How Low Can They Go

My friend Pam/Digging recently made a great post for a regional gardening roundup of writers, all celebrating the kind of garden designs that emphasize what makes a region of the country unique - those styles, materials, plants and way of blending with existing landscape that makes sure no one will mistake a Texas gardens for one in New England or Alabama or even California. In a modest way I'm using these ideas in my front garden and parking strip.

But while I love the Austin in my garden - cherishing those yaupons and native plants - to look out every window at a garden grounded too strongly in Central Texas would feel claustrophobic. There are so many other places that hold my heart, so many beautiful plants that I've loved, so many years of gardening elsewhere, so much history.

What Philo & I have here isn't a reflection of the State in which we find ourselves at present, but a contrived world fitted together with pieces of our past, hints at other places we've lived, places we always wanted to see, of the areas our ancestors lived and the regions where our grown children and sisters and brothers now live. Moving to zone 8 meant I could finally grow plants beloved by garden writers like Miss Elizabeth Lawrence, Allen Lacy and Henry Mitchell In an attempt to connect with my mentors' worlds, a Magnolia and a Banana Shrub, Crinums and Loropetalums, Camellias and Myrtles were invited to live here.

I don't know which of the four previous owners of our house planted the boxwood and have no idea if they chose it for a special reason or just because it's common and available. What I do know is to that to me a Box Hedge was the stuff of historical romance, the bones of a classic old garden. I was shocked when my Austin friends suggested ripping them out! There were Bridal wreath spiraeas and Abelias scattered around the yard, and I kept them, too - enjoying their resemblance to shrubs that bloomed in my grandmother's garden, at my parents' house, and at three of our Illinois homes. I've allowed sentimental additions of daylilies, a gardenia, Weigela, my beloved clematis, Rose of Sharon, outdoor amaryllis and Siberian iris, while pushing the zone boundaries with marginally hardy Meyer's Lemon, Blue Butterfly Clerodendrum, Firecracker plant, Mexican Honeysuckle, Jasmines, Angel's Trumpet/Brugmansia, Duranta, Fan Palms and Evergreen Wisteria/Milletia. I took a chance on less hardy Central Texas plants like Barbados Cherries.

Last summer's heat and drought followed by wet weather knocked off some plants, including native scutellarias and salvias and some passalong heirlooms like phlox, corkscrew willow and a mock orange brought from Illinois in 1999.

This weekend may be the last one for other marginal plants as Central Texas experiences the lowest temperatures in many years. It appears my NW area of Austin dipped to 13F overnight, with another cold night to come. We had to unplug the bird-watering fountain to keep the motor from burning out. This morning John Dromgoole reminded us that with defrost, we'll become familiar with the scent of cold-slimed plants as they decompose.

Pam/Digging, Diana and MSS of Zanthan have already posted about Aloes & Agaves in danger. Unlike my friends, I'm not worried about agaves and aloes - the horrendous hailstorm of last March reduced my plants to a few pups. Obviously less hardy plants like Plumerias, Variegated Ginger, potted lemon, potted Mexican Lime, stapelias & Sambac Jasmine were moved indoors.My concern now is for plants that are supposed to do well here - the rosemary plants, the loquats, the Barbados Cherries and abelias, the star Jasmine and Coral Honeysuckle, the pomegranates and figs and the exposed flower buds of Texas Mountain laurel.

It will be a bad day if we lose the garden dreams along with the frozen plants.
And what happens if the plants that come through best are the ones we like to poke fun at? What if along with Steve Bender's "Cockroaches playing beneath a Trumpet vine" the survivors are the boring and potentially invasive Ligustrums & Privets, Photinias, Nandinas, Japanese Honeysuckle, Asiatic Jasmine and Bermuda grass? Now that would really be a bummer.

Thought Pops, Edition 5: Buds to Iron Man to Rain

COMPANY IS COMING:

This Michelia figo was in bloom on April 3rd, 2008 when MSS of Zanthan Gardens brought MayDreams Carol to my garden but this year the flowers are open in March. We're expecting visitors in a few weeks and I hope a few flowers hold on so the guests can feel the silkiness of the petals and catch the fragrance that gives this plant its common name "Banana Shrub".

My April guests won't be here in time to drink in the grape soda scent of the "Big Drunk Bean" above (Nicknames for Sophora secundiflora include Mescal Bean, Big Drunk Bean and Texas Mountain Laurel) but this March guest buzzed in on time.

