Category — Garden plans

I love the rhythm of tall grasses, bending in the meadow.

Gardeners could take a lot of tips from the way nature has arranged this meadow.  There’s not a clunky note in there, unless you count the power lines.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I can’t identify this flower, which I spent so much time photographing. So I’m going to quickly move to emphasizing what a beautiful job this natural planting does, of providing interest close up

at a short distance

and in the broad sweep.

Pink and pink-purple colors are repeated in this late-summer landscape. Perennial sweet pea*, Lathyrus latifolius,  glows against the green and gold of the grasses. It grows in my area, too. But here in the higher altitudes, it takes on a delicate character absent where I live. It probably dies back in the snow, and doesn’t have the chance to become the tangle of lianas that wild sweet peas become in the foothills. (I once saw a puppy play tug-of-war with the lathyrus in our area: the lathyrus won.**)

The same situation applies to this Sierra thistle, Cirsium californicum, which provides a nice feeding place for bees but doesn’t seem to be taking over the meadow, the way thistles in my own area would.

These fetching little vetches, lower than my ankle,  are making a tiny landscape of their own, interwtined with the grasses. At least I think they’re vetches; I haven’t been able to properly identify them.  (It might be meadow hosackia, Lotus torreyi,  but the typical coloring of meadow hosackia is lighter.) In this plant, the typical pea-family flowers start yellow, then deepen into  tinges of red as they age.

Wetland meadows are probably not the first thing you think about when you hear “high Sierras”. And there’s a reason for that: most of the Sierras are seasonally dry; the vegetation runs from chapparal to sagebrush to red fir communities - and when you get to the timberline, the vegetation runs to rock and very small plants.

Most of the Sierra wetlands I’ve seen have been little pockets, tucked in among the dry clay and granite landscapes that are our usual summer fair. I’ve seen little fens on the side of a long, dusty road;  tiny oases by the side of a lake; and this more unusual wetland meadow, where, as you can see, dry sagebrushy land is not far off.

There’s an important lesson in this for gardeners as well as naturalists: take advantage of your microclimates and - I just made this up - microtopography. Gardeners can get ideas from landscapes like these. If you have a wet spot in your garden, what about making your own little pocket meadow, using wild plants from your own area?

*  Perennial sweet peas (or at least L. latifolia) aren’t actually sweet; they don’t have fragrance.

**Granted, it was a very small puppy. But still.

Some of you may already be thinking, well, that’s obvious: through transpiration, plants give off oxygen, and they take in our carbon dioxide waste.

That’s true, and very important, but that wasn’t what I meant. What I’m talking about is the circulation of air in the garden.

For someone like me, who wants to cram as many kinds of plants as possible in a small place - somehow being artistic about it - the idea of air circulation came gradually. But if you see certain plants dying or just being morose all the time, you start to wonder.

Finally I read (probably in Graham Stuart Thomas, purveyor of articulate, observant, and good-humored rose information) - finally I read that roses need air circulation. They need air flowing all around them to thrive. So if you cram them in with plants of a similar height, after a while, they start looking cheesey.

They need more air.

When I thought about it, I realized that our wild roses grow with maximum air circulation. They form huge mounds, but those mounds of roses are dotted throughout a meadow - air circulation in between the bushes, and air circulation through the meadow (you only find California wild roses in clear areas, or areas that have once been cleared).

When I found out that my lilies weren’t doing well because I had too many tall plants mashed in with them, I changed my planting habits - and got more flowers and healthier plants. Lilies like their roots cool, so covering their ground with low plants is a good tactic. And this, too, is how I’ve seen lilies grow in the wild: most often in low ground cover or thick duff (the wilderness equivalent of mulch).

Mediterranean plants, such as herbs, like a lot of circulation, too. That makes sense when you consider they are basically chapparal plants, dotted over a stony landscape, often on slopes, where air circulation is even better.

Knowing how plants grow in the wild gives us useful clues about how they’ll do in our gardens - and incidentally, helps us know our plants better. If you have plants which are mysteriously languishing, you might consider giving them a little air.

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?