Dragonfly love

Today at the Fall Garden Festival at the City Park Botanical Garden, I took a photo of these two dragonflies mating among the lilies in the pond.

Dragonfly copulation is complicated, and I don't want to go into all the details here. Let's just say that this pair spent a lovely afternoon together before going on their separate ways.

When I related this story to friends, I was told that in New Orleans, they call dragonflies "mosquito hawks."

Go on, you crazy kids!

Basket case

It's fall, and the hanging baskets I planted back in May are starting to look a little tired. I'm ready to replant them. What do you suggest?

Down in jungleland

Jack in the jungle

My landlord contacted me and told me he was a little concerned that my back yard was looking "a little jungly."

Well, yeah, it is. When I moved in, the backyard was a kind of mess of dirt and broken concrete - this was early spring and it was hard to know what plants were growing there. He laid some cheap sod over the top of all this, and - amazingly - it took hold.

But then in June or July, the elephant ears and cannas that previous owners/tenants had planted awakened from their dormancy and asserted themselves.

Around the same time, I bought some big-ass planters and planted some things. Some of them really thrived! Including what was sold to me as a "dwarf papaya tree," 10 inches high in a gallon pot - look what it's become now!

Along with the elephant ears, cannas, and potted plants, the grass my landlord planted also grew tall. In July I asked my neighbor if he would be so kind as to weed-whack my yard, and he did - but since he did it for free and turned down any offers for recompense (including cash or beer) I am reluctant to continue to ask him. He's a nice guy but I don't want to take advantage. So - yes. It's a little jungly out there.

It's been too hot to work in the garden this summer. I should have figured it out - New Orleans gardening activity takes place in the fall and spring. In summer, you should only worry about maintenance - and not that much. I mean - who even goes out there in August?

Jack enjoys it in the backyard

OK - Now it has gotten cooler, And I will pay more attention to my backyard. I am talking to friends and neighbors to see if there is someone - a handy-man or a local guy - who would be willing to clean up my little plot on a regular basis, for a reasonable sum of money (or beer - I'm willing to traffic in beer). Because I really need to get a handle on the jungle.

Hot stuff

Look what I got!!

I lost the tag and I don't remember what kind they are.

But they sure are pretty!

Beautyberry

 

One of the pleasures of my morning walks around the neighborhood has been to pass by the property on the corner of Alvar and Chartres Streets. It's a fenced property, and wildly overgrown with many interesting plants.

Facing on Alvar Street is a corrugated metal shed that seems to be a metal-working shop. Through the fence I can spy various interesting objects made of metal, like sculptures, and so I was lucky on my very first morning here that when I walked past the gate, there was a man in the yard.

His name is David. I asked if he was a sculptor, and he said, not really. He's a landscape designer.

This explains the interesting plants. There are flowering gingers, and blooming daylilies. There are all kinds of twining vines through the fence. On the Alvar Street side there are tall cypress trees and stiff spiky palmettos.

And then there is beautyberry.

It's all in the name, Callicarpa americana. In Greek, callos means “beauty” and carpos “fruit.” Beautyberry is a fast growing shrub, native to the southeastern United States. The fruit forms in clusters on the main branches, between the leaves, and in late summer or early autumn, it ripens and turns a brilliant violet-purple.

It reminds me of the spray-paint color called "Federal Safety Purple," one of the OSHA designated colors used by industries to code safety equipment locations, physical hazards and protective equipment. Federal Safety Purple is used to designate radiation hazards, and you have to admit beautyberry throbs with a weird unnatural glow seldom seen in fruiting plants.

Beautyberry provides food for song birds. The berries aren't really edible for humans, but like the leaves, they are a natural insect repellent, and farmers used to rub crushed leaves and fruit on horses and mules to protect them.

My neighbor's beautyberry is at the height of its splendor right now. When I walk past its long graceful branches strung with bright clusters, I wonder what other beauties my morning walks will bring, in the coming months and year.

Front porch

At our new house, we've got the right kind of porch for sitting on. But when we arrived the four hanging baskets of Boston fern were sadly wilting. And after a few days of heat, it was clear that they were dead.

So today I went up to Harold's Plants on St. Claude and bought what I needed to refurbish the baskets. 

Here they are now - I've planted each one with a large begonia and surrounded it with interesting foliage plants - tradescantia, ferns and creeping jenny.

Bobby at Harold's Plants told me how to plant with the coco-fiber baskets. Harold's is right next to the Press Street railroad tracks, and is a gardener's paradise. I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of time up at Harold's Plants. 

