Back in the garden again.

My garden is still a thing. It's getting to be springtime so it's fun to take pictures again. All the plants are getting so big. I prune and prune, but you would never know.



The buckeye, pruned every winter to keep it shrub sized, is leafing out. Some flowers would be nice. It has never flowered. It's my curse to want flowers and get foliage, foliage, foliage.



Well, here are some flowers, on Cestrum elegans. I've tried many species of cestrum, and this one is the best for me. Good growth, lots of flowers. Two thumbs up.



I forget the name of this Annie's Annuals plant. I think it's a eupatorium now. The leaves turn purple when the sun shines on them for any length of time, as it's starting to do now. I think the catalog says part shade is best, but in foggy San Francisco that means full sun.



The strappy, floppy leaved agave-looking beschorneria over there is getting much bigger than I expected based on specimens in the San Francisco Botanical Garden, which is where I know it from best. One day it will let out a huge, towering inflorescence. Until then it's all leaves poking at my face when I walk down the stairs and tripping me up when I try to walk around it.



My crazy/weird neighbor is finally having some work done on his house. He had workers remove all the bamboo from his backyard (so just remnants of it pop up on my side of the fence now and then), cover the whole thing thing with black plastic tarp, and then he went on a plant buying rampage-- hydrangeas, rose standards, boxwood topiaries, cyclamen, ferns, heathers, some aeoniums, just all kinds of stuff. It's like a whole nursery over there. ALL IN POTS. NURSERY POTS. Then, after he filled the whole back yard COMPLETELY FULL OF PLANTS IN NURSERY POTS, he had a guy come over and rebuild his back deck, the previous one having completely collapsed on itself due to rot, neglect, and a vigorous wisteria. But his new deck is quite nice. I can only imagine what the contractor who built it is thinking though, because the rest of the house is quite visibly falling down. What a mess.



Anyway.



Omphalodes cappadocica, a great great plant for dry shade!

Mid-August in the back 40

I ran in to Kelly at the Dead Can Dance concert last weekend. She said Garden Blogger Spring Fling 2013 is slated for San Francisco? Is that right? First I'd heard of it! Anyway, I may or may not participate in the Fling itself, but I definitely have some suggestions for gardens you should visit and maybe for accommodations too. San Francisco is expensive. I would love to meet some of you. Would you come over for dinner one night?

Anyway, our chance encounter reminded me that I am a garden blogger. I took some pictures to prove it.









The big pivot to monocots continues as the monocots already planted get bigger and bigger.



It won't ever be all monocots though, at least not in this garden. I've always got to have something for the insects. For the last few years, the fennel (I have three big clumps of it) are crawling with swallowtail caterpillars, but that has not been the case this year. Wherefore art thou, caterpillars?



I thought I had more Asclepias curassavica than just this one. I most have lost a couple. I will grow more.



The Meyer lemon is bent over with fruit. We'll be having fancy lemonade for indian summer in September and October. Meanwhile, I've been snipping off the leaves as they turn yellow. Ugly!



I snipped all the leaves off the buckeye too. It loses them this time of year anyway when they turn brown and drop off to mitigate the effects of the long summer drought, but I don't care to witness the transition.



I culled all the dead things out of the nursery, and replaced them with new, living things. I'm ready to sow seeds like I used to, but first I have to get my lazy ass to the real nursery to get some growth media. I'm out.



I came very close to removing Fuchsia 'Miep' this year in a made pruning frenzy, but at the last moment, before the last cut, I put the saw down. She's now growing back all over the place and making bright pink flowers.



This garish, inappropriate lily which I really did try in earnest to kill is perhaps the most vigorous plant in the garden.



I didn't know Lilium lancifolium was super-common and even weedy when I bought it. I've been plucking bulbils off and potting them up for a couple weeks now. If you didn't know, the spots are purple. How groovy is that!



We had this container on our front steps, but I decided to move it to the backyard when we painted the front steps. It was crowded up front, so I made room for it back here. I am happy.



Usually aeonium go dormant in summer, but this one seems more alive than ever. Also note: Seaside Daisy (Erigeron glaucus).

