Category — Garden plans

Building a moss garden is more like home decorating than any gardening I’ve done. At least building this moss garden is.

The idea of the moss garden is to have a beautiful view from my window, where there’s now a bunch of chewed up bits of board and debris amongst the leaves and needles. It has to be a shade garden, since the whole area is loomed over by a ponderosa pine. For those unfamiliar, 100 feet (30 or so meters) is a pretty normal height for a mature ponderosa. So, shade. And did I mention steep? It’s a very steep slope.

The other part of the idea was to have something green to look out on in summer, when everything is sere and dry. I appreciate my dry California dormant season; it has beauty of its own. But there are times when the eye craves green.

Part of the plan is to create a carpet of moss, as I discussed in the last post. But as I slowly piece it together, I find myself running in and out of the house: I want to see how the picture looks, framed in the window. It’s hard for me to tell what’s visible from the window when I’m in the garden, and since it’s such a steep slope, I can’t even tell what it looks like from the window even if I stand in the French drain that borders the house. It’s a little like hanging a picture; I have to keep stepping back to check.

What I thought was the right place to lay the (so far tiny) moss carpet is actually mostly invisible from the window. So I will have to start tweaking it around. But in order to do that, I also have to start pondering where the other design elements go.

Some of those elements involve more moss. As Schenck, my moss gardening guru, points out, one of the easiest ways to get moss from the woods to my garden is to carry away an entire moss-covered rock or log. So when I found this in the woods, I hauled its unwieldy wet heaviness back to my garden.

But while I’ve now got a log to cover up one of the dug-in buried rotting boards which is unofficially terracing this area, I’ve also got a problem. Well, three problems. One is that it’s hard to place this mossy log so that the thickest moss is on display, because most of its moss is on the narrow top section, and I can’t face it toward the window, because the log falls over. The second problem is that, theoretically, the moss is supposed to be oriented the same way it was in the woods. But if I did that, I’d have to dig it into the ground - and the reason I have it on that spot is so I don’t have to dig out the rotting board beneath it. The third problem is, the placement of this log looks real awkward with the mushroom-plugged oak round I’d already placed on the slope as part of the garden.

 To me, this looks posed, artificial. So, more running to the window to ponder and look and wonder what I can do. Not to mention wondering how the native shade plants I have for this area - thimbleberry, salal, native honeysuckle - will look with it. And then I had been hoping to plant some mushrooms in the ground, too. Where do they go? What would make a natural-looking flow?

Moments like this remind me that I am no garden designer. I have no principles or rules to rely on, because I’ve always gardened the way I cook: improv. I think, “Well, that might be good next to that,” and I move things around, and often, with a little tweaking, it works. Or sometimes it doesn’t, but I usually manage to work it out.

This garden is a whole new undertaking. I’m not sure if it’s the nature of the plants, the slope of the ground, or what, that has me so puzzled and at loose ends, so fuzzy-headed, like a rank beginner. But I know I’m learning something. This is how learning feels: slow, sometimes frustrating, with a frightening sense of a Grand Canyon’s depth of ignorance. My own ignorance. And here’s the weird thing: this feeling is a big part of why I garden.

I’ve started my moss garden.

And the beginnings aren’t quite as small as this picture implies. This little window moss-garden was inspired by having some very tiny pieces left, little shreds that happened as I was gathering moss, plus the small curl of oak bark you can see rearing up its mossy head. It’s very fun having a moss garden by my sink, though (and that’ll make it easy to remember to water it).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the house, I’ve started assembling some ingredients.

Here’s a photo of the kind of “soil” I’m dealing with (mostly shreds of old boards on top):

I’d originally thought that I’d just grind up moss and spray it all over the whole thing, voila, moss garden. Like all garden fantasies, this one was torn from me forcibly. George Schenk’s Moss Gardening (Timber Press), advised me that some mosses like wood, some like rocks, and some like to grow in soil. One moss does not fit all.  OK, so one little piece of knowledge rattling in the empty cauldron which is my knowledge of bryophytes (mosses and lichens).

What I’d have to do, if I wanted mosses on the ground, was to go and find local moss growing in a similar situation (there are shade mosses and sun mosses, another tiny bit of knowledge I’ve gained. I thought they all grew in shade). Then, at least if I wanted the easiest quickest method (I do), I was supposed to cut up divots, about the size of my hand, leaving plenty of moss to grow over the blank spots.