Better beat the birds!

My ornamental grapevine is bearing grapes this year - but only until the birds find them!

I owe you

I owe you an explanation. Why I've been so inactive at this blog lately. So okay.

There's not just one thing, it's a confluence of several things.

First - I've been taking a writing course, which has been wonderful. But working on assignments takes up most of my writing time, time I would usually spend here.

Second - I got a new computer back in March, and while I love and adore it, the Windows package I got with it does not include Windows Picture Manager, which I am so accustomed to using for my photos. Windows Picture Manager is boring, dull, and limited, but it was easy and I got used to it. So now I'm using Picasa, which I'm not totally happy with. When I think about putting together a post, I have to think about photos, and I just feel frustrated. Anyone got some recommendations for some good photo organizing/processing software?

Third - Life is not very exciting right now. My job is boring, and I'm not really doing anything much worth sharing. [The Man I Love] is very busy at his job right now - this will ease up by summer -  and I'm kind of knocking around on my own on weekends.

Fourth - I'm sad about our garden. The septic tank work this winter pretty much devastated the backyard, and disabled the sprinkler system. We're in the middle of a terrible drought, and everything that's not already dead is dying. I got a lot of inspiration from the garden, and I miss that - I also feel guilty for allowing it to die. It's hard to see the bare ground, the shriveling plants.

We don't have the cash to redo the garden yet, and even if we did June/July is not the time for planting, it all has to happen later. It's foolish to fix a sprinkler system if you don't know what it's going to sprinkle. Plus we're in a drought. I know this sounds like rationalization, and it is.

But, things are looking up. As I mentioned, the writing course is going well. I'm almost at the end of spring term, and trying to decide what to take in the summer.

And I'm going on a trip! My writing project requires research, and I've got a surprise chance to fly to New York next weekend. I will be seeing some old friends, and revisiting some old haunts. Hope to share my experiences with you all, and come back re-energized.

Sun lover

This little lizard is enjoying the afternoon sun in our garden.

What lies beneath

Our long septic tank nightmare continues. The concrete that the main tank is constructed of is so old it's crumbling. Felipe has lined it with new concrete, and has put in a filter that will keep the feed to the leach tanks clean. He is also swapping out the old, too-narrow manhole for a larger, up-to-code one.

After that, he will replace the D-box that feeds to the leach tanks. There are four deep pits in our back yard; the stones of the patio have been lifted up. We've turned off the sprinklers for this area, so the roses are not being watered. That and the fact that their roots are exposed now will probably kill them.

We'll wait till it's all done, then figure out what to do with the garden.

Garden Gold

I mentioned that I am taking an on-line writing class. I'm rather pleased with a piece I wrote for an assignment.

The assignment was to write about something we taught ourselves, in 500 words or less. Open with a quote, saying or cultural reference, and then return to it at the end with a twist. Here's mine:

Weekend update

Because it is my weekend; my new job works a 9/80 schedule, which means working 9 days over a 2 week period for 80 hours. It's 9 hours a day Monday through Thursday, and eight hours on every other Friday.

So tomorrow is my Friday Off!

But this isn't a time for goofing off, I've got some serious things happening.  

My task for the weekend is a messy and yet familiar one - the raccoons have attacked our fishpond. This time, they've managed to snag the pump hose out of the fountain and cause it to spray over the edge of the pond. On two different mornings, we've awakened to a green, slimy, stinking pond, with only a few inches of water remaining.  The first time, after I plugged the hose back and re-filled the pond, I could see the goldfish cautiously swimming in their new water. This second time, I can't see any fish. They are either hiding or the bastards got them.

With my work schedule and everything else, I've had to let the pond just sit. So tomorrow, I will refit the system and try to craft some kind of raccoon-proof protection. And buy new fish.

And, mind you, it's over 100 degrees during the day. A fishpond full of slimey stuff smells pretty high in that heat.

Stay cool, people. And avoid green slime if you can.

Violets and roses

Rosa glauca, from Wiki-commons

 It's been a year since my friend Laurie slipped away from the world, despite her brave fight.
 
When I visited her in Seattle, just a few weeks before she died, I remember walking into the little bungalow house she shared with her husband, my dear friend John, and their two grown daughters. The front walk passed beneath a wooden arbor that John had built for her, twined with a species rose just burgeoning with red new growth, and there were violets blooming in the small garden bed just inside the yard.

