. As I understand it, the small orange nymphs are young nymphs, the yellow ones are older, and the larger greenish ones are in the last phase before they morph into adults. Most of ours are orange right now. We’ll have the nymphs for a month or two, and then later we’ll get the hoppy adults. Neither one seems to affect the plants much.

Close ups of spittle and a butterfly are below. Read the rest of this entry »

Nature By Design by Ripple Effect Water Gardens

We went to the SF Flower and Garden Show Friday evening. Overall I thought they were really good this year. Some photos are below. The indoor lighting is weird, and scaffolding or restroom signs seem to find their way into a lot of the shots, but that’s part of the garden show ambience.

Nature By Design

Salvaged Creole Jazz Courtyard by The Artists Garden

I thought the New Orleans courtyard garden was the best garden. Really interesting plants and great attention to detail. Dimly lit to give it a voodoo mood, though, so not the easiest to photograph.

Salvage Creole Jazz Courtyard

The Papillon Pad by Mariposa Gardening and Design

The Papillon Pad

The Papillon Pad

The World Without Us by The Garden Route Company

The World Without Us rainwater catchment well

The Living Room by Organic Mechanics

You will be assimilated.

Inside the Living Room

The garden show website has a list of all the garden creators with descriptions of the concepts for the agardens and links to the creators’ websites. Garden Porn and Floradora and An Alameda Garden and Blue Planet Garden Blog (and probably many other blogs) have photos from the show. The New Orleans courtyard seems to be the consensus favorite.

Clematis ligusticifolia, Virgins Bower

Now that we are just past the official start of spring, I thought I’d post the state of our deciduous plants. Nothing especially revelatory here, but it might be interesting/helpful to me in the future to have an approximate calendar date for leaf-out on some of these plants.

California natives:

Clematis ligusticifolia is leafed out;
Calycanthus occidentalis is just now leafing out;
Dicentra formosa and Dicentra “Bachanal” leafed out at the start of the month;
the Redtwig Dogwood is leafed out;
the Ninebark leafed out in early February and already has flower buds;
the native lilies came up several weeks ago, the other bulbs have been up for a long time;
the native asters are leafed out;
the Ribes “White Icicle” in the shade is leafed out and still holding some blooms;
the non-cultivar Ribes sanguineum is mid-bloom with leaves just starting to appear;
the two Amelanchier alnifolia in containers are budding;
Philadelphus microphyllus is budding;
the Snowberry leafed out two weeks ago;
Mimulus cardinalis is leafed out;
the Stream Orchid is just poking up

Non-natives:

the fig tree is leafing out;
the walnut just started to leaf out;
the Chinese pistaches are budding;
the Japanese maples in containers are leafed out;
the Astilbes just sent up some foliage;
the Chaste tree is just budding;
the young Eastern Redbuds have a few flowers;
the Indigofera just started to leaf out

Dicentra formosa and Tellima grandiflora

Dicentra formosa was the plant that I was happiest to see this year. It’s in a container that was devastated by skunks last year and I thought it was gone, but it popped out from under the Tellima several weeks ago and now has a few blooms up.

Dicentra formosa and Tellima grandiflora

Wow

To my complete astonishment, the highlight of my day yesterday was the Lowes parking lot in Concord. It has the biggest, bloomingest, most successful wildflower meadow I’ve ever seen. I have some cynical thoughts about it — it was probably done to appease environmentalists or the planning commission, it was probably amended with all the damaged bags of Miracle Grow, Monsanto probably supplied the seed mix — but it was impressive nevertheless. Not something I expected to see at a big box store.

Tidy Tips, Layia platyglossa

Tidy Tips predominated in the bio-swale, Chinese Houses on the berms.

I had never been to Lowes before and it turned out to be even more like Home Depot than I expected, but my hat’s off to whoever is responsible for that meadow. It’s pretty incredible.

Tidy Tips, Baby Blue Eyes, Alyssum, and African Daisy

Coastal California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica var. maritima

A lot of our plants seemed to make an effort to open their flowers for Bloom Day, including our first Cal poppy of the year which opened yesterday afternoon. Look at all that sunshine it’s been storing up.

Tazetta Narcissus, Falconet and Golden Dawn

We have two kinds of Tazetta Naricssus blooming. I think Golden Dawn is the slightly paler one, Falconet the slightly more orange one, but I’m not actually sure. It turns out that when you buy very similar-sounding varieties, you end up with very similar-looking flowers. Between them, they have our yard smelling of Narcissus.

Blue Eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium bellum

The Blue Eyed Grass seemed to do the California poppy thing, where the first flower from the plant is unusually large and the subsequent flowers are smaller. I have about a dozen throughout the garden. I think they are all blooming at this point.

Unopened Tulipa saxatilis yesterday morning

A few of the species tulip, Tulipa saxatilis, have been trying to open for about a week, and then yesterday’s sunshine popped several open. My first time growing a species tulip; supposedly this one will naturalize here. I’m happy with them even if they don’t come back.

Opened Tulipa saxatilis in the evening

New Zealand Tree Fuchsia, Fuchsia excorticata

The New Zealand Tree Fuchsia, Fuchsia excorticata, is probably the strangest plant in bloom right now, with flowers that change color over a long period of time. I’d seen them in New Zealand and was curious to see one in bloom, so I bought one a few years ago. Now that I’ve been growing one, I’m still not sure what I think of it.

Heuchera, Ninebark, Wind Grass, Hardenbergia

The Heuchera maxima is another plant that opened it’s first flowers yesterday; the hybrid heucheras have been blooming since last week. The ninebarks are budding and about to open, which seems really early for them. The hardenbergia in the background has been blooming for a while, maybe the plant most fully in bloom right now.
I’ve been trying to maintain a list of everything in bloom on bloom day, but I haven’t had a chance to do that yet; I’ll probably add it to this post later tonight or tomorrow night (11/21 — it’s now below the fold). The list will be quite a bit longer than last month, as one would expect in the Bay Area in March. My thanks, as always, to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for creating and hosting Bloom Day. Click over to her site for links to about a hundred other garden blogs showing off their flowers. Read the rest of this entry »