True Dirt

Begonias

My first season of planting begonias, and I was scared stiff to dig them up. But, all the books told me to do that, store them in a box in the garage 'til next spring.

Now, late November, and most of them had collapsed, covered over by fast growing foxgloves. Time to pull the bulbs out.

As always, gardening surprises me with how simple things are. The falling stems gently drop away. The bulbs, just under the surface, pop up with a twist of the spade. The dry dirt slips away under my gloved thumbs, and all that is left is twisting hair-like roots.

Most of the bulbs look like they did when I planted them -- little furry disks, with a slight indentation on one side. In my ignorance I was surprised to see that that's where the plant "grows" from.

I slipped the half-dozen little pods into an old yellow Webvan box, on a shelf in my cool garage. See you next spring.

The garden is finally fading in late late autumn. I'm not disappointed. Moreso relieved; maybe I'm just a bit worried that San Francisco is so mild that we'll just miss the cycles entirely, and my plants will exhaust themselves with continuous year-round blooming.

Still so much to do. Books can wait for serious rain.

book weather

The days are too short for much gardening. It is dark now when I get home from work. The weekends confront me with a long list of tasks that I tend to ignore knowing the yard will be in shadow before midafternoon. I begin by circumambulating the garden. Descending the basement stairs I emerge at the top of the driveway—a sloping path of cement leading to the doorless, detached garage that is my tool shed. There, amassed, are the potted things I can't grow in the dirt—the aloes, succulents, cymbidiums, and various herbs—as well as new plants waiting for better weather, or plot preparation to be set out. Around the garage, across the small deck past the potted roses, Meyer lemon, and various rhododendrons, to the narrow path that runs between the back border and the raised bed.

The back border is dominated by a gnarled giant of a lemon tree through the center of which has grown a Japanese maple from a vagabond seedling. A rickety trellis that I built from scrap lumber shoulders a rambling white rose. At the end of the path an enormous Banksia rose has wrapped its exfoliating red trunks around the rusting clothesline pole, both remnants of a previous resident. I pass the compost bin, pick my way across the cement chunks spanning a dirt slope to the "lawn"—a sward of clover, yarrow, English daisy and crabgrass. Uphill of the grass, the stucco square of the house rises against the sky. A spindly rhododendron, of an age with the lemon tree, reaches ten feet or so to the bedroom window. Next to it, a towering scarlet oak breaches the roofline. About five years ago I discovered the sapling with its oversized leaves poking up from a tangle of fern fronds. I left it alone and it proceeded to push upward like Jack's beanstalk, its spreading canopy claiming the upper quadrant of the yard. Now it crowns the top of the slope, mingling with the draping branches of the paper birches that look so out of place in California gardens.

I have spent considerable effort to create in this high corner of the yard an impenetrable wall of foliage to shield my garden from my neighbor's second-storey deck. Francis Lester, an accommodatingly agressive musk rose, scaled the 8-foot trellis I had attached to the low chain-link fence in a couple of years. Binding the trees and the rose together is the Western spice bush—Calycanthus occidentalis—that I planted a decade ago and which has slowly bulked into a 10-foot by 10-foot wall of green. Standing in front of it I can look east beyond the garden fence, and over the rooftops to the hills and a broad sweep of sky. This is my favorite vista, and in the dry months a greying Adirondack chair commands the spot, a kind of garden throne from which I survey my Lilliputian domain. But the chair is folded in the garage now and the Scarlet oak's leaves are a dusty brown.

Last week a marauding East wind ripped away the jeweled fall foliage, denuding even the green shrubs, and left behind a seared and sorry looking landscape. It is enough to make one think Nature is sentient—and has a cruel streak. I look to the sky for a sign of the rain that should be falling but the sky is poker-faced. A shadow is creeping across the yard. I walk back to the driveway, pick up my garden gloves and head for the basement door. It's book weather.

the green-eyed goddess

I do not feel the tug of desire for other people's possessions most of the time but as a gardener I find Envy is my frequent companion. There is envy of Size--the bigger garden; of Skill--the hand-made rock wall or waterfall; and of Beauty--the perfect perennial border or the artful woodland glade. But the most insidious form of the sin is Rose Envy. It is the equivalent of wanting somebody else's Jaguar or Rolex, or Wolf range.

