Tuesday evening summer garden.

I seem to be running out of interesting new things in my garden to blog about.

I know my cat's recovery from abdominal surgery will only get me so far...

I suppose the question is, "Interesting to whom?"

Who am I to say what's interesting to you.

I don't even know you.

It was nice and warm today. I understand in some places it was unpleasantly hot. Well, in San Francisco it was nice. The perfect sunny day; warm and satisfying to the body.

Just about this time of year the drought avoiding natives go dormant. Leaves on my little buckeye (Aesculus californica) are turning brown and dropping off. Soon they'll be gone, and leave behind the smooth silvery framework of the trunk and branches--a solid, stunning garden feature in my view.



Trey wrote about this plant here. A fabulous old specimen was recently discovered in Point Reyes. Read about it here. See stunning pictures of it here.

I don't know what's going on with some of my Madia elegans.



Why is the flower deformed like this? Note that this is NOT the end-of-day, exhausted flower; this is a new flower. I grew several M. elegans from seed; half of the plants have normal flowers, and half of them have this flower. Same thing happened last year. I'm going to keep the warped-flowered plants in the garden longer this year than I did last year. Maybe the flowers will straighten out later in the season.

The normal flower:



You lovers of red-and-yellow can sneer at me for having some yellow Madia in close proximity to red Keckiella.



And here's a dahlia that comes close to more of the same.



Close, but not quite. Not quite red. Not quite yellow.

Lisa, you asked if my anti-raccoon strategy of crowding the garden with pots had any effect. Yes, it made him mad. Now he's doing double-damage. Sigh. I ordered some OMRI-approved repellent material from Havahart (via your tip). It hasn't arrived yet. Stay tuned...

In the meantime, here are some of said pots.



In the upper left is something new, Tithonia diversifolia. Are you familiar with this plant? About it, Annie's Annuals says this:

"Sunflowers for Winter... A stunner & fragrant... Quickly growing from 8-15’ tall & spreading to probably 6’ wide...it blooms from November thru March. Many stout, branching stalks are formed from the base & are topped by many 6” to 7” bright golden daisies. The fragrance is my favorite - chocolate... The deep leaves are large & deeply lobed & tropical looking..."

Hopefully, I'll have more for winter Bloom Days this year than just Hardenbergia violacea. I'm growing it a pot of compost until the rains come. Then I'll plant it in a corner that gets part-sun in summer, and full-sun in winter.

Plants in the two other pots are natives I grew from seed, Berberis nevinii and Galvezia speciosa. No idea what I'm going to do with either one. More on them later.

Triteleia laxa 'Queen Fabiola'. I planted a bunch of these along with some other, more obscure Brodiea. The raccoon got some and who knows what's left. Taxonomy for those plants is "problematic". I don't even go there.



Three cheers for summer bulbs.



The raccoons left some Sinningia tubiflora tubers undisturbed. (But not all of them. I went down to the garden one morning and found tubers of this plant dug up and tossed everywhere. Very sad. Alas, I potted them all up; maybe they will survive and make it through next year.) Do you know this plant?



They should call it S. tuberosa for the powerful fragrance the strange flowers emit when it blooms. Stay tuned...

You may remember a row of potted Echeverias pictured in recent months. I decided to plant them out, in the bed under the abutilon where this black mondo grass is really starting to spread. Nice, color contrast-y goodness.



This Monardella villosa is starting to flower. Every year, it seems like it will make just a few flowers. In early summer it makes a couple flowers, and those die. And then, later, when it's hotter and drier, with no water for months, it just starts pumping out flowers.



The common name is Coyote Mint. The foliage has a rich, complex fragrance that I can best describe as musky-mint.

It's growing next to a young manzanita, Arctostaphylos bakeri 'Louis Edmunds'. The manzanita bark exfoliates with gusto in summer. This is just a small plant. Imagine this effect on a much larger plant.



I'm looking for a place to end. I don't really have anything.

A final glimpse of this lily, before it gives up the late-spring ghost?