Category — Garden plans

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.)

My vision of ‘Apricot Beauty’ and ‘Dreaming Maid’  was based on memory. And, as so often, memory was faulty.

I still see Dreaming Maid and Apricot Beauty as totally gorgeous. But I had imagined them in a harmony that was never meant to be.

The last time I grew Dreaming Maid (I know cultivar names are properly in single quotes, but I think they look stupid sprinkled densely through a post, as if the entire top of a pepper shaker had come off and dumped in more spice than was necessary or desirable)  - the last time I grew Dreaming Maid, I hadn’t yet started photographing my plants. I did remember, though, that when someone gave me a branch of lilac flowers, the two harmonized perfectly, shades of the same soft bluish lavender-purple.

I combined the memory of that color with the beautiful peach-and-pink shades of Apricot Beauty (sparked with its occasional flecks of green and rose), and came up with a beautiful dream of tulips, a river with lavender and peach currents.

But while they look fine together – it would be hard to find two pastel tulips that didn’t -  their colors don’t set each other off.

Part of this is due to the changing nature of Dreaming Maid, which starts out rosy-purple.

It isn’t until the very end, when it’s getting crepey, that it evolves into something more like the hazy lavender of my memory. It could be that there’s a soil difference makes a difference in its colors, too. My last batch of Dreaming Maid was planted in the ground; these are in containers. I can’t do the lilac test, because this year, these tulips are way ahead of lilac blooms; lilacs are just leafing out).

Apricot Beauty also changes, although the way it changes seems to vary with the seasons. Sometimes it’s pinker, but that can happen either at the start of its life

or towards the very end. Sometimes it’s a yellower orange, but that can happen either at the end of its life

or the very beginning. The only thing it does consistently is to get paler as it ages.

While Apricot Beauty isn’t actively bad with Dreaming Maid, the two aren’t complementary, to my eyes.

I’m sure this has something to do with the color wheel; if there are any artist readers who can explain this better, I’d appreciate it. When I put my much yellower-orange ‘Apricot Emperor’ tulip next to the gently aging Dreaming Maid, the two set each other off much better than the combination I’d planned.

But Apricot Emperor and Dreaming Maid is not a combination I can expect to see again in my lifetime, since Apricot Emperor is an early Fosteriana tulip. This year, perhaps because of our weird dry warm winter through December and January, the garden bulbs have come out higgledy-piggledy, in any order, crocuses and hyacinths blooming with early and even mid-season tulips, while the Fosterianas, generally next after daffodils, have come out with the usually-much-later single early tulips.

I’m hoping my late orange-and-purple tulip combination, ‘Orange Favorite’ and ‘Queen of the Night’ (with a few ‘Paul Scherer’ thrown in (see what I mean about all those single quotes?)) will turn out better.

As for now? Sometimes the material world surprises us with more than we had expected; other times it disappoints us of our glowing visions. I had the beautiful dream, and now I have beautiful (though mismatched) tulips.

“Don’t plant tender plants until the blackberries bloom in your yard,” said a local market farmer. We were standing in the post office lobby, where I’d been discussing the weather with someone else.

Last-frost dates are always a matter of controversy. That’s mainly because the weather has never learned how to read a calendar. Probably isn’t even interested in trying. Leaving us humans arguing. “It’s May 15th.” “No it’s not, it warms up by the end of April.” “Well, I remember one year when it snowed in the beginning of June.” And so forth. These conversations can go on for a very long time.

While I’ve always held to the May 15th theory, myself, I immediately recognized that “when the blackberries are blooming in your yard” is a much more accurate measure. I mean, I’m not silly enough to think that summer actually starts on June 21st–in my area it starts much earlier. Natural signals–the peeper frogs are peeping, the blackbirds are back, the snow has melted, the mosquitoes are out, the oaks are leafing–are a much better guide to the seasons. The real seasons, not the ones humans make up.

And “blooming in your yard” is even better. (We won’t go into how a lot of people here would rather blackberries didn’t bloom in the yard, because they are a spreading pestiferous impenetrable nuisance.) Every area has microclimates: small climates-within-climates that are formed by being by the cool creek or on the hot south-facing slope or any number of things that make your place cooler or warmer than another place just down the street. In cities, the amount of heat-holding cement around you can make the temperature higher by 10 degrees F (about 12 degrees C).

