True Dirt

$110 and 29 plants later....

On a beautiful, blustery, sunshiney, non rainy Sunday my friend Brenda and I drove out to Annie's nursery in Richmond to engage in some serious garden shopping. Brenda had not been before and I warned her not to hyperventilate when we finally reached the gates of paradise. There actually are gates. Since the last time I was at Annie's a year ago a rather impressive entryway has been built, including a wall and stately gates with lamps atop. This seems rather grand in the context of the neighborhood which is a dilapidated but thriving semi-industrial area crisscrossed by old railroad tracks and dotted with cyclone-fence enclosed empty lots.

To get there you must print out a map from Annie's web site because the usual Yahoo or Google maps will get you lost. After leaving the freeway on San Pablo Dam Rd. (the dam is important; we took the San Pablo Rd. exit which turned out to be a mile or two in the wrong direction), you proceed into the tiny village of San Pablo and its casino which is nearly as big as the town; turn left at the WalMart and leave the strip malls and parking lots behind as you drive over railroad tracks and past small four-corner business districts and tiny bungalows until at last you see the brightly colored and welcoming sign for Annie's.

We enter the yard (Brenda gasps) and pick up our little red wagons, upended against the board-clad trailer that serves as a check-out counter and lounge area for the staff. We bypass the small demonstration garden at the entry and head straight for the rows of tables stretching to the horizon upon which are massed the green plastic four-inch pots of garden dreams.

We started with the California natives section where I picked up several pots of "meadow foam" (Limnanthes douglasii), a bountiful yellow groundcover that reseeds easily (but had been devoured in my garden this year by starving slugs); "slender hair grass" (Deschampsia elongata), that is good for shady borders and doesn't get too big; a stunning pale pink penstemon (palmeri), native to the high desert but somehow adaptable to adobe soil (if well drained) and (my holy grail) scented; a grey-leaved pale blue lupine (formosus), and a "sticky" phacelia (Phacelia viscida) which grows on the coast in sandy soils (so that will be a test case in my very unsandy garden).

I also stumbled onto my new obsession. In addition to the old obsessions, every gardener I know gets struck by a new obsession periodically, usually in spring, as if Eros had a sideline business hooking up plants and people. This year it's Papavers. I know it's an obsession because I didn't even stop to think about appropriate soils or bloom time. I just went gaga for the colors. I justified it all by telling myself that the poppies would be perfect in my Mother's somewhat barren raised planters and that I could plant them all out next Sunday (Mother's Day). This may actually require a stealth planting, a la Miss Willmott. Anyway, I was besotted by the following poppy plants: Papaver "Drama Queen", P. rhoeas "Dawn Chorus", breadseed poppies (the kind whose seeds appear on your bagel) "Lavender Breadseed" and "Persian Princess", P. "Raspberry Ripple", and P. setigerum "Poppy of Troy".

Just to round out the collection, I also picked up some unusual hybrids--for color, of course--including a couple of columbines (Aquiligia chrysantha "flore pleno", and A. vulgaris "magpie"), some peach-colored Cosmos, and a spectacular double pinky orange snapdragon (Antirrhinum "Double Azalea Apricot") touted to have a tropical scent. Killer.

Cretan Poppy Goddess of Health and Euphoria

Posted by briggs at March 22, 2006 9:10 AM