Category — Garden plans

The Art Historian and I reached the large terrace where the watercourse goes underground. We met up with a fellow gardener by this pot of  linaria and what looks to me like some form of pelargonium (if it isn’t a geranium, or a heuchera: if you know this plant, take pity and let me know, too).  It was one of those annoying moments when the name of the cultivar – ‘Festiva?’ – is right on your tongue, but somehow not formed enough to quite turn into a word. (Identification for this one, and the red-twigged plant, would be a relief, too.)

A terracotta urn of forced tulips next to the linaria started a conversation with the chance-met gardener, who said he prechilled and planted tulips every year. My hat is off to someone who thinks this far ahead this far and works this hard to have tulips in a hostile environment.* I’m sure they look great in containers in his yard or on his porch. Yet somehow the tulip pots stuck among the brilliant tropical lushness of the Getty just looked out of place to me, a Georgia O’Keefe flower in a Betye Saar painting.

But if tulips with tropicals don’t strike my fancy, I can still appreciate the designer’s urge  for bold new combinations. Robert Irwin’s motto, “Always changing, never twice the same,” is carved into the garden’s plaza floor, which according to the Getty website, “[reminds] visitors of the ever-changing nature of this living work of art.”  Irwin’s vision includes the people inside his artwork.  Instead of the broad allees of formal European gardens, long stretches where people can see and be seen in large groups, Irwin’s meandering paths and spirals take you in a flow pattern where you see only a few people at a time – and you hear even fewer. It feels as if you are on your own personal journey.

Descending a deep, precipitous turn in the path, and the Art Historian and I were suddenly tiny Borrowers in the giant world of the trellises, now revealed in their hugeness.

Further along, the Art Historian and I admired this much simpler pea or sweet pea trellis (in LA, peas get planted year-round, which is why they can have already climbed so high in mid-February). It’s made out of 1 x 1s glued together, although it could as easily be made from scrap wood or twigs (in which case you’d have to use twine or some other form of attachment). To our eyes, the pea trellis made an impressionistic picture with bold plant combinations, unlike the forced tulips and incipient roses we saw.

Unusual combinations are the order of the day in this garden, with its particular pallette of art, climate, water supply, and huge foundation for support. Where else would you find brugmansia and osier willows growing next to each other? (The osier willows are the red and yellow twigs in the background.) The brugmansia flowers had only a subtle, slightly lemony scent; it was midday, after all, and they really wait for the night.

This oxalis/grass/succulent/large bulb combination is a gratifying mosaic of color and shape, though all plants have a similar smooth texture. It’s also a combination that would be difficult to grow as a perennial garden in most places, though it could serve as inspiration for similar low-water combinations to fit your own climate.

Nasturtiums, tropical grasses, and what looks like agapanthus make exuberant fountains of color together. I can’t help thinking this would make a great container combination.

While most of my attention was drawn by unusual combinations, single specimens got a look, too. I found the stems of this tropical grass-like plant

as photographable as the leaves.

The orange-tinged ephedra (an almost abstract plant) was new to me.

And while I have long held the opinion that gold leaves are sick leaves, this sunstruck gold succulent (what can it be?) just bursting into flower might open me to a whole new world of understanding.

The center of the Getty garden is a beautiful example of monocropping – of azaleas? (Yes, they’re Kurume azaleas: I checked the Getty website.)  The pool is shallow enough that the gardeners can wade to create the strokable-looking roundness of the maze. My friend at the Getty says the gardening staff works hardest of all. I believe it. Everything in the garden was beautifully groomed, without ever being stiff or unlivable. All hail Getty gardeners.

So here’s my advice. If you’re in LA, forget the museum: go see the Getty gardens. I have only one complaint: there are no botanical labels.  (You may have guessed this from  the vague plant attributions and  lack-of-identification sniveling throughout these posts. And unfortunately since I’ve been to the website, I can’t whine quite as heartily: they do have a list of some botanical and common plant names there. But still. On with my plaint.) While this is probably for reasons of high aesthetics, it’s a little frustrating to the gardener looking for inspiration. Since they label the art inside with names and dates, why not do the same for the art outside?

*There are such things as tulips which need no help in non-chill climates, but they are species types, not the large and ebullient garden ones we saw here.

 Water rains through the dome at the top…

Recently I was in Los Angeles, where I had the good fortune to go to the New Getty Museum – and its garden.  A friend of mine who works there, as well as the Art Historian traveling with me, both share my opinion of the garden. So I feel confident (and less Philistine) in saying that the garden outside holds more interest for me than most of the exhibits inside.

