DryStoneGarden

Rain Garden Perspective Drawing by Gates and Associates

As part of the stimulus program and various water quality initiatives, El Cerrito got funding to add some rain gardens along San Pablo Avenue, the main commercial street in my neighborhood. A huge percentage of the area is covered with concrete, so when it rains the water has nowhere to go and the streets can look like this photo I took in May; sometimes I feel like I should get out a kayak. To help mediate that, the city redid two sections of sidewalkswith plantings set below the grade of the street. Instead of draining straight to the bay, stormwater will now flow from the streets and sidewalks into planting areas where sediment will drop out of the water and pollutants and trash will be filtered by the plants. There are 600 total linear feet of basins in the two separate areas, calculated to treat 1.23 acres of paved surface; the San Francsico Estuary Institute is going to monitor water quality to see how big of an effect the gardens have. There’s a podcast about the project here. It’s a nice use of plants to address an infrastructure issue.

San Pablo And Eureka Ave

The plantings are all natives. Juncus, leymus, and a grass that looks like a melica are the main species, peppered with some yarrows, two monkey flowers, two California fuchsias, two Ribes speciosa, several Verbena lilacina, two wild roses, a redtiwg dogwood, and a Doug Iris. There are one or two blooming plants in each planter right now, not a big impact, but just enough to focus the eye as you walk past each one.

Monkey Flower and Leymus

The El Cerrito Patch says the cost of the project was $350,000 for the two sections of rain gardens.

San Pablo and Eureka

Island Pink Yarrow, Achillea millefolium rosea

There’s a meme about public plantings, Out on the Streets, hosted by Veg Plotting. Click through to see other posts about public plantings. I have a few more photos of the planters below the fold. (more…)

Rather more on-topic is this video. The footage is from the Stone Foundation’s January workshop and symposium. 14th and 15th generation Japanese stone masons came to California to demonstrate their traditional method of dry stone castle and wall building, and to supervise the construction of some ramparts at a park in Ventura. Most noteworthy in the technique is that the walls are battered with a subtle arch/concave shape for structural stability and that each of the structures has a ‘mirror stone,’ an especially large stone meant to reflect the strength of the builder or owner. The caption says the video is a documentary in progress, but I like it as is; it’s not fast-paced, but that’s appropriate for a stonework video, and there’s some good footage of rock shaping.

The Stone Foundation has an article about the project with info and photos. The Ventura County Reporter did a writeup with a slideshow, and the Ventura County Star put video footage in theirs. I’ve never been to any of the symposiums, but I know a few people who have, and they speak really highly of them. Looks like it was pretty cool.

Lobelia Queen Victoria

The word on the street is that this summer has been the coldest and foggiest in the Bay Area in 39 years. I can believe it; it has been so foggy and windy at our house, I started wearing long johns last week. The plants in our garden don’t seem to mind as much as I do. I don’t notice any particular lack of flowers, and the usual late-summer suspects are all blooming. I missed last month’s bloom day, but most of the same plants are still in bloom, with the Lobelia and the Stargazer Lily being the two main ones that hadn’t quite opened in mid-July.

Stargazer Lily

In June we accidentally let our containerized native lilies dry out, so they declined to bloom this year. The Stargazer is in the ground, so it’s flowering nicely.

Indigofera

The Indigo Bush, Indigofera heterantha, behind the Stargazer is our reliable summer-blooming shrub. It has been happy this year, with none of the aphids that appeared on it last year around this time. The ornamental oregano at its feet hasn’t seemed to attract as many honey bees as usual, probably because the weather has been so chilly.

Western Spicebush, Calycanthus occidentalis

The Western Spicebush is our other summer blooming shrub. It has been going for several months now, with lots of seed heads, flowers, and new buds. It loves the graywater from our laundry machine.

Rocoto Flowers

The Rocoto pepper is also enjoying a long season. The flowers aren’t very noticeable from a distance, but I like them up close. I don’t think people with sunny vegetable gardens can appreciate how happy I am to find a pepper that produces so well in our foggy, part-sun site.

