Fall colors in the late summer garden

Check out the grape leaves!





Geez. The contrast with the lemon and bamboo could not be more stark.



It seems like I usually enjoy those red leaves in the softer light of autumn. It's not autumn yet.



Perhaps this early color is an by-product of my infrequent watering. Not pruning very frequently either, apparently.



But if I'm not pruning, why is my compost bin so full?



There is some evidence that I do still garden down in my nursery (nursery==metal shelves in the back corner). I can't seem to refresh the succulent pots on the roof or front steps without propagating the clippings. (On TV they call this hoarding.). Anyway, this means I always have extra succulents... Right now I have a whole bunch of fragrant Aeonium balsamiferum in 1-gallon pots if anyone is interested...



Anyway. Back to the garden. Where it looks like fall, in general...



I should pick that lemon before a rodent does.



I tend to have a lot of purple in fall. This is Salvia 'Jean's Purple Passion', the product of a local Salvia lady who died a few years ago. Well, she was quite old. Annie's Annuals is still selling the plant. It's a good salvia for shade, as its parents come from the cloud forests in Mexico, as opposed to the sunnier, dry areas most salvias seem to come from.



Elsewhere in San Francisco, princess plant (Tibouchina urvilleana) flowers all year. Not so much in mine, however.



Here's some summer. Madia elegans. I don't seem to have as much this year as I usually do. Only one plant flowering? I usually have a few volunteers. You know I always worry about my wildflowers becoming inbred in the small garden. I bought fresh seed at Larner Seeds last week, so I can bring up more for next year.



Madia is allegedly a very common California wildflower, yet I have never seen it in the wild (have you?). I see its close cousins from the genus Hemizonia often enough. I would like to get some of those in my garden too, but I'd have to pick the seeds myself. Hemizonia has not entered horticulture to my knowledge.

More yellow, from Tithonia diversifolia, a subtropical plant that is waaay to big for a small garden. Last year this guy started blooming in fall. This year, late summer. Underneath the green canopy, dead leaves hang on for a long time. You can see them in this picture if you look. Honestly, I like it. There's a "lost garden" vibe to it that I think is groovy.



After I took this picture, I did a little deadheading.



More yellow with the bronze fennel. I should probably do some dead-heading there too, if only to keep volunteers to a minimum. I have quite a bit of fennel in the garden, but no fennel volunteers yet. I guess that's a good thing.



At some distance away, the red fuchsia flowers.



After all, one does not want one's reds too close to one's yellows.

Return to the garden

I don't have much to say about the garden right now, and it's too hot to spend much time in it anyway. Keckiella cordifolia winds down at the end of the season and I cut it back as it does so. This is really one of the great California native plants. More Californians should grow it. I grew mine from seed a couple years ago, but you can find it at native plant nurseries and Annie's Annuals and Perennials.



In SF, Keckiella starts to flower around June and has tubular red flowers until mid-September. Then it goes dormant. Cut it all the way back. New growth bursts forth with autumn rain. Long, arching stems thread through neighboring plants. This is the time for training and shaping if you have something in mind. Keckiella is lush green all winter and continues to grow through spring.



Cutting back the Keckiella gives me a better view of nearby Fuchsia fulgens,



And the coastal native purple angelica, Angelica stricta 'Purpurea'. I think I mentioned it before, but I have two and this one is much more purple than the other one.



The other one is paler, almost mauve.



I'd like to collect seed from these and grow a couple more for next year.

Fall asters just getting started. This is Aster novae-angliae 'Skyscraper'. I've had mixed results with fall asters. The native Symphyotrichum chilense doesn't seem to like my over-amended soil. It grows like a weed and doesn't flower. I wild-collected some seed on the side of the road in Big Sur a few years ago (i.e., I pinched three seed heads, of thousands), with the same unsatisfactory result. Well, I really like fall aster. I had to try this one when I read about it at Annie's Annuals.

"[I]t easily reaches a very multibranching 5’ x 5’. Starting in midsummer & continuing throughout Fall, especially with deadheading, you’ll get a zillion 2”-3” amber-yellow centered, rich periwinkle blue daisies great for butterflies & for cutting for vases."

Yes, please. Not 5' tall now, but it was new to the garden a few months ago.



I like all kinds of aster family plants. I grew Rudbeckia triloba from seed. I'd like to have a couple more of these too.



I usually have more sunflowers than this, but I guess I missed out getting them started last spring.