Garden Glimpses

I've been spending 1-2 hours per day in the garden since we got back from Hawaii. It's part of my daily routine, while applying for jobs, and working on some special math/programming projects I've been waiting for school to end to work on.

In the garden, mostly I prune. I reduced the Ceanothus crown ~50%, which is 20% more than I understand one is to supposed reduce a crown in any given year. Well, it seems to be making new leaves already. Opening up the crown and lifting it up a couple feet sure let a lot of light in to a corner of the garden. No pictures of that today. Maybe next time.

Today we have fuchsia and dahlia.



Big, dark (edible) berries follow the flowers on the red Fuchsia boliviana.



I pruned the daylights out of Fuchsia 'Miep Aalhuizen' several weeks ago. It was that or take it out.



Dierama pulcherimum I grew from seed a number of years ago has made flowers again this year, the second year in a row.



The seed came from Seed Hunt over there in my seed source links. Germination was easy, but flowers took three years.



Just a few flowers at a time now. In the future, hopefully more.



All those 'Bishops Children' dahlia tubers I grew from seed a few summers ago went in the ground last fall. Reds, oranges, and purples mostly, and all simple-type flowers. Talk about easy germination. Every seed sown germinated. I was very picky choosing only the most vigorous seedlings from the seed tray. Today, this one is my favorite:



This yellow one has an odd defect. It drops one petal a day or two after the bud opens. Sigh.



I planted that fancy (expensive) cordyline I bought at Sierra Azul. It flowers pink in winter? We'll see about that.



Dark dahlias, dark cordyline, dark phormium (behind this lily stem)...



I have a smoke bush too. I bought it in a 1-g pot a couple years ago. It's in a bigger pot now, but I'm thinking about using it to replace the princess plant (Tibouchina urvilleana).



I don't know why the princess plant has never been very happy in my garden. They flower all year in San Francisco, but not in my garden. I rarely get more than a couple months of bloom and then it looks frankly miserable. I've tried being patient. Maybe a smoke bush would be better? Maybe it would not. I don't know. The uncertainty stays my hand.

See? Boring.



The buckeye got big this year. My plan is still to prune all the leaves off when they turn brown in a month or two and then prune the wood in winter to keep it shrub-sized as I've read in books.



That strategy has worked with the Calycanthus occidentalis in the front yard. I could thin it a bit, I suppose.



That's a narrow planter for a spicebush, but I am pleased with the result. Plenty of flowers this year too.



Back in the backyard, Bartlettina sordida is recovering from the hard prune I give it ever year after the flowers.



And that plectranthus has been a fine companion for it underneath. My one little stab at variegation.


Lilies have started to flower. This is some random nursery lily. It's been very reliable for me, blooming heavily every year and growing ever more stout. I keep it in a pot.



My next project for tomorrow and Wednesday is to fix this dreadful planter under the deck. Maybe I'll just cut back the iris leaves and try to encourage the the campanula fill in. I had a Japanese maple in there once but it grew lanky and got in my way and I am heartless. Also some chewing insect regularly massacred the leaves. Bleargh.



I found a lot of dead plants in the nursery when I tidied up and swept. The native Berberis nevinnii (on the left next to the fence) I grew from seed was doing well tho'. My garden is much too small for a thorny plant like that so I keep it in a pot in the corner. I'm sure I'll find a place for it in a bigger garden, when/if we ever move to the suburbs. There's always a place for thorns in big gardens, right?



My little Banksia collection is doing well.



It's 8 pm. Sorry for the abrupt ending, but Guy wants me to finish making dinner so we can eat.



We're having (vegetarian) Sloppy Joes.

There's a storm blowing in

So I don't have to water up here today.



I'm trying to simplify and harmonize the roof garden. I'm an uninspired container gardener at best, and it's always been a hodgepodge up here. I'm tired of it. I took out all the weedy Nassella tenuisima, raggedy gazania and Cotyledon orbiculata and a very sad specimen of Agave vilmoriniana who'd turned yellow and had roots growing a foot or two through the hole in the bottom of the pot.

I brought up several 1-g pots of this fragrant Aeonium balsamiferum from the nursery downstairs,



and made several divisions of Echeveria 'Afterglow', really one of the easiest succulents to propagate. And that's saying something.



