DryStoneGarden

Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflora

It’s seeding time for California wildflowers. It’s mid-October and the recent rains have germinated the reseeders, both wanted and unwanted. We always start some in potting soil this time of year, so that we can direct seed the wildflowers we want and then use the potting soil starts to fill in any gaps where the direct seeding failed. One of the ones we’re starting this year, after a couple of years break, is Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflorus. We started it in a couple of gardens three years ago and hadn’t really thought about it since then, but this year we noticed that it naturalized pretty well in those gardens and that it keeps blooming until quite late in the year; it can bloom until as late as September in a garden where it gets some supplemental water. Also, we saw a thick patch of it in the Botanic Garden at Tilden this past July, looking good when most of the other native annuals were done, and it made us want to plant some more of it.

Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflorus, at Tilden

We also started California Wind Poppy (Stylomecon heterophylla), which we grew for the first time this past year, Blue Flax (Linum lewisii) which isn’t an annual but functions a bit like one, and Clarkia bottae. The rest of the wildflowers will just be whatever reseeds.

Striped Agave and Ceanothus

What do porcupines say after they kiss?

Ouch.

This is largest, spiniest plant I’ve ever transplanted. It had been planted too close to a path and had reached a point where walking in the garden required a delicate, sideways, dodging step to get around it. There was talk about consigning it to the green bin of life, and less serious talk about homegrown tequila or mezcal, but it had been the most striking element in this garden for years and it was much much cooler than anything else that could have been brought in to replace it. You can’t really come up with a better focal point than a large agave. So I agreed to try moving it.

It was kind of fun, actually; certainly more interesting than anything else I’ve ever transplanted. I wrapped it in burlap and wore two pairs of gloves, but the thorns pretty much laughed at that (local seller of succulents Cactus Jungle Nursery recommend using pieces of carpet when you move a cactus and if anyone asks you to move one of these agaves, “just tell them no”), though I actually got most of my pokes while I was cleaning out the pups growing all around it. 

The real challenge was the weight of the thing. I don’t know what it weighed, but it was much more than a hundred pounds; boulders seem easy to move in comparison. I couldn’t lift it, the only way I could move it was to grab the top of it and kind of leverage it around while my client’s landscape architect friend rather tentatively pried at it with a rock bar. He didn’t seem to find the process as charming as I did.

Fortunately, we were only moving it three feet, to the center of the planting bed; I don’t think I could have moved it much further.  We moved it in early October, which I think is a little late — you want it to heal and put out new roots before the cold and wet of the rainy season — but the plant didn’t seem to mind and it’s still looking healthy now, a year later. And if it grows a few feet wider and blocks the path again? Well…

Sagebrush Country

Most of my time on the eastside, I was camped on the edge of the sagebrush sea that stretches from the Sierras across the Great Basin to Utah. It was a good opportunity to get to know that plant community. I’ve seen it and driven through it and even planted the namesake plant, Big Sage aka Great Basin Sage (Artemisia tridentata), in several gardens including my own, but I hadn’t really camped or hiked or spent an extended amount of time in it. It’s an interesting plantscape. Flat for the most part, with almost no trees, and the soil is loose and sandy and not for any plant that needs to be well fed or water-fat. The sun is strong, even though the actual temperatures stayed moderate because of the altitude, and there was almost always wind, especially in the evenings because I was at the base of a mountain. There were monsoon rains a lot of the time I was out there, storm clouds building during the afternoon and then briefly dropping rain somewhere on the landscape, frequently with a double or triple rainbow somewhere. Rains were still T-shirt weather, and the high desert smelled amazing afterwards. Sagebrush is one of those smells that evokes an entire landscape.

Snowberry, Bitterbrush, Sagebrush

Most of what you see of the sagebrush in the photo is actually its bloom stalks. Sagebrush is wind-pollinated, so it doesn’t need a big, showy flower and it doesn’t care about attracting pollinators. The foliage is beautiful enough to make up for the lack of flowers, though. We made a tea with it one night and seasoned potatoes with it on another, and it smells nice in campfires or as smudge sticks. I usually think of silver foliage as an accent or contrast for green foliage, but silver is the dominant color in sage country and it is the greens that act as compliments.

Blazing Star, Mentzelia

A few other plants — Blazing Star, Prickly Poppy, and Sulfur Buckwheat — provided the showy flowers. The spiny, weedy foliage of the blazing stars and prickly poppies would probably keep them out of most gardens, but their flowers are fantastic.

Blazing Star, Mentzelia

Prickly Poppy, Argemone

Prickly Poppy, Argemone

Sulfur Buckwheat, Eriogonum umbellatum

Sage at Convict Lake

“The Sagebrush Sea (scientifically known as “sagebrush steppe”) covers approximately 110 million acres of the American West, making it one of the most extensive landscapes in North America. The heart of the Sagebrush Sea is shaped by the Columbia River Basin, the Great Basin, the Wyoming Basin and the Colorado Plateau.” More info, including details about conservation efforts and some cool maps, can be found at SagebrushSea.org.

Sagebrush Sea, from SagebrushSea.org

Sierra Lily, Lilium kelleyanum

I was up in the east side at a great time for wildflowers. One area that really impressed me was at Agnew Meadows in Devil’s Postpile National Monument. In one place — a boggy meadow beside a stream — I counted a dozen different wildflowers in full bloom within a twenty foot radius, and I was impressed at how well the colors all complimented each other, purples and blues contrasted with yellows. I saw the same flowers growing together in various combinations at many of the other meadows and streamsides in the monument and in the national forest, but because they were all present at once in Agnew I started to think of them as the Agnew Meadows wildflower mix, as if it were a seed company’s wildflower packet. For a moist cottage garden at high elevation, I reckon you couldn’t do much better.
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Sweet Peas and Garden Pleasure Lily

I’ve mentioned before that we like cut flowers to have in the house and also give away. We don’t have enough space for a cutting garden, so we grow sweet peas, which earn their keep by fixing nitrogen and producing a lot of flowers in a small space. We had a white vine which finished months ago, but our purple vine is over ten feet tall and still going upwards, still in full bloom. For a while we could stand on a chair to cut them, but now the bulk of the flowers are too high even for that. It’s not even particularly ornamental any more; it’s more like an actual pea vine when the bottom of the plant is in decline, but the top is still too productive to take out of the garden. I’m not sure what happened to make it so vigorous.

sweet peas

Sweet peas in a few combinations are below. (more…)

Hello Neighbor!

For three years, there’s been a fifteen foot tall cactus in our neighbor’s yard, six feet away from our back door, but Anita and I never noticed until it bloomed. To be fair, most of the plant is behind a garden shed and fence, and we have to stand in rather contorted positions to view or photograph it, but I would have expected us to notice it before now. Though, this is a phenomenon I’ve observed before; some plants just are low-profile until they bloom. Hellebores, for instance, usually manage to stay below the radar and avoid detection until they finally bloom. I didn’t expect the same thing to happen with a fifteen foot tall cactus.

the view through our fence