I went to the woods near my house and proceeded to moss-hunt. I’ve permanently misplaced my trowel (yes, I know, I could have replaced it in the ensuing years), so I took a pruning knife with me. Actually, for the moss that was growing on the face of banks, no knife was necessary; I could work off the pieces with my hands (that’s where some of those tiny ones came in; they just broke off). They didn’t come with the 2-3 inches (5-8cm) of soil that Shenck recommends; they weren’t (as some gurus say) that deeply attached. The ones I cut from flat ground didn’t come up with much soil, either, maybe because I was cutting them with a knife, maybe because I was cutting them out of pretty-much solid clay.

The clay aspect worries me. Because, when you clear the debris away from my moss-garden-site soil, you get this:

Sandy loam. Really rare in our area, and one of the best possible soils for growing most things - but it is very different from the clay soil my mosses were wrested from, and they were under oaks, not conifers.

Will this make a difference? I don’t know. Next post, I’ll show how I started creating my moss garden (with a little potential fungus involved, too.)

This post, I’ll leave you with a quote from George Shenck, on why more people in the U.S. think moss is something to be thoroughly cleaned out or scrubbed off. It’s a rather grandiose justification for my little moss garden, but, like moss, the concept creeps up on you, filling in spaces you didn’t even know were blank and unfurnished.

“At a certain level of mind, mosses and lichens are allied with owls, toads, bats, and things that go bump in the night, are in league with Nature at the downturn, at one with decadence and demise…Admiration of mosses and lichens, and interest in cultivating them, represents the attainment of a certain wholeness of the civilized mind, a roundness in understanding our environment.”

If I want to see some good sweet pea foliage in spring, I’ve got to start it now.

This may come as a surprise to those of you who think of sweet peas as an early-spring-planting flower. And if you live in a climate where springs are mild and winters are harsh, they are: under those circumstances, an early spring or late winter planting (sweet peas can take snow and a fair amount of freezing) gives the sweet peas time to develop the roots that support abundant, beautiful flowers.

For those of us who live in climates where spring goes from cool to broiling in 30 days, it’s another story: fall’s the time when cool-loving plants can develop their roots.  So late summer or early fall’s the time to get in the seed. The best sweet peas I’ve ever had got several inches of vine growth before they went dormant for the winter. The next spring they went crazy, flowering long and lusciously.

Since sweet peas can take freezing, this technique may work in climates much colder than my zone 8, where freezes are usually (but not always) light.  You can use the same technique for edible peas.

Until now, I’ve planted only peas and sweet peas this early. For other cool-weather plants, I’ve waited until the rains come, which is when I plant the perennials and wildflowers. Waiting for the rains makes keeping up with the seedlings easier, and, of course, by then the weather has cooled down.

But it’s just occurred to me that the same late-summer growth that does peas and sweet peas so well might give me a better display with all those cool-weather annuals that usually shrivel away before they have time to thrive. Maybe I got the inspiration from my food-farming neighbors, who are already setting out their cool-weather seedlings: cabbage, broccoli, and greens.

This year, I’m going to try planting my larkspurs and asters and agrostemma and other cool-loving annuals at the same time as the sweet peas. Growing them out earlier will be more work, but it might give a lot happier plants, and more of the flowers I love.

Do any of you have a system for getting the best out of your hardy annuals?

Houses on hilly sites have extra challenges for the gardener (not to mention the builder), but they also make it easy to achieve privacy by putting in masses of plants which obscure the view upward. I particularly liked this crazy-quilt of plants on a corner house, using wild fennel, madia, and what looks like a cycad. (Any identifications or corrections welcome.) There were also nasturtiums and other plants with varying textures, colors, and shapes.

This house combined a water-hungry lawn with drought-tolerant native ceanothus, so it might be called a kind of halfway-house xeriscaping. (Ceanothus comes in a bajillion varieties and tends to hybridize in the wild, so I’m unsure if this is wild or a cultivar.)

A  water-wise variation on the double-hedge theme was this  salvia with what looks like a bronze yucca behind it. I liked the contrast of shapes and colors with the house behind. A small rise adds extra privacy.

Another house protected its privacy with a courtyard entrance, but flanked it with water-saving plants that make it attractive to passers-by.

I wish I knew this embers-of-orange plant’s identity; it’s a surreal kind of plant. It’s on one side of the garage door.

On the other side of the garage door, near the gateway to the courtyard, is this grapevine. I don’t know if they get any grapes off this vine, but it’s a refreshing change from the ornamentals you often see, and a hardy, low-care vine. While grapes take a fair amount of water if you want fruit (wild grapes grow near creeks and in damp hollows), the vine can get along without copious watering once it’s established, as I can personally testify.

I especially liked this tiny withy-bed of succulents, on the other side of the garage. It was maybe six inches by a foot and a half, a beautiful use of miniscule space.

There’s still plenty of evidence that a lot of people in LA neither know nor care where their water comes from, but I was happy to see a lot more water-saving plants than I have in the past.