Coyote Mint, Monardella villosa

The Coyote Mint, Monardella villosa, also has a long bloom season in our garden. And the Beach Primrose, Camissonia cheiranthifolia, has been going for a while. It’s doing a nice job of sending flowers out into some of the other plants around it.

Dudleya plant, Camissonia flower

Thanks to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting bloom day. Click through to find links to tons of other blogs showing off what they have in flower. Below, I have a list of our other plants in bloom.
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Rocoto Pepper

I think I’ve mentioned before that our garden is in one of the foggier micro-climates of the Bay Area, so a lot of the classic summer veggies are hard for us to grow. A few things like peppers and tomatoes are too important to give up on, so we’ve tried different varieties to find out what might work best. We seem to have found the right pepper for our garden. We’ve been getting a bumper crop of peppers from our Rocoto, Capsicum pubescens, sometimes known as the Peruvian Tree Pepper.
It doesn’t seem to need the heat that other peppers do. It’s our third year since we bought it as a 4″ at Annie’s. The first year I just potted it up, no fruit. The second year, after I transplanted it into the garden in the spring, it looked unhappy for several months, and then recovered at the end of the summer to put out maybe two dozen small peppers. This year we’ve had all-we-can-eat peppers since mid-June, and the plant shows no sign of slowing. We’ve been harvesting them green, when they have a nice pepper flavor and medium heat; three or four green ones in a sauce make it noticeably hot, but not fiery. A lot of people wait until they turn red and very hot, but not me. My stomach still remembers a plate of stuffed and baked ones that I ate in Peru thirteen years ago.
So far, I’ve just let it grow without pruning or shaping, and it has become a leggy seven footer without much ornamental presence. I’ve seen bushier, self-supporting ones in sunnier sites, but ours definitely needs the bamboo poles to keep it upright.

Our Rocoto staked to a Bamboo Tepee

There’s a devoted website, rocoto.com, by a Bay Area enthusiast, with recipes and photos and info about growing them.

Clockwise -- Rosa, Sedona Red, Buckskin, Oak, Buff, Peach

The corollary to the East Coast Connecticut Blue, is our West Coast Arizona flagstone. It’s sort of the ubiquitous, default flagstone of Bay Area gardens, but I’m always happy to use it. It’s easy to work with, and I like the color range, with each of the colors having a slightly different feel. Oak is the hardest; Buckskin and Peach are the nicest to work with; Sedona Red is the lowest quality, the one to avoid.

Arizona Peach Patio at Installation

Peach is probably my favorite, though in the Bay Area it tends to gray over time if it doesn’t get a lot of sunlight and air circulation or if you don’t put a sealer on it. I showed the photo of this patio once before, but here are a couple of more photos. The plants have really filled in around it.

Arizona Peach patio 1 year later

After Three Years

The Pacific Wax Myrtles are eight feet tall now, three years after planting as five gallons. I think they’re going to lose the race with the workers constructing the McMansion next door, but they should provide a good screen fairly soon.

Arizona Peach

Last month I went back and built a second patio with the leftover stone and another new pallet of stone. The cinder blocks are new veggie and flower beds that the clients are building. I think the block will eventually get mortared and stucco’ed.

Sedona Red

Sedona Red is by the far the softest, weakest, crumbliest of the Arizona flagstones. My parents house was the only place I’ve ever used it, and I hope to never use it again. Fortunately, the patio is mostly to be seen and is rarely walked on, so there haven’t been problems with cracking. This is a photo of it in its first year; I had some nice photos of it this spring with a ton of crocuses blooming, but those photos were lost when our laptop got stolen. If the crocuses do their thing again next spring, I’ll swap this photo out for a better one.

Sedona Red sideview

You don’t really want sandstone to be this striated; it’s often a sign of how weekly bonded the layers are. With other Arizona sandstones, the striations are not nearly as distinct.

Buff Sideview

I have a few more photos of palleted stone below, similar to what you would find at the stoneyard page, but not so tiny. Actual colors of course vary. (more…)