The Start Of March

There are a few roses left to cut back.  Abe Darby is in Cheeto-mode again:



There are just a few flowers and buds on the roses, exactly normal for the start of March.  There will be a light preview of rose blossoms about mid-month, then around the second week of April the big spring rose flush will begin.  But today, just the odd 'Ebb Tide' showing rich purple color in the cool February weather:


And there's a 'Tamora' out front, just opening.  Spring is near.

Frost

The neighborhood roofs were white with frost, but the plants look okay.  There was snow in Burbank, but at first glance, we dodged the ice-bullet.   Yay!

Ugly Trees

Platanus racemosa, California Sycamore.  (No, really!  It is! I swear!):


These trees didn't start out ugly.   T'was pruning made them so.  Most--though not all--are grotesquely whacked because they were planted in  a space too small for their mature size. 

Grevilla robusta.  Smoked, indeed.  This tree gets very large very fast and is a common victim of topping:


Another California native, this one is Alnus rhombifolia.  (No, really!  It is!)


Here's a Cedar with the potential to get 30 or 40 feet wide, planted three feet from a building.  The pruners did the best they could by taking out large sections of branches rather than shortening them all.  


A trash-ash, Fraxinus uhdei, that has been topped because it is under a power line, and needs to be topped again (preferably at ground level).  This is one tree that also looks ugly when correctly pruned.  It reseeds like a #$%^&.


Particularly weird things are done to Ficus benjamina.  This tree has such large and disruptive surface roots it should never be planted without careful consideration.  Unfortunately, it is so cheap to produce, it is often planted by people who know nothing about its drawbacks but simply want a cheap tree.  It's not cheap to keep the monster pruned, kids:

Just call her "Fifi":






Ficus benjamina can easily grow to be 60'x60' (20m x 20m).  These are kept to 8'x5':



This used to be an Ulmus parvifolia, or Chinese Elm:


I am not a professional Arborist, but I believe it can be generally agreed that topping a palm tree is a bad idea:



 There, I got the tree-abuse rant out of my system for another few weeks.  You may not feel better, but I do.

What's Going To Die Tonight?

Are some of my darlings destined for plant heaven?

 
This may be the coldest night in more than a decade.  All the potted succulents are huddled together on the patio for a little extra protection...





But there is not much I can do for the ones in the ground...cover with a sheet?  I looked up Aloe dichotoma, which should be okay to 28...it won't get that cold...will it?  We're at 400 feet above sea level.  It stays two or three degrees warmer than the flatland around. 

A. ferox, grown from a wee pup...


I put a bucket over a special Echeveria:



We shall see what the morning brings...plants, or mush...

Succulent Stairs

Grey and grey-green: great idea!

The Element Of Surprise

Garden surprises.

I spend so much time in the garden I'm rarely surprised by an unexpected flower.  I spot the buds and know the flowers will soon unfurl.  A bloom appearing suddenly without my observing its development is rare.  Yesterday morning's Iris was one.  Surprise!  An unexpected delight.  This one hardly blooms--it was in a bad spot.  I moved it last fall, and yesterday it rewarded--and surprised me.

A bit small, but considering it's February...


Everything is a surprise to a new gardener.  I got some roses in the mail today, and worked hard to get them into the ground without delay.  While digging, I recalled the first roses I planted in this garden eleven years ago.  I would go out daily and watch them grow, count flower buds, worry, eagerly anticipate.  I don't do that much any more.  It's not the amazing and exciting thing it used to be.  It's not so--surprising.   I know I can grow roses now.  I know what will happen and when.  Is being experienced the same as being jaded?  Is surprise necessary?

'Easy Does It' x 4:


Coming around a corner, encountering a twist in a path, and suddenly seeing something unexpected is an element of good garden design.  Unexpected is different than something oddly out of place.  I've mastered the oddly-out-of-place in the garden.  I need the unexpected, another form of surprise.  I still have plenty to work on and improve.  I'll be surprised if I ever get it right.  

