January Clippings

Spring comes early in Northern California, so the the last weekend in January is a good time to prune roses and cut back ornamental grasses. After two weeks of rain, the return of the sun meant the garden was calling. Loudly. It's satisfying to reduce things to their lowest common denominator once in awhile.

As opposed to, say, letting them stay all wild and woolly! I am a stickler for cutting grasses back hard; fresh new growth emerging from a haystack is NOT a good look. A couple months of lumpishness will be worth it when this Miscanthus wakes up.

I can't believe how big the crown of this Pennisetum spatheolatum got in one year! This tight mound of old stems will give good support to the grass during the season.

Look who was living all cozy in the grass crown; very happy to come out and twirl in the sun!

Soft seedlings of Mexican Hair Grass are appearing here and there, just the way I like it!

Is there anything more promising than the first daffodil buds?

The Spanish Lavender is starting to emerge; a nice contrast to the dastardly oxalis!

Oxalis, Lavender and Daffodil foliage, a classic California winter vignette

This might be more classic in South Africa; Grevillea 'Coastal Gem' and Leucadendron 'Wilson's Wonder' combined with purple sage and blue fescue take over the show during cool weather.

The last seed pods on the Cercis 'Forest Pansy.' Dreaming of purple, heart-shaped leaves in just a couple of months...

Cerinthe major (yeah, again...she's one of those types who start mugging when they see a camera, how can I resist?)

And they are everywhere!

Pretty Tulbaghia simmleri is another lovely winter bloomer. And it's fragrant too!

Ahhhh, saved the best for last; Hardenbergia violacea 'Happy Wanderer' is covering my back fence with loveliness; this is a nice vine to combine with climbing roses on an arbor, as it is so happy to take the winter shift. Thanks for joining me in the garden today!

Cats In The Garden

My friend and colleague Julie Orr came to visit last week, to interview my obliging cats for her terrific blog on petscaping. Haku the extrovert was happy to demonstrate one of his favorite garden pastimes for her, rolling in the crushed-rock path (he now wants an agent!) This got me thinking about how much I love watching my cats in the garden, and how many of my design choices were made with their habits and enjoyment in mind.
Not to be outdone, Haku's sister Zen has her own favorite 'cat wallow' under the Red Umbrella (where she is always assured of an appreciative audience). Such places are just one feature of a cat- friendly garden. Others are quite simply 'things to lounge on' and 'things to lounge under'
This picture was taken several years ago, in my last garden, which was created using many large granite boulders from the Sierras, a specialty of the landscape architect we hired. They made an ordinary flat landscape a much more interesting place to look at, and, evidently, to hunt in (their sights were set on a fat squirrel in the birch tree, who was never in the slightest danger.)
The boulders were ideal for hiding behind, or lounging and looking handsome upon: cool in the summer, warm and dry in the winter.
Shy Zen has always been good at tucking herself picturesquely into the garden, preferring to observe her domain from the safety of a leafy bower. Evergreen shrubs, trimmed up and well mulched, are natural shelters year-round.
My favorite plants to use in a cat-friendly garden, however, are grasses and sedges. These tough plants are beautiful and resilient. Many, like this Carex divulsa (Berkeley Sedge) are nearly evergreen in California, only needing a good winter trim to prepare them for a burst of new growth in spring.
In my last garden I had several large clumps of this obliging sedge in front of my office window. The cats seemed to like that area better than any other. They would hide under the arching leaves, lounge atop them, even use them for wrestling practice.
Plants that take this kind of abuse with no ill affect are a wonderful foundation for a cat-friendly landscape. More than once I have encountered a pair of big green eyes observing me from under one of them as I work in the garden. Here Zen takes refuge beneath the glossy orange/green blades of Carex testacea.
And the only thing better than one kitty in the sedge is two kitties in the sedge. If I were a cat, this is where I would be on a warm summer's day.

A garden that everyone in the family can enjoy without worry and concern is a treasure, and to see my happy critters so at home in the landscape we share makes me happy too.

In The Garden With Laura

The first week of summer finally brought some heat to the San Francisco Bay Area, after a long cool spring with almost unheard of rain in May AND June. (Compare that to last year: no rain from mid-March to October.) It was a great time to build a new garden, and the majority of the plants in my new no-lawn front yard were planted in April.

My Rudbeckia 'Indian Summer' just started to bloom this week (seems a little early for Indian summer, but my infant garden will take what it can get!) These were planted from a six-pack in April, so they sure didn't waste any time getting down to business. Gotta love perennials. The big, clear, golden flowers glow next to the blue of the fence. They will get about 4' tall, and bloom well into fall. More about them later.

In other news, this is possibly my favorite ornamental grass, Pennisetum spathiolatum (Slender Veldt Grass). I had three one-gallon plants that I bought from grass guru John Greenlee when he came to speak at an APLD 'New Plant Introductions' meeting last spring. (This isn't a new plant, but John doesn't go anywhere without a trailer full of grassy temptation.) The poor things suffered from my neglect for a full year before they finally went in the ground; by then they were unpromising tufts of brown with maybe 3 green blades each.

I apologized profusely as I planted them above the garden wall. And they forgave, becoming the first of my plantings to get taller than the fence. It will become a perfect 3' hemisphere of fine, green blades with zillions of slender spathes (a mature specimen from my last garden can be seen on the splash screen of my website). It wants to be sheared back to a neat ball in winter, so that come spring it can cover itself with fresh growth (I can't abide thatchy grasses! Anything so inclined is cut to the BONE in January, no exceptions!) This is a nice grass to plant bulbs around, but not too close, it gets a wide, dense crown.

The main bed between the sidewalk and the wall is starting to look interesting. At first everything was SO small that it looked like confetti on a plate. People would smile politely and tell me how nice it was going to look 'when the plants get bigger' (I hate that! My garden has such great bones it would look nice with NO plants at all!) But now that the interesting colors and textures are starting to emerge, the smiles are becoming more than just polite.

The succulents are from my SF Garden Show score (I was given 2 flats of assorted 2" pots for my help creating the APLD educational booth). Seen here are Senecio madraliscae and Aeonium 'Thundercloud.' The orangey grass is Stipa arundinacea, an elegant, drought tolerant, evergreen favorite. This is a warm and sunny south-facing garden, so I used sweeps of blue/gray and blue/green plants to visually cool it down. The soft-looking perennial in the foreground is Salvia argentea (Silver Sage) which will form a huge rosette this year, and send up an airy spike of white flowers next spring. And of course, there are the Green Globe artichokes, grown as much for their fabulous looks as for eating (those leaves!)

A Tale of Two Rudbeckias
As I mentioned before, I planted a six-pack of 'Indian Summer' Rudbeckia about two months ago. But I didn't plant them all at once: I was in the middle of staining the fence at the time, so only planted two plants right away. The others suffered in the 'nursery' for a couple of weeks, drying out more than once. Finally the fence was finished, and the last four, rootbound and sulky, went in the ground.

The picture above shows how differently they grew. The plant on the left was planted right away, and has grown amazingly lush with the same soil/exposure/water as the plant on the right. And yet, the plant on the right is the one in the photograph above, blooming early! He's probably thinking he'd better get on with it; who knows what I'll do to him next! It's little 'experiments' like these that teach me about my garden.

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I hoped you enjoyed this little 'sorbet' post while I'm working on a juicy one about my May visit with Billy Goodnick. We saw three of his gardens on a foggy Santa Barbara morning, and each was choice! Don't miss!