Unlike most modern buildings, the Getty manages to be thoroughly contemporary, yet congenial to humans. It invokes a spacious Mediterranean classical feel without ever reproducing ancient architecture: the warm stone, imported from Italy, is an important part of both architectural sensations. Whatever I may feel about the ecological consequences of importing masses of stone from Italy, I can’t deny the aesthetic pleasure.

The garden contines in the same strain. It’s roughly based on a spiral, with water flowing through in the best classical Arabic-garden style. (Also in classical Arabic style is the recirculation of the water, which is pumped from the bottom pool back to the top.)

…to a pool in at the top of the garden…

One of the  most pleasing aspects of the Getty garden may not be visible to everyone: low water use. Though the garden is saturated with the sound and sight of water, its watercourse and pools are recirculated, and create great effect with a fairly small volume. Many of the plants I could identify in the garden thrive on minimal water, a nice design touch for a climate with so little of it.

…planted with papyrus and water lilies.

The visible water is channeled through a fountain, rivulet, and pools that have a feel somewhere between ancient and modern.

The large boulders are in the watercourse, hidden at this point by plants.

The Art Historian (who is also an artist) liked the way the boulders in the stream start out massive, get smaller, and finally go into embedded pebbles laid endwise in Chinese style.

Since the Getty is on a prominent hilltop,  the top of the garden is the place where you get spectacular views of city and ocean, punctuated by the tall wheatshock-shaped structures, as large as spreading trees,  and standing in their stead in this garden. Gardeners in a new and treeless environment might take a hint from these graceful elaborate trellises, which at the Getty are strung with bougainvillea, but might be adapted for any climate. With annual vines, they’d also be a great way to get seasonal shade and a stunning display of flowers or foliage. (Most gardeners would have to scale them down, though; these are two or three stories high.)

You may have noticed the very happily situated hellebores in some of the photos above. Hellebores seem to be stalking me lately, determined to get into my garden. These certainly got my attention: I’m guessing they are plain and variegated Helleborus argutifolius (Corsican hellebore), which fits in with the Mediterranean theme. (Any help with hellebore identification will be gratefully received.)

The hellebores are paired here with black-purple phormium, a satisfying shape and color combination. They are also paired (only in LA) with a variegated crassula.

There are many succulents in this garden, which depends as much on foliage as it does on flowers for its effects.

What’s different is that the succulents are not only grouped with each other, but with nonsucculent plants. This reddish succulent (which I believe is the kind of kalanchoe called paddle plant) is paired with another succulent (which I believe is a hirsute echeveria) which contrasts with the kalanchoe while picking up its reddish tints on the tips and edges of its leaves.

Backing off further, you can see the black phormium and the twig of an unidentified but clearly deciduous shrub, outlining this area.

Pulling back still more reveals the variety of plants which beautifully crowd this bit of garden. (The sun was going in and out of clouds, so this picture is darker.) Every square yard of garden is an artwork in itself, and leads you to explore more as you wend your way down to the dramatic center circle.

Next post: the center of the spiral

Double tulip ‘Creme Upstar’, one of the many reasons to store your bulbs the right way.

My refrigerator is about half bulbs and half food.

In some households, this might be considered a bad thing. Even weird.

For others, it’s a sign of good things to come.

If you don’t have enough refrigerator space for all of your bulbs, you can give room to the most important ones first. Lily bulbs, as I’ve mentioned before, never actually go dormant, so I’d say it’s most important to give them refrigerator room.

Of course,  it’s also most important to plant them first. Not only can they be planted at summer temperatures, they actually take advantage of that warm weather to make  stronger growth for next year.

The moisture-loving frittilaries (some of them like it dry; some of them crave year-round moisture) are pretty similar. Like lilies, they have scales, and are shipped in plastic bags with soil around them; this kind of bulb may just not be designed to be out of moist soil.

Tulips, on the other hand, have a tendency to disappear if you plant them in moist soil, or while it’s still hot. Van Engelen recommends planting them when soil temperatures are about 55 F (13C). Soil generally stays warmer than the air for some time, so that means a fairly chilly outdoor temperature.  After it starts being nippy, but before the ground freezes, is what they recommend.

And in a perfect world with absolutely consistent weather, it would happen that way. In a perfect world, your properly-stored bulbs would arrive at just the right time for planting them. But we’re not in a perfect world, in case you hadn’t noticed, and weather is as changeable as–well–the weather.

There’s also the little matter of schedule. I have planted tulips in flying snow and in freezing rain and about two months later than I should have. (The soil wasn’t frozen, but I was. ) The bulbs did nicely in most cases, but I can tell you it’s a much pleasanter experience if you don’t wait for the rain and snow part.