We need specific signals to the seasons, because it’s just too easy for humans to go off on a fantasy that we’ve really got it all under control. If we want to plant right now, it will work, we figure - because we want to do it right now. It’s a pretty thought that disguises our own troubled relationship with the the rest of nature.

So we may know, in our heads, that tomatoes, squash, and other plants can’t tolerate frost. But when it warms up in early spring, it’s hard to restrain ourselves from putting out all our plants and seeds. It’s so warm. Surely it will never freeze again. That devil blend of hope and hubris that’s led so many of us to disaster.

I think some of this comes from a feeling that our gardens are our own private universes, where (of course) we hold sway. In a way, our gardens are are private universe. But they are also a part of the world around us. Maybe because I came to gardening from hanging out outside, I have always included the rest of nature in my garden notebook: the cranes flew over, the willows are leafing, the moon’s in the last quarter. But I still miss a lot.

Our local farmer said he learned about the blackberry-flower method from the old-timers thirty-seven years ago. If I had used my eyes, I could have worked it out at least a couple of decades ago. You could be quicker than I was: what are some natural signals for your own planting times?

For that full fluffy look, garden books caution, hyacinths need to be replaced every five years. Myself, I think hyacinths are just getting good after five years. They get the way I like my jeans: worn in, graceful, softer: more comfortable in the woods.

I can’t help wondering if I’m supposed to admire those fat, flower-stuffed hyacinths because they’re more productive, more more more: they did get developed in approximately the same age as colonialism, and reached their heights in the U.S.  in the prime of our industrial age, the late 1800s and early 1900s. A time when “more more more” was certainly the cry of the land, if that cry has ever faded, and too bad about what happens in the context of all that production.*

To me, hyacinths fit the landscape much better (even in pots) when they fine down; instead of stiff fat spires suggesting civic plantings, they turn into newly-introduced woodland creatures. As an extra bonus, none of the other woodland creatures has ever eaten my hyacinths.

Once hyacinths get to the point of pleasant woodsiness, they seem to stay there. At least the older varieties like my pink ‘Lady Derby’ do.  I’ve had them for over ten years, mostly in containers, and they just keep coming back.

L’Innocence, another heirloom hyacinth,  is beautiful, I think, even when it’s fined down to this:

Some of my white L’Innocence have kept a heavier supply of their white curlicues, perhaps the ones that get more sun? You can see some of them in the picture at the top of this post.

Festival (sometimes called Festiva) hyacinths have that sparsely woodsy look from the get-go. They’re designed that way, worthy heirs of the old Roman hyacinths which had the same form, several small spikes curving gracefully. (They’re also called multi-flowered hyacinth.)

You can find true Roman hyacinths at Old House Gardens, specializers in heirloom bulbs. While they’re not cheap, Roman hyacinths are meant to go on indefinitely, blooming year after year and even spreading. Modest flowers often do last longer, I’ve noticed. Probably because they’re nearer the species types and further from ones that are bred for professional flower growers, who tend to be geared toward a big one-time show instead of  steady stamina in the garden.

I haven’t invested in Roman hyacinths yet, mainly because I’m happy with my White Festivals, which I’ve neglected shamefully; I put them in the ground near the door, and basically ignored them since then. I don’t even think they got the fertilizer I usually give to my bulbs, since they were not in a spot where other bulbs were. I often neglected to fertilize them in spring for that reason, and of course by fall I have only the vaguest notion of where they are.

But even neglected, they fine down beautifully. To me, this hyacinth looks very like some of the native woodland bulbs we have here: small, unassuming, beautiful. It fits into the landscape almost seamlessly. And this is important to me. I’m not a purist, but if my writing could do what I want it to do, it would remind us all to look up from the garden plans occasionally, look at the bigger world we’re gardening in, and see how we can enter into conversation with it.

*such as grinding poverty, child labor, dangerous work conditions with no health care or insurance, open-pit mines, clearcutting, incredible amounts of pollution, and the general ascendancy of money over kindness, thoughtfulness, and community connections. Sadly, these are both old customs and part of the modern work ethic, but they became institutionalized in the slave workforces of monocropping colonialism, and the social upheaval of early industrialism.