This sprout of Cobaea scandens surprised me. I don't know if this is self-sown, or coming up from the roots. I planted the original root crown three feet away from here, but I know the roots have since spread throughout the garden. Do you think this is new growth from the roots after the severe pruning I gave the vine last week? I wonder. It was hard to germinate this seed in a controlled environment with the seed trays on heating pads and regular water, but ripe fruit could have dropped right around here and received adventitious watering.



Anyway, I'm not sure what to do with it... Train it to grow in the direction I want, I guess. Transplanting would be hard. There's only one place to put it, and that place is taken by the parent plant. Digging it out would be highly impractical.

In which I failed to document the heatwave as it happened

But for the sake of posterity, let it be known that we had 2 consecutive days of 100+ deg F, and then a third day in the mid-90s. I think the official San Francisco temperature was somewhere in the 90s all three days, but temperatures soared way over that in the backyard micro-climate.

It seems that my digital thermometer doesn't function properly at extreme temperatures. At one point, it recorded 132 deg F.



The potted cherry trees dropped all their leaves, but that seemed to be the extent of any heat-related stress effects. Things have returned to "normal" and we're back in the low 60s today. Bleh.

In the thick of it, the princess flowers shriveled up into dark purple crisps. I thought they'd drop, but they cooled off okay.



And the heat didn't melt my neighbor's house.



The sunflowers paid no mind



and Verbena bonariensis kept on keepin' on.



There it is above with one of two Angelica stricta 'Purpurea' from Annie's Annuals and Perennials. Another one is a little farther along.



It's kind of a disappointment when Cosmos blooms white, imo.



The heat might have prompted this long-suffering Passiflora sanguinolenta, also from Annie's Annuals, to make its first flower.



This poor plant has been moved, stomped on, and broken so many times I thought it wasn't going to make it. I managed to provide it safety for the last year, but safety was shady and I worried it wouldn't grow. After a long climb, the vines reached daylight and now it flowers.

(As I was took its picture this morning, I thought about how lucky those of us are who garden here to have Annie's Annuals to garden with. They always have so many different, interesting things to try. I feel gratitude.)

I think this corner area could use some color adjustments.



And as I sit here right now, I'm thinking some dark green foliage might do the trick. Hmm...





Just a week or two ago I was entertaining the notion of removing Salvia uliginosa for failure to perform. Well, it's performing now, and the blue flowers are among my favorite.



So I'm not entertaining that notion anymore. For now.

Blake Garden in the late afternoon light

The late afternoon light of...late mid-summer? early late summer?

The first day of fall is Sept 22; that's 36 days away. There are 104 total days of summer, so 36 / 104 = 0.346153846. The third trimester is imminent. Let's call it very late mid-summer.

Over in my side bar, the first link under "other diversions" is Astronomical Applications. It takes you to a US Naval Observatory web-page that generates a calendar of daylight hours specifically for the area where you live.

Today in San Francisco we had 13 hours and 33 minutes of daylight, about 1 hour and 12 minutes less than we had on the summer solstice. We will lose another 32 minutes by August 31. And, 22 days after that, on the first day of fall, we will have lost another 52 minutes, leaving only 12 hours and 9 minutes of daylight.

For those of you suffering through hot summers, your relief is almost at hand. Meanwhile, those of us on the coast wait for the shorter days to bring the warmer weather of Indian Summer. During the long days of the calendar's summer, hot air rises in the Central Valley, pulling in ocean air through the Golden Gate. That moist air condenses over land and shrouds The City in a chilly fog. August is usually terrible, but this year it's been...very terrible. Expect things to warm up in September and October. October, glorious October--often our warmest month of the year, and a fine time to visit.

Aaanyway...as gardeners does this time of year set you in motion? Are you making preparations for fall planting? Getting cabbage and broccoli starts ready? Stocking up on plants to get in before the first fall rains? Or do you stave off thoughts of putting your garden to bed for winter? Are you preparing to make preparations? Or just putting off the preparations until you know it's too late to prepare so you can just wing it? For most of us, it's just gardening. We can do as we please, and it's tremendously fun.

There are no specific garden blogger memes for the end of summer, but we all seem to write several posts about it. It's one of my favorite times of the blogging year, when everyone tallies up their garden's summer.

My biggest preparations right now seem to be emotional. I'm trying to soak up all the light I can before it's gone. Like it might never came back.

Today I found 30 short minutes to whip through the Blake Garden...in the late afternoon light of very late mid-summer.