DryStoneGarden

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.

Pt. Reyes meadow foam at the Tilden bot garden

Tomorrow is the Bringing Back the Natives Tour and I will be certain to visit two particular gardens on the tour, the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden and the Fleming garden, two of the states oldest and best gardens for California natives. The are great gardens on any day, and right about now is the time when they look their best.

The Fleming garden is the absolute must-see garden of the tour. It goes way beyond what is typical of a residential or native garden, and I think it’s especially interesting to also see the botanic garden on the same day. I don’t know exact history of either garden, but I do know that Jenny Fleming was involved with the botanic garden to some extent throughout the years, and her garden feels like a condensed, concentrated form of the botanic garden at a private home, with a lot of similar plants and combinations. Luke Hass, who does the maintenance for the Fleming garden, has a couple of articles about the garden on his website. RootedinCalifornia has some recent photos and the tour’s website has others. It’s an amazing garden that has to be seen in person to be appreciated.

meadowfoam and stream orchid

Both gardens are over fifty years old, which makes them unique places to see native plants used in Bay Area gardens. Often times on native tours it can be boring to see the same plants at every garden, but in this case it’s interesting to compare how the plants are used in the two settings. The naturalized plantings of meadow foam, Limnanthes douglasii, are a good example. In the Fleming garden it’s intermingled with stream orchid, Epipactis gigantea, while the Tilden garden has the yellow form, Pt. Reyes meadow foam, Limnanthes douglasii var. sulphurea, with Maianthemum. Meadow foam is an annual, but it’s growing in a way that only happens in a mature garden.

meadow foam and maianthemum

Partly as a result of seeing it at Tilden and the Fleming garden, I have it at my house as well, in the veggie garden in between some of the edibles and in our outer garden where it is growing up through the Snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus. It’s not the prettiest plant after it finishes blooming, while you wait for the seeds to form, but the flowers are charming and it combines really nicely with other plants.

meadow foam flower with snowberry foliage

mallorcan style wall

Posting about the angled stone wall in this year’s garden show seems like a good excuse to post about the Mallorcan style wall we did with Mariposa Gardening and Design in the show last year. It’s not as eye-catching as the angled stone, but the building style is unique in its own way. Personally, I didn’t lay a single stone on the wall–I was a bit skeptical about building a wall and then taking it apart five days later, part of the reason I like stone is that it is the longest-lasting building material on earth, so instead my contribution to the garden was flagstone steps that I could afterwards re-install in a real garden–but it was a nice wall and it deserves to have some internet presence.  A lot of the stuff in the garden show is just facade work, but the crew built a real wall, thirteen tons worth, pretty cool and pretty crazy.

Mallorcan walls are also sometimes called polygonal walls because they use five-sided stones laid in an arch pattern; traditional walls use four-sided rectangular stones laid in linear courses. One of the sacred rules of traditional walls is to break every joint, but with a polygonal wall the joints zigzag enough that the rule doesn’t apply. Instead, the rule for a polygonal wall is to have every stone touched by five others. Instead of trying to create a flat surface for the next stone, you try to make a cradle for it, and instead of vertical and horizontal lines, you create arches. The idea is that the adjoining stones form an arch around any given stone, so if that stone falls out the other stones will still hold together and the wall won’t fail. In theory, if you pick a stone, you can see a little arch of other stones around it.

mallorcan wall arch detail

The walling style is really effective at making tall, strong, long-lasting walls out of irregular stone. Mallorca is full of walls hundreds of years old, and examples I’ve seen on the internet are often ten or twenty feet tall. To work on the walls, workers pound metal bars between the stones and then put boards across the bars to act as scaffolding. A lot of the walls are pretty rough looking but at the same time really appealing because of their size and strength. The walls get capped with European-style vertical coping stones, which adds a nice touch of style and self-consciousness to the rather rough, naturalistic stonework. Our wall in the garden show was made with Napa basalt, the closest Bay Area equivalent to the limestone they have in Mallorca.

The Stone Foundation has a beautiful Mallorcan wall in their write-up for the 2007 workshop and another in their write-up for the upcoming 2009 one. DryStoneWalling has photos of two walls, one that’s retaining and one that’s freestanding. Below, I put one of my sets of flagstone steps with a section of Mallorcan cheek wall.

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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 a photo of a man taking a shower on the internet.

This is our wisteria shower. Most of the year it’s a bamboo shower, but in April you get to shower with the wisteria blooms cascading around you. The shower is on our front porch, but so far no one has walked in on either of us and the bamboos in pots around the shower do a good job of screening. Guests are usually a bit skeptical at first, but they become hooked as soon as they try it. We have an indoor shower, too, but it’s much nicer to shower outside, especially when the wisteria is in bloom.

Last year we got a much better bloom and two winters ago we had a frosty winter that had the wisteria covered in blooms. 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. You prune wisteria 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 and 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.

EwaintheGarden has a great gallery of wisteria photos.

ryan 4/19