I suspect that something like R.E. is at work in David Austin's creation of a catalog's worth of Perfect Roses. They work not neither do you toil at producing blooms worthy of a travel brochure for the Cotswolds or Garden Design magazine. Here is a gardener who looked upon Rose du Roi and thought "I must have that rose." The rest came when he hadthat rose but wanted it to bloom more than once a year, not send up suckers all over the place, be less droopy of form, and, of course, be patented. Now David Austin's roses are the envy of many gardeners--even ones who didn't use to like roses.

But I am trying to escape the point here. Which is that while looking at pictures of Rich's roses I have been easy prey for the green-eyed goddess.

Rose du Roi from the Bayview garden:

2002 Rose Report Card (Part 3)

Have no fear, this is the last entry. There are three more roses I planted last winter.

Gertrude Jekyll (Jackson & Perkins). Another David Austin rose, a hardy reliable performer that creates gorgeous deep pink flowers. This rose grew really well into a leggy, 5'+ tall beauty that threw out wave after wave of gorgeous Austin type flowers, with an enchanting perfume. Here's an example.

Chinensis Mutabilis (Wayside Gardens). A species rose that is growing well but slowly in my garden. Only about 2' tall, I expect it to get to 5'+ when fully grown. Still, it put out continuous waves of pretty 3' single flowers. The magic of this rose is that the flowers start out a pale yellow then fade to pink. So, at any one time, the shrub is covered with a range of colors of flowers.

Guinevere (Jackson & Perkins, HARbadge). An "English Style" i.e. David Austin style rose, bred by Harkness and imported by J&P. A low grower, supposedly to 3', with white flowers that fade to a very slight blush. I'm a bit disappointed in this one. It did ok, and the flowers are lovely, but it only grew to about 1' tall. I'm going to try moving this into a half barrel and putting where it will get a lot more direct sun.

2002 Rose Report Card (Part 2)

Briggs strongly encouraged me to try non hybrid tea roses. This seemed like a good strategy, because almost all the existing roses in my yard (all HTs) got extremely sick with rust and black spot over the course of the very moist cool San Francisco summer. So, on with the review.

Reine de Violettes (Wayside Gardens). I saw this Hybrid Perpetual "old rose" growing at Brigg's and thought it was a beauty worth trying. The blossoms (a very bluish violet) are lovely, and I was intrigued by the vigorous thornless branches. This has done extremely well in my garden, blooming non-stop for well over 6 months (still going strong near the end of November). It has grown to about 5' tall in one year, and been very generous with blooms.

The leaves are a pale green, but it has been essentially impervious to the leaf diseases that seem to attack the HTs in my garden. The one odd thing is that the flowers are very delicate -- fall apart quickly (both in the vase and on the plant). Luckily many more come to replace old ones.

Henry Nevard (Wayside Gardens). An "old rose" Bourbon-type, I was fascinated by the huge, deeply cupped and deeply red flowers. This plant grew well and got quite tall, but ran into two problems. First, the blooms almost never opened. They would become large soft buds, then just rot. San Francisco is just not hot enough for them, I guess. Worse, the plant got a terrible mildew, and was just coated in the stuff. In all, a failure, and I recycled it in late August.

Jaune des Prez (Wayside Gardens). A climbing noisette, I planted this rose on an eastern facing wall that is a bit shady. The books said it would do well anyway. As I learned was typical for climbing noisettes, it didn't bloom its first summer. But -- it did grow quite spectacularly. The plant through out long meandering canes up to about 12 feet long, more or less covering the wall and several trellises I've attached to it. I'm very much looking forward to this rose's first flush of flowers next season!

2002 Rose Report Card (Part 1)

When I moved into my new house in the spring of 2000, I found over 40 roses in the front yard. Knowing nothing about roses, I just watched and watered them for about a year. They were almost all hybrid teas, though a few were floribundas. Most were tiny, ancient, sick, rarely (if ever) bloomed, or were planted in inappropriate spots. The majority of these old roses have now been removed.

A year ago I bought a dozen bare root roses to improve these gardens. In this series I'm going to review how these new roses performed. Though it is now late in the season (end of Nov) for most of them, a few are still blooming. I've included a few photos as examples. All are from my garden.

Glamis Castle (Wayside Gardens). 3' tall David Austin English Rose with 3" white flowers. I planted this in a 3 cu. ft. half barrel and planted in a windy SE corner of my property. It has done extremely well, and has put out flush after flush of lovely white fully double "old" style blooms. Despite being wind-blown it is holding up well with just a few thin supports. The flowers are very sweet smelling. Canes unbelievably thorny.