If you think these are dirty, you should see my knees:
 

Realizing how long you've gardened and how much your perspective (and your soil) has changed is a surprise.   I used to carefully amend soil with compost before I planted roses, and put a couple of tablespoons of triple super phosphate into the planting hole, and add fertilizer in with the soil, and have to dig and redig to get the hole just the right depth and width.  Now I dig right into the soil, which is much changed after eleven Februarys of mulching, and add nothing.

Earthworms have thoroughly incorporated eleven years of compost mulch into the soil, and little effort is required.  I still have some trouble getting the planting hole wide enough, and now I find a root or two from other plants.  How much more difficult it used to be. 



Realizing you can still be surprised by plants is a surprise.  The other day I found a tiny Alocasia tucked into a pot of Anigozanthos.  That pot of Anigozanthos has been in the garden for four or five years, not growing all that much, but reliably blooming every year.  How did an Alocasia get in there?  Is that weird or what?  Another mystery:  the last time, a few years ago, yesterday morning's Iris bloomed, it was a flat uniform pink, and without the veining and apricot color it had yesterday.  How could it have possibly changed?

Mystery is a surprise, and in the long haul, gardening without question gets more mysterious, not less!

How Many Canes Should A Climbing Rose Have?

I'm finally done with the 'Sombreuil' over the front door--maybe. 



Quelle difference!


I carefully spaced the canes attached horizontally to the balcony, and limited the number.  Over the front door, I left a lot of canes, which are mostly arched rather than attached strictly horizontally.  Which side will look better when the spring flush of flowers commences?   Is a mass of foliage and flowers best, or canes carefully arranged so that every flower is clearly seen? 

That's the question.  I'll post photos in a few weeks and show you what works best. 

Too many canes on this side?
 

Oh how I wish wish wish the David Austin catalog would add a photograph of how the roses over their arbors are pruned and arranged.  Perhaps the English being so sophisticated in their gardening assume that everyone knows how to get that effect.  Hello Gentlemen, this is a country where most kids have no clue where vegetables come from.  Help us out, please. 

The Austin results are stupendous (and apparently without the aid of Photoshop).  Surely they could sell even more roses if they would only shown how the masters prune and arrange climbing roses?  If you look very carefully at some of the pictures, you can see that they have multiple plants on each side of their arbors, and they prune them in graduated lengths--short canes are at the base, with others gradually longer and longer up the side of the structure, then the longest canes pulled over the top.

This technique--at least it is my guess as to how they are pruned--creates flowers all the way up the sides of the arbor, instead of a big bare space at the bottom.    The monster 'Sombreuil' over our front door has a six feet (2 m) bare run from ground level upwards.  I've compensated for this by planting a 'Jackmanii' Clematis next to the rose.  This is decently good at prettifying the bare base, especially now that the Clematis is establishing and producing plenty of its own stems.  It was painful to look at the first few years.  Why did I not try the graduated-lengths technique?  Um...I'm thinking I need to try that.  Just not this year.  I was at that 'Sombreuil' for days.  I will leave that experiment for next year. 

The First One On The Block

This is a variegated (marginated?) form of Agave 'Blue Glow':



This is a variegated form of Agave 'Blue Flame':



These are very new plants, and quite rare as far as I can tell. There may be millions in tissue culture not yet ready for sale, but today these are not common, run-of-the-mill varieties. They are the first ones on the block.

In the technology world, there are people known as "early adopters".  They are the people who buy the newest gizmos as soon as they are available, or beta-test new software or products.  They live on the bleeding edge--the product may be a failure, and they are stuck with an expensive dud--or it may have a lot of glitches or problems that have not yet been worked out, or it may be a big hit and for a while they are the coolest of the cool. 

There is something like that in the gardening world too.  Gardeners love new plants, and love having a new plant no one else has.  New plants, like new technologies, are not always perfect.  The plant may be a complete dud, or not that much different from the old version, or it may be novel, but also butt-ugly. 

