One of the things that really bothered me about my garden last year was how everyone else had lots of sweet early spring flowers, but I had none. Give me some of that February/March color!
So this year I planted lots of freesias, tulips, and other spring bulbs in pots. They're all coming up now, the pretty little things. The freesias (yellow and white) are somehow both dainty and tough, sprouting when it's still so cold.
Eat your hearts out neighbors!
Yes, you can have lots of Bishop of Llandalf Dahlias -- assuming of course that I actually divided them correctly. Nothing would make me happier than sharing.
Briggs, didn't you get fined by the city of Oakland because your garden was sprawling out of control? Yet, if I understand this correctly, this sprawl was the actual natural state of your native plants.
In other words, you got fined by the city because you planted a lovely native garden?
Adhere to the standards of common non-native gardening or beware! Grass and nothing else!
I've got so many plants somewhere out in the ether, in that magical space between selection (order placed on the Internet or from a catalog) and planting, that I've reached an interesting state of dreamlike garden confusion. What did I order, when is it supposed to arrive, how tall, what color?
Yes, there are records of it all, somewhere, all part of a master plan. Roses, azaleas, dahlias, more or less. Not that hard to keep track of I guess. But where's that 50 pound bag of alfalfa?
The plants will arrive, I assume, eventually. So i prepare for them by digging and digging and digging. Getting ready the huge wholes for them all, to be filled with lucious new soils jammed with nutrients.
So that's what I did today -- dug until my back ached.
Taking a moment to visit ...last summer's garden
Passing the desk of a coworker this morning I saw a large vase of flowers - a spray of blood-red rose buds with a frothing of Gypsophila (baby's breath). The roses, needless to say, were those Cadillacs of the American florist industry -American Beauties. Taking a closer look at the bouquet I marveled at the stout thornless stems nearly as thick as my pinkie finger, and the perfectly sculpted buds. The stems were nearly two feet long and I didn't notice any place where a lateral branch had to be clipped off. In fact, if it weren't for the water in the vase I would have sworn the roses were plastic. They will actually open in a few days. But that is not what they are about. They are about being perfect buds. They were bred to be buds. When they do open the recipient of these symbols of love are apt to be disappointed since the flowers are rather scrawny compared to the grand promise of the buds. And of course they have no scent.
Maybe what most disappoints me about florist's roses is that they don't have most of what makes roses interesting. In fact, the florist's rose has been reduced to the least interesting and most ephemeral feature - it's puer-ness you might say (if you were a Jungian), or the eternal bud.
What interests me about roses is how many features they have and how different all those features can be. Even without the flower. There are the leaves which run the gamut of color from dark green to bright bronze and every shade of green in between. Some are glossy, as if they had each just been glazed with linseed oil. Others look like rumpled tissue paper. The stems also choose from a varied palette of near black to bright green. When first emerging they can be bright russet or pale bronze.
The thorns add more variety, sometimes huge and in other cases so small they appear more like a halo or dew on the branch. One variety of rose sports thorns so broad and large they essentially are the branch. The moss roses, on the other hand, exude a sticky resin that clings to the hair-like thorns creating the effect of pale green "moss" on the stems and buds. Thorns can curve up or down or stick straight out (often noticed by the gardener while pinned down by them).
Rose bush anatomy is complicated and also widely variable. Those florist's roses are grown on bodies whose only purpose is to produce those long sturdy stems. They have no shape to speak of. We are familiar with "climbers" and "shrub" and "standard" or tree roses. But try to fit a rose bush into some designated spot in your garden and you have to contend with height (2 feet to 20-something), width (ditto), and whether it grows in a column, or is vase-shaped, or "weeps" or fans out or grows like a giant bonzai.
Not to be overlooked are the hips. You could call them the winter bloom. Bright orange or red, bottle-shaped, oval, or berry-like they can be a little extra something, a lagniappe from nature, or the main show.
Finally, the flower. But here I have to stop before I go off on forms, colors, shapes, stamens, bosses, and bracts....
p.s. the "thorn" picture above came from this accomplished photographer's wonderful site
There is this odd intersection of my life where politics and gardening collide. It has to do with a word and a concept: native. In a nutshell, there is confusion at the moment between the concepts of native plants and native peoples. It involves value judgement, i.e. native is good, non-native not so good. And it is particularly difficult to talk about with people concerned about social justice and the acceptance and well-being of immigrants to America.
A local politician recently railed against a suggestion that all the plantings in a public park should be native plants which he took to mean that people not native to America were also not desired.
People I work with in natural habitat restoration projects also have questions about the good of using only native plants. But we are also faced with an array of plants we call "invasives" that displace native vegetation and reduce the value of habitat for native fauna (and the native fauna also are losing ground to the "introduced" fauna). In gardening, the term is "weed" and we gardeners don't want them. But one gardener's weed may be another's prize specimen.