I told her how beautiful I thought they were, and John quite proudly told me about the rose. It was special, he told me, a rare and special rose that Laurie had planted years ago.

During that visit, she was still strong and we all thought she would stay with us longer. I went back to the hotel I was staying in during that visit, and thought about the rose, and how even in her illness Laurie was still surrounded by beauty and love. Then it came to me. The rose was rosa glauca. I had given Laurie a rooted slip from the plant that grew in my own garden, over fifteen years before - when our children were still babies.

What lasts are memories and love. Violets and roses.

Thematic Photographic - Multiples

Carmi at the blog "Written, Inc." posts a photographic challenge each week at Thematic Photographic. This week, the theme is "Multiples."

Carmi writes: "There's a certain appeal to pictures of many of the same thing. Sometimes you can see patterns in them. Or sometimes they all look identical. Or just similar enough to attract the eye. Or different enough to prompt discussion." Share your images at "Written, Inc."

Click to "embiggen"

A thickly planted garden bed brings together in one shot a multiplicity of the striking and bold flowers of the perennial thistle, Eryngium giganteum. This is the variety also known as "Miss Wilmott's Ghost", for its eerie silvery bracts, but perhaps also because the legendary English gardener, Ellen Wilmott, loved it so much she surreptitiously sprinkled other peoples' gardens with its seeds, leaving a legacy that would multiply after her death.

These plants thrive at the Thames Barrier Park in south-east London.  Multiples - with bees!

Quickening

In Southern California, winter is the time of rebirth. Autumn's sere Santa Ana winds are over, and spring's heat waves are yet to come. The rain has begun to fall, and when I go out in the mornings for my walk, I can see the new life burgeoning on the hillsides and in the oak woods around me.

For a brief few days in spring, the west-facing hill on our street is a sight of astonishing beauty, a brilliant mass of bright yellow flowers of the wild mustard, or brassica rapa. Its beauty is brief. It grows rampantly, goes quickly to seed, and soon the property owner's hired crew will have brush-cleared the hill bald.

But that's in the coming year. Now, in December, you can see the seedlings sprout everywhere on the hillside.

If you've ever grown radishes in your garden, you'll recognize these wee, kidney-shaped leaves, sprouting in pairs and frosted with a slight grey-blue bloom. Brassicas have a clear family resemblance, as obvious as a persistent family nose or chin.

Even now, the moment is fleeting - here some mustard seedlings have graduated to the next stage, with the jagged, toothy young leaves furling out. These will become tall, gangly jagged-edged monsters, like the other members of the Brassica family..

Once I noticed this new life springing out, it was easy to see it everywhere I looked.

Here, in the front yard, my narcissus bulbs are poking their shoots out of the soil. They are well on their way to blooming in January.

Elsewhere, there are other new leaves coming up amid the old. These are the shoots of Amaryllis belladonna, the magnificent Naked Lady flowers. These shoots will become huge, rank strap-like leaves that swamp and choke out everything around them in spring, then suddenly disappear as the plant goes dormant. The huge, crystalline pink flowers will appear suddenly in the dry days of autumn as if by magic.

And then the rains will come again, coaxing the new shoots out of the ground again.

Volunteers

The first year we moved to this house, I bought four packages of sweet pea seeds and threw them into the garden soil. They grew and filled the garden with a tangle of multi-colored fragrant flowers.

And they came back year after year, as flowers faded to reveal fat seed-pods that dried, split and found a cozy home in the soil.

Gradually, I began to notice that each year's sweet pea crop was becoming more predominated by one color - a deep red-violet. Evolution - or devolution - had wiped out the more delicate strains of pale pink, cherry red or blue sweet peas, and left only this strong elemental variety - vigorous and strongly scented.

Observing the process of evolution through sweet peas is not a new idea - my high school science teacher taught us about Gregor Mendel, whose experiments with another pea species, pisum sativum, pioneered the modern theories of genetics.

It's been almost fifteen years since I threw those packages of seeds into my garden, and over the years the crop has diminished, due in part to Marcielo's diligent practices of winter garden cleaning. But here and there, a few remain, and twine up through the cistus or the rosemary, and give us the gift of their beauty and scent.

Twining vines

Gardening is not just about putting flowers in garden beds. Gardening is multi-dimensional. Which is why after greedy gardeners think they've run out of space, they make some more space - up in the air.

Vines add another dimension to the garden - height. They clamber over arbors, up trellises, cling to walls and fences. They take up very little earth-space - just enough for their roots. You can build an arch over a pathway, or a pergola over a patio or deck - and cover it with blooms.

