DryStoneGarden

Carex testacea, Teucrium chamaedrys, Achillea Moonshine

Anita is teaching a class at the Gardens at Heather Farms next weekend about using grasses and grasslike plants in the garden, so for the last few weeks we’ve been accumulating photos for her to use. With my attention focused on grasses, I’ve had several realizations and reminders:

The first is that I seem to consider most plants “grasslike.” Lavenders, yarrows, santolinas, gauras, oreganos, and coleonemas have all had the camera pointed at them in my search for grasslike plants. The English lavenders, in particular, with their masses of flower stalks and unopened flower buds, seem to make me reflexively point my camera like a birddog spotting a grouse. “Grasslike” means sedges, some bulbs, iris-like plants, the more slender phormiums, maybe a few other things, but some part of me seems to want to include everything else that ever grows with an upright form. Fortunately, I’m not in charge of the class. I kept to grasses and grasslike plants in the photos below. Read the rest of this entry »

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 pretty blue flowers, they don’t take much space, and they don’t require any irrigation, you just fall-plant them 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 »

Sedum spathulifolium

Our Sedum spathulifolium (stonecrop) has started blooming. I like the flower buds better than the flowers, which are a bit too mustardy for my taste.

Sedum spathulifolium

In our garden we have it in containers. I keep accidentally knocking off little pieces of it, which I then put in potting soil to root and make new plants. I now have six little sedums in thimble pots and stubbies, a couple of which are preparing to bloom. We planted spathulifolium in a couple of gardens last year, but we tend to reserve for extreme sites where it takes a while to establish and spread, so the plants aren’t really photo worthy yet.

Sedum spathulifolium

The Fleming garden has the best planting of it that I’ve seen, cascading down the slope between the rocks. It can be hard to get plants to survive, let alone thrive, on a slope that steep, but the spathulifolium clearly likes the extreme exposure; easy to see why it’s one of the main California natives that appears on green roof plant lists, like the one for the Academy of Sciences Building. I have several more photos from the Fleming garden below. I wish I’d been there when the light had been more amenable to photos, but I don’t see a way to fix that, other than to wait for our own slope-planted plants to spread so I can photograph them at the optimum hours of the day. Read the rest of this entry »

arizona flagstone path and border

This is the flagstone path and border you see when you come in through our gate. We try to keep it full of blooms year-round, and this month, May, is probably the easiest month to do that. In another month the fog season will start, the heat of the Central Valley will suck moisture from the ocean through the Golden Gate and over our garden like a swamp cooler, but for now all the plants are soaking up the sun.

Monardella macrantha

Our Monardella macrantha just started up, flashing the victory sign.

California poppy and Calendula

The poppy is Mahogany Red, pretty variable in how much red the flowers show. I like the ones where I’m not quite sure if it’s a cultivar.

Penstemon heterophyllus and Triteleia Starlight

I think the penstemon is “Blue Bedder,” but it might be “Blue Springs.”

purple breadseed poppy

A breadseed poppy that was too tall to fit into the frame.

Salvia chamaedryoides and Phormium ad nauseum

The salvia actually has some blooms on it but it works better as a foliage combo with the phormium. Most of the other plants in that bed have token blooms, but nothing dramatic; maybe they’re waiting for the poppies and calendulas to quiet down. Thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Click thru for links to lots of other gardens in bloom.

Some more bloomers from our outer garden are below. 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.

purple breadseed poppy

Our first breadseed poppies have opened, second generation descendants of “Lauren’s Grape.” Their size is always a little shocking when the first one goes, it’s not exactly a subtle flower. Personally, I will always think of papaver poppies as the weapon of choice for the most easily vanquished villain in movie history, the Wicked Witch of the West. The ones in the movie look like Flanders poppies, P. rhoeas, but the witch seems to be referring to the latin name of the breadseed poppies, P. somniferum when she talks about going to sleep. I guess it’s not as cinematic to romp through fields of five foot tall P. somniferum, so the art department substituted in the shorter Flanders ones.

purple breadseed poppy

Youtube has a version of the original and one of the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz mash up, The Dark Side of the Rainbow. The poppy scene starts around 4:10 on the Dark Side version. I wish I could conjure up fields of blooming plants as easily as the witch does.