Those two are the new backbone on the roof. I also have couple nice specimens of Kalanchoe beharensis and a vigorous black Aeonium 'Schwarzkopf' for a bit of contrast.

I replaced one clump of feathergrass with the restio Chondropetalum tectorum that I bought in a 4" pot a while ago. I don't know if a restio can grow well in a pot on the roof, but if it does I'll get another one. I like there to be some movement in a garden when the wind blows. Succulents tend to be rather inert.

Once the echeverias are done blooming I'll take them out of the copper fire pan and encourage this one Sedum whose name I can never remember to fill in the whole thing.



The plan is to improve the feeling up here using repetition. I hope it works.

We are temporarily hosting a beehive downstairs. This is my friend Claire's.



For unknown reasons, this hive is not doing well. It's also been raining a lot so she's feeding them saturated sugar solution in that inverted jar. They come out on sunny days.

Have I shown you Kitty World?



Guy and his dad built this last summer.



The kitties love it, especially at night. I coaxed Penny out for a picture.



It's not much, but it's better than nothing.



Down in the garden...



Everything is getting so big. I could be a case study in the perils of over-planting.



Plants aren't dying necessarily,



But there is definitely some congestion.





And, actually, there have been some losses, mostly among the natives. The Fremontodendron californicum, a favorite tree/shrub fell over in the rain last year and could not be salvaged. I managed to kill my treasured Keckiella cordifolia. I'm not sure how. I gave the Ribes malvaceum away because it never flowered. What good is a Ribes that doesn't flower? But we still have the buckeye,



here with a fuchsia,



and of course the Ceanothus 'Ray Hartman'.



It's peaking right now. Soon there will be pruning! There's a Passiflora sanguineolenta vining through it right now.



I never get to see the flowers, they are so far overhead. We still have many native perennials, like Grindelia hirsitula, Verbena lilacina, and Salvia spathacea all grown from seed by me, and doing well. It was hard to get that Salvia started, but it finally seems happy, spreading at will. I see lots of flower buds.



I managed to right the birdbath again, for now. Stay with me, birdbath. I took out one patch of Festuca californica for the sake of this Delphinium elatum 'Dusky Maidens'. I thought those flowers would look nice with the black phormium and gray artichoke nearby.



The Douglas irises are about to bloom. That will be nice. I started a couple seed trays of summer annuals this morning, Madia elegans and some Clarkia, I forget which. It seems kind of late to start seeds, so I hope it works out. Anything I plant from here on out will have to be watered this summer. So it goes.



We had a lot of daffodils this year, but I didn't get to enjoy them much with school. This is the last of them and it has a caterpillar.



Some remnant foxglove from a massive planting I did a couple years ago are still hanging around.



Remember Cobaea scandens? It became so massive I had to hack it back unto death. It's back! Volunteers are, anyway. You can see it climbing the deck post.



I can't allow it back on the deck, per Guy (and I agree), so I'm going to find out whether it's possible to hold it at 10 feet or so. Doubtful! I loved those woody vines as much as the flowers. I did not like the flowers dripping copious amounts of sticky nectar on the deck, however.

Another plant I was known for once upon a time, Hardenbergia violacea, has also seen better days. I hacked it back after letting it go wild for a couple years, and it has not rebounded. I may take it out altogether, or start with a new one. I think I'd like to try the pink variety.



Under the deck, Bartlettina sordida is doing very well, and right on schedule for April flowers.



Claire tells me there is movement afoot to change its generic name. This might be a Eupatorium soon...



The Bartlettina has been a great plant for us. I got it at a San Francisco Botanical Garden plant sale in 2005. Our other giant aster, Tithonia diversifolia continues to embiggen itself.



I need to go in there and do some serious pruning too. Unlike the vines, I don't think it will hurt this plant. It responds to being cut like a hydra, spouting 6 new shoots for everyone I lop off. Clematis 'Comptesse de Bouchard' is threading herself into it.



I've encouraged this with some feeding recently. Go, lady, go...

Anyway, that's what's going on here. I'm looking forward to spending more time in the garden this summer.



In the meantime, the cats and I are back inside waiting for the storm to blow in.