When we bought our house, the southwest-facing slope of our backyard was a baked, sere swath of dirt, where nothing grew. Double-blasted by the sun and the reflection off our windows, even weeds shriveled and died here.

One of our first house-guests was a colleague who knew a lot about how human beings adapt to natural habitats, and he said, "What you need here is a ramada!" With that always in mind, a few years later when we were able to create our garden, that's exactly what we built, with the help of other talented friends, craftsmen and garden designers. A level deck with a pergola and a graceful shade tree keep the blasting sun out of the house and offer a sheltered spot to sit and enjoy the garden. The pergola provided structure to support vines that could provide color and beauty throughout the year.

The most dramatic of these is the wisteria, which begins to bloom in early spring. By now, May, its blooms are over but its vigorous foliage keep the deck below cool and shady. And now, the next act begins.

There are almost 300 species of clematis in the world, and when British gardeners got ahold of them in the mid 19th century, they bred them and crossed them and introduced hundreds of varieties. The flowers are often large and showy - I remember as a child poring over the Wayside Gardens catalog admiring the huge, flat, starry blossoms of clematis with names like "Nelly Moser", "Mrs. Cholmondely", "Duchess of Edinburgh" and "Comtesse de Bouchard."

Thought many lust after clematis, for some reason gardeners hesitate to grow them. A devastating fungus called "clematis wilt" can wipe out a promising plant in an instant - and who wants to take on that heartache? Plus, recommendations for pruning clematis are complicated and present a challenge that puts off beginning gardeners.

For pruning purposes, experts divide clematis into three types of plants, and you'll see them labeled as "A", "B" or "C." The "A"s bloom early, on last season's wood. You cut the flowering stems back right away after flowering, so they can grow next year's growth, but you leave the old growth alone.  The "B"s bloom in June on shoots that grow from old growth, so you prune these carefully in February and March, in order to stimulate the flowering shoots.  The "C"s bloom completely on new growth, so these are the simplest - whack the whole plant down to three feet or so in late winter, and let it grow in the spring.

I have to confess I have lost track of which type my clematis is. When I bought it, I thought I was buying "Etoile Violette," but since it's a tender bi-color lavender instead of deep violet, it's clearly not what I thought.

Its delicate flowers spangle the leaves of a purple-leaved grapevine that twines up the pergola and into the branches of the jacaranda tree. The tree's showy purple flowers come in late June, and then when autumn comes, the grape leaves flame rich scarlet. Containers on the deck provide summer color, with a white David Austin rose called "Winchester Catherdral" and pink zonal geraniums.

It all sounds very well put together, doesn't it? Except I am a lazy, neglectful gardener, and I haven't done any pruning, and very little maintenance and care.

But isn't that the beauty of it? If it can look like this in my garden, just think what it can look like in yours!

Plant a rainbow

A friend in Seattle wants advice planting irises in her yard, and I thought I might pass along some ideas.

There are some 300 species of iris that grow all over the temperate world. While some irises grow from bulbs, most typically are rhizomes - actually the stem of the plant, growing underground, branching out and dividing as they grow. Since a broken-off piece of rhizome sends up growth for a new plant, this makes irises really easy to propagate and share.

In praise of foliage

A path through the Northwest Perennial Alliance border

This post is for Heather, who joined me for a walk through the Bellevue Botanical Garden. It was a grey but beautiful Northwest day - the kind of day that mixes grey clouds with bursts of sunshine; raindrops that spangle your windshield, but are gone after the first pass of the wipers.

This magnificent park was once the property of a couple who enjoyed growing rhododendrons and other plants. In 1984 their property was deeded to the City of Bellevue to be a public park. A group of gardening enthusiasts promoted the creation of a botanical garden. I learned of the garden in the early '90s when the Northwest Perennial Alliance - my hometown garden society - designed and maintained the vast perennial border that crowns an east-facing slope at the edge of the huge lawn.

Abundance in spite of neglect

This spring, mild temperatures, good, gentle rain, and plenty of sunshine have all made my garden thrive, despite the casual neglect I give it. I must also thank Marcielo, our gardener, or what in my old Seattle neighborhood we'd call a "yard man."

Marcielo is probably a better gardener than I am, but since I work during the week, I am hardly ever present when he and his crew come to work. We don't get much time to talk. He is good about anticipating what needs to be done so that he can ask me about it in advance. In a perfect world, we'd have lots of garden talk, and we'd work together, but I've gotten lazy and leave it all to him.