Royal Bonica (Wayside Gardens). These are 3' tall shrub roses that I bought to grow up and over a 2' tall brick wall. My plan was to buy 4, space them every 2.5' or so, and have them create a mass of pink. Their flowers are 2' double pink fellows that are not very fragrant. Throws out floribunda-like sprays of blooms. I'm somewhat satisfied with these, although I'm hoping for more and broader growth in years two and three.

Two interesting side-notes to these plants -- I bought four of these, and two died fairly quickly. I complained, and received two more. Of these, one didn't make it past spring. Somewhat disappointing, though WSG came through on their guarantees. The other oddity is that, though these are all supposedly the same variety, their flowers vary quite a bit -- from deep pink and fully double to light pink and sem-double, to white with pink edges and semi-double. Is this typicaly variation in one variety?

Tamora (Wayside Gardens). Another David Austin English Rose, this one about 2' tall, with 3" apricot flowers. I planted this in a 3 cu. ft. half barrel (like Glamis Castle), and it also has done extremely well, throwing out flush after flush of lovely blooms all season long, in a compact but well shaped bush. The blooms tend to open as a medium apricot, then fade to a pale yellow. The flowers are very sweet smelling. I am very happy with this rose -- the blooms are wonderful. I especially adore the almost open buds, which look like silk with a red edging.

PS. I've used Growing Good Roses by Rayford Reddell as my guide for planting, maintaining, etc. I just followed his cookbook-like instructions and my roses seemed to do very well.

caterpillars continued

"Butterflies can be attracted to your garden by providing suitable flowers from which they can obtain nectar. Most butterflies can utilize a wide variety of flowers, including those of many cultivated varieties, as nectar sources. However, a more critical need is for the plants which provide food for the larval (caterpillar) stages, and most species will accept only one or a few species of plants at this stage...Although the caterpillars will feed on the leaves of these plants, the damage is usually minor and only temporary."

So all those articles and books about attracting butterflies to your garden? I think they cleverly forget to mention that you will also probably be attracting caterpillars to eat your garden. Which is good. Yes?

This reminds me of a childhood event of terror involving caterpillars falling from the sky....more on this later.

the agony and the ecstasy

Ok, maybe i'm obsessing over these little pre-butterflies. But, there's one on my hollyhocks I missed.

Not the best picture, but captures the essence. And, Briggs, I'll let him live and munch on my leaves. I hope he makes a pretty butterfly. Where will he chrysalisify himself?

Caterpillars: Now I'm sad

Ok, so I blew it. I got impatient and plucked the caterpillars before waiting for an answer. Maybe some more will show up.

I looked at the link you kindly provided -- if that isn't the exact match, then it is a different butterfly larva that looks almost exactly the same.

I actually did try searching the web for butterfly info, but didn't successfully find anything useful enough.

One interesting point -- you say you almost never lost a plant to insect consumption -- so should I just ignore this kind of thing? Or when is too much destruction too much?

Finally -- on the subject of snails -- I pay two little boys a nickel a snail to hunt for them in the spring. Not sure I prefer the raccoon method.

ps. this exchange is exactly why I think this blog is going to be fun!

Who's been eating my garden?

This is really a response to Rich's caterpillar crisis entry of yesterday. But I have to say something about bugs in general in the garden. There are lots of them and they are there to eat mostly. However, in over ten years of gardening in the same back yard I have yet to lose a plant to bug eating—well, not quite. Snails and slugs can consume seedlings and small plants in five minutes. And a tomato hornworm the size of a blimp can eat half a tomato plant in an afternoon. But those creatures are easy to identify and there are a million ways to deal with them (including eating THEM).

Besides the snail problem—which disappeared when the racoons and opossums began to regularly visit my garden—I have found that just about any plant-eating bug that appears is soon consumed by some bug-eating bug, or bird, or something else. My first bug crisis—spring rosebuds covered with aphids—lasted for about 3 weeks until I noticed the presence of little orange and black creatures on the same plants. At first I thought they were some alternate specie of earwig. I finally looked them up in a book and found they were actually the nymph stage of the lady bug. The lady bug nymph is a prolific consumer of aphids.

