DryStoneGarden

View from the New Office

Happy Bloom Day. This is the view from our new office. I still need to stucco the exterior, so I haven’t really gone through and photographed it for a post, but we’ve been moved into it for about a month now. It’s not a large office, and right now it’s full of stacks of paperwork for our taxes. There are worse things than doing taxes and bloom day posts in a garden office.

Coastal Cal Poppy and Blue-Eyed Grass

Lots of poppies are blooming throughout the garden, mostly yellow-tinged coastal ones in the outer garden and red-tinged ‘Mahogany Red’ offspring in the inner garden, with a few regular orange ones showing up in both areas.

Mahogany Red Cal Poppy and Variegated Iris

Meadowfoam and Cal Poppies

We have meadowfoam blooming in several areas. During construction of the office, I relocated our bathtub bog planting to the outer garden. It get the roof runoff from office now. When I moved the tub, I replanted everything. Mimulus cardinalis came roaring back right away. The Colocasia has been slower to recover, but it’ll start muscle up out of the mimulus soon. A surprise appearance was meadowfoam. I had grown some of them in the tub its first year, but they got out-competed and disappeared until I turned the soil and replanted everything. I’m sure they’ll get out-competed again, but it was nice to see them this year. Kind of funky to see them growing through the agave sitting in a container in front of the tub.

Calocasia Black Magic, Mimulus Cardinalis, Meadowfoam, Agave

Ninebark with some older Heuchera maxima flowers

The Iochroma has been in full bloom for several weeks now. I’m really happy with how it grows up through the spicebush as if it were all one plant, giving it a longer bloom season and making for a more evergreen shrub. The flowers are a different tone of red, but peak at different times of the year.

Iochroma with Spicebush Leaves

Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Spicebush

And the best thing in our garden right now is the plein air shower. Our Wisteria is a Japanese variety, W. floribunda, so the bloom stalks are long, fragrant, and they open slowly. We’re about a week away from when the flowers hang so low they brush against you and get in your hair and it feels like you’re bathing in flowers. It’s already pretty fantastic, though.

Wisteria Shower

Later today, I’ll probably take another break from taxes to post a list of everything in bloom in the garden. My thanks to Carol at MayDreasGardens for creating and hosting Bloom Day. April is always one of the best months to surf around on bloom day, so click through to her blog for tons of links.

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. (more…)

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

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. (more…)

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.

Eschscholzia californica maritima & Escholzia californica

I like this accidental side by side comparison of the coastal form of the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica maritima or Eschscholzia californica var. californica, and the regular California poppy, Eschscholzia californica. I put in the regular one two years ago and the coastal form last year. Both plants are perennial in our garden, so now we have both. I suppose growing together they could hybridize, but we deadhead pretty regularly and there are many blocks of houses and concrete between us and any “wild” land.

The regular poppy might be the better plant for most gardens–bigger and faster with larger blooms and that unique burnt-orange color–and it’s definitely more common in gardens, but the coastal one has its merits, too, and seems to be getting more popular. I say “regular” and “coastal,” but I’m pretty sure the coastal form is actually the native one for Richmond Annex where I live. In fact, the owner of Larner Seeds, where I got my seed, has a post on her blog that suggests that the prevalence of the more annual form around the Bay Area hills and throughout the state is the work of past generations of Boy Scouts, Sierra Clubbers, and other human seed dispersers, and that there used to be a lot more regional variance across the state. And apparently people are still doing it, James at Lost in the Landscape cites a recent re-gen project in the San Diego area that used the generic poppy instead of the locally native form.

The flowers of the coastal form have an interesting two-tone color, an orange interior fading to a bright lemony yellow on the outer parts of the petals, and they seem to vary a bit in size and coloring; the biggest coastal flowers are often as big as the smaller flowers on the annual form. In the wild I’ve mostly seen the coastal form looking like a woolly little blue-gray thing growing in dry mineral soil, but in the garden they get about a foot tall, and they’ve been quite willing to cover themselves in blooms during the spring and then keep producing sporadic blooms throughout the summer. Their small size works best for our small garden, so we’re thinking of pulling the regular ones this year, and going down to just the single form, the coastal one.

Eschscholzia californica maritima, coastal Cal poppy