This year, it’s not just my schedule; it’s the climate’s. It’s been hot late into the year. So even though I bought from specialized bulb dealers who ship at the proper date for planting, the proper date for planting turns out not to be the proper time for planting. It hasn’t cooled down yet.  In order to get the best out of my tulips, I have to store them.

I have often stored tulips in cool places other than the refrigerator. Cool places are in low cupboards, basements, the floor of a shed, storage room, or even under the bed. (Heat rises, coolness sinks.) Just make sure it’s somewhere where sun doesn’t hit and it doesn’t get too hot.

Also make sure that rodents can’t get to them. They adore tulip bulbs and will be happy to eat them up for you. And bulbs need to breathe, or they get moldy and even rot.  So don’t seal them up in closed box or bag.

This year, I squeezed all of my tulips into the refrigerator. It was still so hot that I just couldn’t find any other safe place that was really cool. I need to check my own refrigerated bulbs, to be sure they’re getting enough ventilation.

The refrigerator is actually a little bit cold for bulbs. Most refrigerators are in the high 30s to low 40sF (-1 to 4C); Van Engelen recommends storing bulbs at 50 to 70 degrees Farenheit (10 to 21 degrees Celsius); Old House Gardens recommends 40 to 50F (4 to 10 degrees C). But I figure it’s much better than what happens when you keep bulbs in the heat. If tulips bulbs are in the heat too long, they give up the ghost, and don’t flower. And it has been hot. 80 or 90 degrees F (27 to 32C). That won’t last much longer, but it’s not a good idea to plant any of my tulip bulbs until it cools off.  As the Old House Gardens instructions say, the later you wait, the happier tulips are.

Another thing to be aware of in refrigerator storage is that gasses from ripening vegetables and fruit can affect the bulbs. (So can exhaust from cars, if you’re inclined toward garage storage.) I’m hoping that shutting all of my produce in a crisper will keep that from happening.

Daffodils–and all the other kinds of narcissi–seem to be pretty much resistant to any kind of treatment–they may even sprout if you take them out of a forgotten bag which has been stored in the heat until the bulbs withered thin. (I don’t have to tell you this is a biographical story, do I?)  In this case, most of the bulbs may be brown all the way through, and those won’t make it. But otherwise narcissi are always worth a try, no matter what their condition, or the weather.  They may not make a flower that year, but they are likely to come back. Narcissi are tough.

I don’t know as much about the storage needs of the huge variety of other, smaller bulbs. But this information will at least give you some intelligent arguments for claiming refrigerator space.

References:

Van Engelen planting instructions (come with bulbs; I couldn’t find them on their website)

Old House Gardens planting instructions

I know only the tiniest bit about bonsai. But when I see trees growing out of rock, wind- and weather-shaped, I can’t help wondering if the inspiration came from high mountain trees like this. (Well, that and the ever-enticing concept of having a small world which you can shape and enter into entirely.) This tree, though huge by bonsai standards (a few feet tall), has a form and surroundings that bring to mind less-shaggy bonsai.

If I’m remembering rightly, Japanese culture has a spiritual and aesthetic reverence for things mountainous.

Including rocks. One my one visit to Japan, I visited one Shinto shrine which had a rock that was famous for curing respiratory diseases. (If you’re interested, I was exposed to a respiratory flu in Japan that lasted for six violent weeks when I got home. After it was over, my susceptibility to bronchitis did seem to taper off.) Buddhist and Shinto shrines always featured rock and plants, in one way or another.

Shinto is the indigenous spiritual practice of Japan; like most indigenous spirituality the world over, it concentrates on the cycles of nature. It was inspiring to me to be in a country where this type of worship had been respected, instead of systematically killed off as much as possible, as it was in Europe and the United States. Shinto seems to thrive along with the different sects of Buddhism, Christianity, and the other religions of Japan. People don’t seem to consider it exceptional to visit more than one kind of worship place; the religions aren’t in competition with each other.

While many Buddhist shrines had beautiful gardens,  I was most fascinated by the tiny plots of ritualized country that formed the Shinto shrines. There were so many of them in Tokyo, in amongst the skyscrapers and traffic noise.  At least one for every neighborhood, it seemed. With the help of an English-language guidebook, I walked to different ones each day and spent time sitting in them, listening to the sound of water from the bamboo fountain, watching suited businessmen come in for a quick prayer before going on with their day.

In my culture, religion is formally separated from nature (although a lot of gardeners heal that rift), a legacy of a time when nature, and those who understood its voices, were enemies of the church/state. In Japan, the connection between nature and spirituality seems to be a given. I can’t help feeling that anyone who has experienced time in nature knows that for truth.