This house is fortunate in its privacy: it can combine the double-hedge technique with the plants-on-a-hill technique. They’ve also got enough room to squeeze a tree in there, using three of the privacy techniques I saw on this walk.

OK, bougainvillea may be a cliché in frost-free areas, but I still love it. No matter how many times I see it, I still enjoy all its variations of red against this privacy fence, and the white wall beneath it.

This older-planting tree is probably left over from a time when the neighborhood was a collection of modest working-class houses. I liked the way grass had taken residence in one of its many knotholes. It was limbed up high, so it was hard to get close to the leaves to see what kind it was. The leaves are hard and shiny, almost like some kind of live oak, but not like any kind I know. Can anyone identify it?

This green-on-green combination is a refreshing privacy hedge in the LA glare, but definitely not xeriscaping. It could be worse: ivy, azaleas, and what looks like agapanthus aren’t huge water hogs.

None of the plants surrounding this shady staircase is unusual, but they’re combined in a way that creates a satisfying sense of protection. As you walk under the big tree that overhangs it all, you get a momentary sensation of being secluded in a woods, or maybe a back lot, before you’re back out on the bright sidewalk again.

JUNE: A MONTH TO HONOR WATER

In a way, my whole blog is about low-water gardening; that’s the reason I got involved with tulips, and I already loved natives and Mediterranean herbs. During June, my posts will all be about conserving water in the garden. This gives me scope to cover everything from containers to cityscapes, soil to site to sprays, and of course portraits of more of those stellar plants that spread their glories with little or no watering. (Hint: the “Wild Plants” category will give you quite a few more; so will the “Bulbs” category.)

I take a sort of peeping-Tom’s pleasure in seeing what other people do with their gardens.

City gardens fascinate me; I like to see how people create their own personal paradise in a tiny space. Here in California, our two major cities (San Francisco and Los Angeles) also have a tempting variety of semi-tropical and temperate plants to choose from. And since this was an upscale neighborhood, these private city gardens are probably maintained by professionals, which gives us some insight into what’s fashionable in the mainstream garden world.

On a visit to Los Angeles, I took a walk with this question in mind: how do people give themselves privacy on their tiny lots?  It’s one of those places where gardening meets architecture. But I’m always looking at water use, so I found myself also seeing who had the water-efficient gardens, as well as the private ones.

I noticed several examples of what I call the double-hedge technique; a low hedge, and a higher hedge behind it.

Roses behind rosemary: an interesting example of double-hedge technique

This house created the illusion of privacy by the shelter of a large old tree in front, circied by a low brick wall. A very friendly grey-and-white cat, with extra toes (which I find appealing) came up for some pets. An Irish setter/mutt-looking dog said hello as well, but he was sequestered behind the iron grillework of a gate.

Some people forgo the privacy notion and just have a straight-up entrance to their houses. But even these vary in character, from suburban-banal

to this minimalistic Zen approach.

Though this looks like xeriscaping, it isn’t quite, since equisetum (horsetail) is a water-hungry plant, living on the margins of streams and rivers, or in damp low boggy spots. The white-rock mulch, though, provides the double service of keeping moisture from evaporating out of the ground, and reflecting the heat of the sun.  I’m not sure what kind of upkeep this landscape demands, but watering would certainly be lessened by this, and care would be reduced to the bare minimum: horsetails don’t need pruning except for the occasional removal of a dead stem; they grow symmetrically all by themselves.

Here’s an example of true xeriscaping, using dark pebbles as a mulch. I liked this creative use of that strip between the sidewalk and the street, combining chamomile (probably a seasonal appearer) with more traditional dryland plants. While residents of rainier cities might have fewer concerns about water conservation, xeriscaping those strips might still be an excellent idea, since you can’t put in automatic watering systems without digging up the sidewalk, and hand-watering can be a chore. And a lot of times, people living in the houses don’t regularly see these strips, they just drive up to the house and enter through a door that is far from the sidewalk. Out of sight tends to be out of mind, so besides saving you water, xeriscaping your sidewalk-strip might save you time, dead plants, and the embarrassment of contributing an eyesore to the neighborhood.

Next post: more privacy and water-saving ideas

JUNE: A MONTH TO HONOR WATER

In a way, my whole blog is about low-water gardening; that’s the reason I got involved with tulips, and I already loved natives and Mediterranean herbs. During June, my posts will all be about conserving water in the garden. This gives me scope to cover everything from containers to cityscapes, soil to site to sprays, and of course portraits of more of those stellar plants that spread their glories with little or no watering. (Hint: the “Wild Plants” category will give you quite a few more; so will the “Bulbs” category.)