I'm not an early adopter of technology, being completely content to let the bleeding-edgers work out the glitches and pay the premium price while I wait for the reliable version half the price early adopters paid.  It's a thing I had to learn about where plants are concerned.  When I first started growing roses, I eagerly bought new introductions (and believed the marketing hype, Lord help me!).  Now I wait a year or two for feedback before I buy a rose, to find out how badly it Rusts, and how much it blooms, in my climate.  If it is a good cultivar it will be available for at least a few years. 

Though when presented with variegated versions of two really gorgeous hybrid Agaves, I could not resist early adoption.  I'm a bleeding edger with these two, though choosing Agaves for the bleeding-edge experience, a genus that thrives here with little effort, was at least hedging my bet.

Gardener Takes Own Advice, Shocked To Find It Helpful

About five minutes after you start gardening for the very first time, someone asks you for advice. This is because after five minutes, when it comes to plants, you are already vastly more experienced than most of the rest of America.

If you think Americans are ignorant about how their government works, it's even worse where plants are concerned. Ask a non-gardener the name of any plant. Sometimes they will be able to tell the difference between a Pine and a Palm, but not always. A lady told me she asked a group of children where carrots came from, and they answered, "From a can." How very sad.

I remember some previous neighbors always referred to my roses as "sticker bushes", apparently not realizing that roses exist other than those imported from Columbia by their neighborhood florist shop. Come to think of it, the number of Americans who could find Columbia on a map added to the number of Americans who know most florist roses are imported from South America may be about as small as the number of Americans who can identify a tree. But I digress.

Sticker bushes:


I've read national gardening forums to learn about the scourges of Black Spot (barely exists here) and Japanese beetles (not here yet, thankfully), read books from England about how they garden over there (gravel gardens! double digging!), and compared vastly different results on plants grown a few miles inland and a few miles closer to the ocean from my own garden. So any advice I actually give comes with considerable caution and restraint, because gardening and plants are complex systems, meaning there are a lot of variables to account for, even more variables that can be accounted for.

And because, really--what do I know? Your run-of-the-mill California gardener (me) isn't all that skilled because she doesn't have to be. The climate is so mild, the pests so modest, the disease pressure so minor, the range of plants that can be grown here so staggering, that it's fairly difficult to kill a plant unless you make a genuine effort.

It is the truly skilled gardener who successfully grows Agaves in Minnesota, or Peonies in Miami. Wow would I love to meet gardeners like this--though--what could they tell me about gardening in Southern California? It's not the same. Too many variables. Undoubtedly they could tell me something, which I could then translate into something useful in my own garden. But translation required.

There are a few things that can be considered standard tips for any garden, anywhere. When it comes to pruning climbing roses, I can say:

1. Remove any damaged, diseased, or dead material
2. Except for 1.), leave the main canes growing from the base untouched from base to tip
3. Shorten the laterals coming off of the main canes
4. On fully mature plants, remove one or two of the oldest canes every year to stimulate new canes which will replace the old ones
5. Retie, rearrange, readjust the canes on their support

This is decent general advice. There are assorted other, smaller details, but those five things are the essence.

Yesterday I was faced with my real mess of a climber, the 'Sombreuil' over the front door.

"What climber over the door," readers may wonder. "All those pictures and I don't remember seeing any pictures of a climber over the front door."

Exactly. It wasn't worth looking at. An embarrassment, a shame, a failure.

I got out the ladder yesterday and started working on it. It was a mass of canes going everywhere, tangled up. Old foliage, heads that needed deading. Disaster.

Yikes!


If you are eating spaghetti one strand at a time, which one do you fork up first? Perplexed on to where start, at a loss, I decided to take my own advice.

I started by shortening all the laterals I could reach. I removed all damaged and dead material. I stripped off old foliage. Now I could see more of the structure of what was left, and see what was good and what was bad. I took out a couple of the oldest canes right down to the base. A few more laterals to shorten, some cane re-arrangement, and the climber looked miraculously better. That was it. The five rules worked.



We can all give good advice about any number of things. It's easy to do something like that when you are on the outside looking in. It's more complicated when you actually have to do it. Overwhelmed, I clung to my rules, and it wasn't so complicated after all.