I remember walking by a very small local shrine, a low fence enclosing a small triang

le of bare ground maybe ten square feet on a narrow city corner. I don’t know what kind of shrine it was, and since I had about ten words of Japanese, I couldn’t ask. My book didn’t  say.

I saw many dark rocks, smoothed by time, any carving or elaboration long since worn away. It gave me shivers. Ancient things do that for me. I feel somewhat the same way looking at Sierra granite, still holding on to the polishing glaciers gave it millenia ago.

I started out full of myself. And multiple enthusiasms. This would be the most unusual, fresh version of the Three Sisters the world had ever seen. And it was all going into my prize bronze-brown Vietnamese pot, the big one that I’d splurged on at the discount store (it was only a few dollars more than a plastic one the same size, I told myself). I had vague, secret-from-myself dreams of how I’d win the Fine Gardening container contest, with becoming modesty of course.

Then came the reality.

Those  yin-yang beans I bought to twine up the cornstalks? Well, as it happens, they were bush beans. They weren’t going to twine anywhere. And they didn’t seem to like the circumstances I’d put them in, either; I harvested two pods with two beans in them and that was it.  The leaves had a ratty white-spotted look, too, that I think was due to nitrogen deficiency. I did get enough beans to replace the ones I planted, though the ones I harvested were kind of scrawny.

OK, then there were the violetto trionfo beans that actually do climb. (I planted three of them, and three of the yin-yang beans. Six stalks of corn.) I’ve got at least one of them running up the cornstalk now. But they’re just blooming, and the way those corn cobs feel, the corn’s going to be long dead before the beans get ready.

And then there’s the corn itself. A Japanese exotic corn, striped pink, cream, and white. How cool is that? And it’s actually very pretty-but not nearly as healthy (or colorful) as I’d envisioned. I do admit to getting a laugh out of pruning corn, which has got to be the most Garden Society thing I’ve ever done.  The leaves would go dead, and the corn would look funky, so I’d cut off the dead ones. Pruning corn.

Even though it wasn’t what I expected, I have enjoyed seeing the corn evolve, from its first pale stripes to the dark burgundy color that’s spreading ever further along the stalk. And even though it’s not as tall and bushy and strong as I would have liked, I did get one small ear of wine-red corn on each stalk.

The cucuzzi climbed rampantly out of all the other pots I put it in-but it made a few pale leaves and petered out in this one. The Waltham butternut squash  I also put in there is just putting out its first blossom now. And the surprise Brown Sugar canna (deep brown foliage, pink flower, reputedly) I planted late? It did show a tentative green point a month or so ago. And then sank back into the earth.
I think this trio, or quintet, (or sextet, if you count the canna), needed a lot more water than they got in that pot. I put in a reservoir insert, so they did get some bottom watering. And I put in some water-conserving polymers into the soil. But  I think that reservoir just wasn’t big enough for such heavy drinkers. Especially in a ceramic pot that allows water to evaporate. It’s  a glazed ceramic pot, which is a lot less porous than unglazed. But still.

I think they all needed a lot more food than they got, too. Oh, I did use a heavy-on-compost mix for soil, and put in amendments, the way I do with all of my container plants. And I foliar fed them, the way I do my whole garden. But corn, beans, and squash are notoriously nitrogen-hungry. They are heavy feeders and drinkers, and I treated them like anorexics.

Recently, I also read that the Three Sisters idea was about handy harvest, as well as space saving. The corn would have been field corn-the kind you gather when it’s ripened hard, to feed to livestock. (William Alexander suggests a modern version: use popcorn.) The squash would have been winter squash or pumpkins–not harvested until their shells were hard. Late, like the corn. And the beans would have been dry beans, not ones you’d pick off the vine to eat fresh. Dried beans that get harvested when the pods dry.

I could look at this season’s formerly-known-as-star container and be disappointed. But you know what? I’ve enjoyed the little purple curling edges of the corn leaves, and I’m enjoying the purple bean flowers and vines spiraling around the almost-dead corn, and I enjoyed the magic of opening up my two little pathetic yin-yang pods and finding replicas of the little seeds I planted.
I even enjoyed pruning corn.

Reference:

The $64 Tomato, William Alexander, Algonquin Press, 2006

Places to get seeds:

yin-yang beans: Park’s
violetto trionfo beans (I  notice they are not in the current catalogue. They’d been sitting for some years): Pinetree Gardens
Japanese ornamental corn: JL Hudson
cucuzzi squash: JL Hudson
Waltham butternut: Pinetree Gardens