Our gardens are highly artificial environments so it's hard to justify excluding plants that didn't grow there before (and the question is when was before?). On the other hand, if you take a walk into the nearby hills with someone who is very concerned about a creekside habitat that is becoming a monoculture of escaped Algerian ivy, or blue Vinca (periwinkle) the implications are far-reaching.
I remember a friend describing the countryside of northern England (Yorkshire) after her first visit there. She said the countryside was entirely artificial now. Meaning that there weren't any "native" plants anymore. And very few wild animals either. Even few birds. And this in the nation famous for it's gardens and gardeners.
So, what to do? Getting back to politics, people and plants are not alike. Human society is not ecology. Humans can move around, adapt to situations, and assess danger relatively rapidly. Plants and animals have fewer options. When a housing development ploughs over an ephemeral vernal pool where a small population of flowers has evolved over millions of years there is no place for those flowers to go. They have lost their niche forever. California poppies have a good chance of hanging on because we like to grow them in our gardens and they have a way of reseeding themselves all over the place.
The recent discovery of a pathogen that kills California oak trees has me more worried. I cannot imagine a California landscape without oak trees. Which perhaps is why, in my own backyard, where the local (non native) squirrels have buried hundreds of acorns from the next door neighbor's giant old oak, I am letting them grow. There are maybe twenty now and they may one day turn my bedding plots into an oak grove. But I feel a need to ensure that there is another generation of oak trees there. I have heard that my neighbor is planning to build a house on the spot where the old oak grows.
to 20 Bishop of Llandaff dahlia bulbs. I don't know where I'm going to put them either but it's too much to pass up. I've been hallucinating a new design for the front yard that will include a spot for a baby California buckeye tree I've just started from seed and why not a spate of garnet red dahlias while I'm at it. It only involves digging up lawn and crunching up some adobe into something resembling soil. Oh, and I forgot digging up the dahlias every year and processing them....not likely to happen.
activity report...
The evergreen clematis is blooming! Even before the plum trees pop. And a few jonquils are opening though most get eaten by slugs if I don't immediately cut them. But the major show is the manzanita and ceanothus in the front yard. The manzanita looks like it belongs on a wedding cake--tiny sugary pink-white clusters cover the four-foot shrub. The California lilac is now tree-height and in another couple of days the closed buds, now pinkish lavender, will open up in electric blue. The bees are already having a party.
By the way, I ordered four new roses for my garden this year -- Buff Beauty (to train through a bunch of pink-blooming shrubby Royal Bonicas), a Graham Thomas and Gertrude Jekyll each to complement another rose of the same type, and a Mayflower standard.
The last three are all David Austins. Mayflower is a gorgeous soft pink, and its claim to fame is that it's supposedly "completely resistant to blackspot, powdery mildew and rust." We'll see.
For now, I dig and prepare my earth.
My mother-in-law called them LOLs -- little old ladies. Despite the fact that I have mostly roses in my garden, I decided to join the local chapter of the Dahlia Society. The San Francisco Dahlia Society to be exact. So there I found myself on a Tuesday evening sitting in a room with a crowd of elderly gardeners. Average age 72 -- but they know a heck of a lot about Dahlias.
Ok, to be fair, there are some younger folks ther too, plenty of kids in their 40s and 50s.
Regardless of their age, these big flower lovers convinced me that the only way to treat your dahlias right is to dig them up every year and divide them. To learn how to do this (actually really complicated) task, I spent last Saturday with them digging up all the Dahlias in the Golden Gate Park Dahlia Garden (near the newly rebuilt Conservatory of Flowers). When in bloom this garden is truly stunning.
So here's what you do:
- dig up the dahlias carefully, using the patented two shovel method. Lift them out from below so as not to snap their fragile necks.
- what was, last year, a single potato-like tuber is now a huge clump of tubers all attached to each other.
- gently gently now! rinse all the mud off.
- let them dry.
- very carefully cut them apart. you better have a dang sharp little knife -- I bought a new one for the occasion. When cutting be friggin' careful to get a hunk of the crown with an "eye" - a bud waiting to form -- for each tuber. Mess this up and you have a tuber that never grows.
- rinse off your tubers in a bucket of 10% chlorox solution.
- carefully label each tuber.
- let dry for a few days, then wrap up in plastic bags stuffed wth shredded newspapers.
In about 8 weeks when things start to warm up, all the tubers go back in the ground.
So now my only question is -- what do I do with 20 Bishop of Llandalf, and 20 Angels Dust dahlia tubers? My garden has about room for 4.
Briggs? Interested?