After taking my own advice about pruning the climbing rose, it seems taking my own advice, formed after thought and study, is something I should try more often.

After thought and study: education, education, education. Education matters. It starts with at least knowing what things are called, and going on from there. In the beginning was the word.

Kids, carrots come from the ground after adding seeds, water, and loving care. A can has nothing to do with it. And long-gone neighbors: they are roses, not "sticker bushes", you ignorant clowns.

No Bye Bye After All, And New Yuccas

Rain makes them hungry:


Yesterday's post on the demise of The Bougie was premature. The Bougie is not gone after all, it is just a vast deal smaller. You can see a tragic volunteer fig tree behind the Bougainvillea stumps. That sad tree is what the Bougie was climbing before the big collapse. The fig snapped under the weight of a soaking wet 20'x20'x20' (about 7x7x7 m) vine. The other sad tree in the photo is the trunk of a Jacaranda growing at a 45 degree angle. It was a "Y" shape with the bottom arm of the "Y" hanging over the fence dropping Jacaranda crap on my boxwood. Mercifully the tree guys trimmed it.



The silver lining of the new view of the neighbor's air conditioner is that now we also have a much better view of the neighbor's Quercus agrifolia, their one tree that is not weedy, sadly misshapen, or growing at a 45 degree angle (or all of the above).

Not a great Quercus photo because of the rain:


This native Oak was not more than 8 or 10 feet tall (2 m) when we moved in 11 years ago. It's now several meters taller than their house. Native oaks grow faster than is commonly believed. You want slow?

I'll give you slow. I'll give you molasses in January in Fairbanks Alaska slow: our new baby Yucca rostrata 'Sapphire Skies' there on the right side, in front:


Along with Agave bracteosa 'Monterrey Frost', a speed demon in comparison, and another snail-paced grower, Yucca queretaroensis (keh-reh-ta-roh-EN-sis??). The San Marcos comments for Y. queretaroensis include: "This plant is considered by many to be THE most beautiful Yucca species." Well, the babies are lovely. I hope I live long enough to see it in mature glory.

The Agave is pretty prime, too with its foliage arching in sinuous grace. I'm more likely to be around for that one's time of glory. I think it has already achieved it, baby though it is.

Rain and new plants and a view of a native oak from my window. Today was good.

Bye Bye Bougie

The neighbor's enormous Bougainvillea began to come out yesterday.  It grew rampantly for nearly a decade after we removed all the Eucalypts on our property, which finally allowed it to get the sunlight it craved.  Creating a waterfall of magenta, it was a glory.  During our heavy December rains, it began to collapse, bringing down the telephone wire for the neighbors and the uphill house as well.  Thus it was doomed.  It had mostly collapsed over on our side of the fence, but the telephone company said it had to be removed, and so it was.

It was enveloping a tragic "Y" shaped Jacaranda tree which is growing at a 45 degree angle.  The workers had to hack it out of that, unfortunately--also removing the Jacaranda would have been appropriate.  A Jacaranda tree can be a beautiful noble thing properly shaped and cared for.  Grown at a 45 degree angle and left full of dead branches, it ain't quite so lovely. 



Bougie whacking continued.  Five men hauled at a rope trying to pull a big section of it up towards the chipper truck.  Rats were scurrying out of the Bougie as it sagged downwards.  Helpfully, they all appeared to head to the neighbor's property. 


The workers got about a quarter of the beastie into the chipper before quitting as darkness fell.


They are supposed to finish today, hopefully before it rains.  Several of my favorite roses are engulfed and I could not get to my compost piles without getting engulfed myself.  I played the whiner and complained about the fallen litter filling the drainage culvert--not good when rain is expected.  The tree guys cleaned it up a bit.  I hope they finish before it rains.

I will miss the blaze of magenta, but not the rat nests.  Bye Bye Bougie!