Then there were the various creatures associated with my compost bin...more on that later. I guess the moral of this story is "find out what it is before you kill it." Because it might actually be harmless or precious. I suspect that the caterpillar eating Rich's hollyhocks is some California butterfly or moth species for which the hollyhock is a host plant.

Not having my California Butterflies field guide (which has pictures of the caterpillars too) handy, I looked on the Web for a something that would help. The most useful site so far is the USGS web site.

To start, I looked for an orange and black colored butterfly like the Painted Lady. I found the West Coast Lady, in the same butterfly family, and read the entry. It seems these butterflies are very fond of many plants in the Mallow Family—of which Hollyhocks are a member.

This site had a photo of the West Coast Lady in its caterpillar forms.

Caterpillars

This morning I discovered that my Hollyhocks were being attacked by black caterpillars (with yellow stripes down their backs). All told about half a dozen of the little creatures. They were steadily munching their way through the leaves of my young plants, and creating little parlors for themselves by spinning a web covering.

My first thought was -- is this just a negative for Alcea Rosea, eventually to transform into something positive for my garden? An attractive butterfly? Or just a pest?

So, I went to the web. My researches turned up a number of possibilities: tent caterpillars, wooly bears, a few others. None seemed to have any beneficial properties.

Next step -- take a picture, post it here, and have Briggs tell me what to do :-). I won't recount the tedium of my digital camera problems, but needless to say, no pictures were taken.

Impatience got the best of me. I plucked them all off and crushed them in the gutter. Score one point for the Hollyhocks.

going native?

It seems to me that gardening is by definition about the creation of artificial spaces. A garden of California natives is still an artificial space. So let's just call a spade a spade, and admit that a preference for natives (in private gardens) is as much a subject of taste as whether you think that pink and purple striped petunias are gaudy or divine.

I'm ecstatic that my California natives (a wild lilac 'frosty blue' and a shrub lupine) are will be both gorgeous and more likely not to wither under my black thumb. But I hope that the lilac's blue flowers will musically hint at a later wash of perennial flax, and its white tips suggest a swath of waving japanese anemones.

old garden new gardener

A little over two years ago I bought a house in San Francisco with large but clearly aging gardens. The previous owners had lived here for 50 years, and were avid plantophiles, especially interested in roses. While some plants were in good shape, many were on their last legs or beyond.

Touched with madness, I decided to rebuild the grounds with new gardens. Mad because I had never so much as lifted a trowel before in my life! My entire gardening experience was mowing my parents suburban New Jersey lawn over 20 years ago.

The projects I've taken on already are too numerous to list here. I'll write here about whatever takes my fancy in my current projects, and to chat with Briggs.

Here's a sample of the hodgepodge of things left to me from the previous gardeners. A foxglove, a rose, and a fuschia. What rose, I don't know -- some kind of floribunda, beyond that I'm unsure.

A neighbor told me she brought the foxglove seeds back from England as a gift many years ago. Over the years the foxgloves have seeded themselves everywhere in the garden. Just add water, and poof up come foxgloves. Happily I like them!

Eve's Garden

The way some people talk you'd think the demise of the First Garden was due not to the eating of forbidden fruit but to the planting of a non-native. Somehow over the last few years the campaign to elevate our appreciation of native plants has taken a dangerous turn—onto that path of righteousness that doesn't necessarily lead us away from temptation, or the planting of seductive foreigners in our local habitat. The recent uproar over a certain park committee wanting to restore poison oak to its former habitat in San Francisco is a case in point.

In the same way that California has been a magnet for people in search of a new place to drop their hat, or make their fortunes, or just bask in sunshine the better part of the year, it has also been a place that plants from afar could drop their roots and thrive. California is not unique in this respect. The English have been famous for appropriating plants and making a place for them in their gardens for centuries. But in California the lack of extreme winters and the variety of accommodating niches for many types of plants has encouraged the botanical multitudes to prosper in ways that they could not even in their home ecosystems. I don't mean just that I can grow orchids or banana trees in my garden but that some plants, introduced intentionally or by accident to California's open spaces, have displaced or crowded out the plants that were part of the natural ecosystem of that place.

I don't understand why people won't plant California Oaks or why they want an Eastern lilac in their yards when a perfectly nice California lilac will do better. I do understand that people's yards and gardens are their own domain to create whatever fantasyland or nostaliga trip they may. There has been a movement afoot in the arid West to encourage gardeners to use plants that need less water and less fertilizer—usually the plants that grew there before gardeners altered the landscape (and developers before them). A good idea in theory, especially if you live in a place where water is scarce or pricey. Good particularly for public landscaping. Not so good for those of us who have a penchant for botanical exotica and cannot contain our enthusiasm to a narrow palette of plant forms.

The debate as it concerns wild spaces is not merely theoretical. There we are talking about the destruction of wilderness. It may not be so obvious as a redwood forest but from the bug's eye view it's enormous. Or from the bird's eye view. Or the butterfly's. For these creatures we are talking about removing their sustenance, their nesting places, their offspring's chances of survival. If ivy covers over the wild violet's territory it also wipes off the face of the earth the wild Mourning Cloak (a butterfly) who claims it as a cradle for its larvae. And don't get me started on golf courses. The look of our neighborhoods with their tree-lined streets, lawns, and shrubbery-framed houses is the look more of New England than California.

To me, the perfect garden is an Oak grove on a grassy hillside where a secret stream lies hidden in its cleft among Big Leaf Maple, wild cucumber, monkey flower, flowering current, and yes, a bit of poison oak.

wild Collinsia and Poison Oak...

Return of the Natives

"Many people are riled because they say native plants are often low-growing species that bloom only for weeks, then look the rest of the time like scrubby weeds" (Nov. 18 San Jose Mercury News article).

Coyote Brush: "They're callin' me a Scrubby Weed!"
Scrub Oak: "You haven't got enough stature for that."
Evening Primrose: "Well, if they ever bothered to look AFTER sunset, they'd see me blooming like crazy—all summer too!"
Sticky Monkey-flower: "Hmmphff! I'd like to see some 'o them Petunias blooming out here in July"
California Poppy: "They'd be dead as sweetpeas in a snowstorm."
Farewell-To-Spring: "You know, all those Store Flowers were natives once."
California Lilac: "But they've forgotten their roots."

Correction

I incorrectly described Ferdinand Pichard (in yesterday's photo entry) as having been bred in the 1800s. In fact, it is the modern creation of French rose-breeder, Remi Tanne, who produced this gem in 1921. The oldest striped rose is probably "Rose Mundi" (which also goes by many other names) and most likely was bred (or appeared in someone's garden) in the mid 1500s.

rosa mundi

Tales of the rose. It's one of those stories that goes back before myth. It's more than a flower. It's a world view. Ask any gardener who has grown one. And not all do, of course. I tried mightily to avoid them in the beginning of my earthy apprenticeship. They reminded me of my mother. But then I got hold of a peculiar catalog of "old fashion" roses that came out of a nursery in Watsonville--rather more famous for artichokes than roses. "Roses of Yesterday and Today" it was called. The "Today" roses were much like the ones I was trying to avoid--the ones my mother loves: "Queen Elizabeth," "Just Joey," "Peace." I knew the words "hybrid tea" but didn't know that it referred to a vast collection of hybridized eye candy developed in the Eisenhower Era for a new generation of post-war gardeners. The ones that had just acquired ranch-style homes on fenced suburban plots with lots of empty dirt.

But the "Yesterday" roses shipwrecked me. The siren song of rosa mundi called me and I floated into the mists of obsession...

Francis Lester

A classic musk rose, parent of the popular East Bay climber, "Kathleen." Francis Lester created this rose on his nursery in Watsonville, California around 1900. This picture was taken in late May of 2002--prime time for this usually once-a-year bloomer.

Ferdinand Pichard

The first striped rose, created mid 1800s*. Perhaps named for the creator, obviously French in any case. This plant bloomed the first spring I got it--in a 4-inch pot.

* for a correction of this historical error see "rosa mundi" entry

Pax

This came in the first bunch of "old" roses I ordered--from one of the few places such roses could be ordered ten years ago, Roses of Yesterday and Today (by the way, this was originally Francis Lester's place). It's a rangy climber but tolerant of the shade.

Tuscany Superb

One of the oldest hybrids--supposedly from Empress Josephine's famous rose garden--and also one of my first picks from Roses of Yesterday and Today. I'm not sure it's on it's own stock. The gallicas are prolific suckerers and this one sends up new shoots each year from below the soil surface which I remove. The scent is as unbelievable as is the dense magenta color.