Maintenance to me is the most important part of gardening.  A beautiful design is nothing if some plants are left to die, others to become overgrown or engulfed by weeds.  An unmaintained garden is like an uneducated child--sure, the kid is alive, but doomed never to reach her highest potential.  Zen gardens--with their raked gravel patterns ringing boulders and a tree or two--Zen gardens are all about the maintenance--that gravel raking is a way to meditate.  Meditate upon the growth and destruction of things, about daily routine, about repeating actions working towards perfection, about doing something one way and then another, doing with anger, with joy, with boredom.  Maintenance reveals. 

I have many photos of the Bougie in full glory, and will remember it fondly but without regret--it was engulfing some of my roses and shading them out.  Now I have a lovely new view of the neighbor's air conditioner and a clear sight of their collapsing wall made of rotting railroad ties.  But that creates opportunity--shall I plant a small tree to screen out their garage?  Add a panel of wrought iron and grow a vine or rose upon it, to see something other than that collapsing wall?  Loss has created planting opportunities!  Yee Haw! 

Bye Bye Bougie.  I will remember you.  All the magenta red glory faced my way--all the neighbors ever saw was the bare leafless north side.  I will miss, but not regret.  Gardens change.  I meditate on that, daily.

A Handy Little Tool For The Succulent Gardener

Cheap, simple, replaceable, and useful:  not all garden tools are so.  Storage is often an issue, as is real usefulness:  the home chipper-shredder comes to mind.  The idea of a chipper-shredder is wonderful.  Grinding everything into little bits that will quickly compost is a dream for every gardener.  The reality doesn't quite meet expectations.  They are large, hard to use, potentially dangerous.  The most useful ones are expensive, while the not so useful ones are expensive, too.  If you happen to want to chip the exact material that the chipper is good at (straight stems with no side branches, not too large in diameter) they then are a wonderful thing.  Otherwise, no.

But sometimes there is a tool that is all you hope it to be.  A perfect tool for removing the water from the center of little succulents, or dislodging bits of pumice or stray bits of leaf from those tiny crevices between leaves, is the ordinary drinking straw, available for free at any fast food establishment. 



As Bacall said to Bogart in "To Have And Have Not", you just put your lips together, and blow. 

I spent a moment blowing the rain water and bits of dirt out of a hybrid Echeveria this morning.  I rescued it from the Death Rack at Lowe's for a couple of bucks last summer.  No wonder:  when I bought it, the foliage was a gruesome shade of reddish gray.  It looked like old raw meat, the stuff you'd hesitate giving to the dog.  But cool nights and bright winter sun, and now the gray has transformed to coral, and it's lovely.  



Echeveria colors can change significantly in response to the weather.  Know thy Genus.  That's a handy thing, too.

Bulbine latifolia and Calothamnus villosus

I got a few new low-water plants for the front slope. I wasn't familiar with Bulbine latifolia. I've had Bulbine frutescens 'Hallmark' out there for a while, enduring horrific drought and thriving in spite of it. B. frutescens has grassy, tubular foliage, while B. latifolia resembles a small toothless Aloe, or even a dwarf Agave attenuata.





Graceful yellow flower spikes will contrast appropriately with the blue of Senecio mandraliscae.


Also for the front slope, Calothamnus villosus. I went to a garden talk on low-water plants Monday, and this one was enthused about as a hummingbird magnet, so I thought I'd give it a try. The foliage looked like it would coordinate with the trio of Chamelauciums already out on the slope. I look forward to watching these grow and seeing how they perform.

I made the big grown-up step in buying three instead of one in order to get away from my one-of-everything design problem. A group of three is at least a start. Five or seven would probably have been better, but if C. villosus finds the slope too harsh, then I have five or seven dead plants instead of three. It's always a conundrum: if you buy one, it does great, and you are then guaranteed never to be able to find more for sale. If you buy several to create a mass planting, they'll all croak. Succulents are, of course, an exception to this rule: one is always enough because propagation from cuttings is usually so easy. One of a succulent is correct, unless you are in a hellfire hurry.

Calothamnus villosus foliage:


I hurried to get them all planted, because there is a chance of beautiful wonderful rain over the next few days.