A month from now the Coral Honeysuckle/Lonicera sempervirens might still be blooming but the 'Lady Banks' rose/Rosa banksiae 'Lutea' will be done. The entwined green leaves enhance the metal arch year-round but this electric combination happens only briefly each spring.

ROBERT DOWNY JR
Philo was quite surprised when I moved Iron Man to the top of the queue because he didn't think it was my kind of movie. We watched it last night. It was pretty silly, and it sure would be great to see Jeff Bridges in a more Dude-like role instead of as a typecast power-driven executive with a shaved head. But I enjoyed most of it. Apparently any movie that has Robert Downey Jr in it is my kind of movie.

SLOW GARDENING
When our guests come the white iris will be done but the native Red Yucca above should be flaunting its first flowers along that stalk. In Spring 2005 I paid less than $2 for a tiny plant of Hesperaloe parviflora, but had no flower bed ready for it. The small plant grew and I repotted it into a larger container. Then in March 2007 Philo and I began the Pink Entrance Garden and the Hesperaloe had a home.
Could I have had instant impact by buying a blooming-size plant right away? Of course - but I would have lost the pleasure of seeing it grow and develop until it become mature enough to bloom.


PALM FLOWERS Do those weird yellow growths on the Mediterranean Fan Palm look like a promise of flowers to you? If Kerri hadn't blogged about flowers on her potted palm I might have thought it was some kind of fungus. Isn't it cool that an Illinois-born woman gardening in Austin, Texas can learn about Palm flowers from an Australian-born woman who gardens in upstate, snowbound, non-Mediterranean New York?


DRY SPRING IN TEXAS
The white iris (probably Iris albicans) are blooming in three borders - seen here with some snapdragons that just started reblooming after making it through a second winter.
In two facing borders the tall, fragrant, pale peach iris are in full bloom. Now 'Amethyst Fire' iris from Pam/Digging are in flower, too.
I hope Henry Mitchell is wrong, and that the perfection of the iris will not call down a major hailstorm. But if the iris must be sacrificed to make the clouds rain down on us so be it - we need rain that badly!
The Leucophyllum frutescens, AKA Cenizo AKA Purple Sage AKA Texas Barometer Bush says it might rain and so does Jim Spencer. And I have a new rain gauge ready to go.

Year Three - Day Four

"Year Three - Day Four" was written by Annie in Austin for her Transplantable Rose Blog.


It's hot and dry and the rain that splashed other parts of Austin has missed me so I've been hand-watering the borders to keep the summer flowers alive. Please come in through the garden gate and look to the left. The two white 'Acoma' crepe myrtles started blooming a few days ago - as much a marker for true summer as any other sign from nature. They survived 5 years in pots on the deck of our other house, and were barely 3-feet tall in spring of 2005 when we ousted the existing hot pink, mildewed crepe myrtles so we could plant these here. Now they're almost 8-feet tall, softening the view with white flowers.
If you now turn and look to the right you can see across the whole garden back to the dark corner with the shed at the left and the patio table with its striped umbrella at right. The larger of the two triangle beds is closest to us - it has a 'Little Gem' magnolia and a tall metal obelisk. We made this bed two years ago. I didn't exactly plan this riot of color but that's what happens when tropical butterfly weed, a 'Black Prince' butterfly bush, Salvia farinacea, 'Cupani' sweet peas, lantana, pink coneflowers and Platycodon/Balloonflowers bloom at once. I hope they "clash well", as Henry Mitchell used to say.



The second triangle bed comes next - only a few months old, it's a jumble of plants and looks a little too McDonald's right now. Some were bought on purpose, like the three lavenders, the Cherry Pepper, narrow-leaved zinnias and moss roses, and some lifted from other beds like the Hummingbird sage/Salvia coccinea and yellow snapdragons.


Off to the right is the patio, with the disappearing fountain attracting birds and animals. Philo and I have seen a pair of hummingbirds taking dips in the water, but haven't been fast enough to take a photo of them. This squirrel stayed still while I snapped his picture through the window.


Along the edge of the gravel near the fountain is a pot of lavender in bloom. It's been growing in that clay pot for nearly seven years, but none of the lavender I've planted in the ground have lived through a winter. Will the three new plants in the triangle beat the odds?

Behind the lavender is a 'Mutabilis' rose. It opens individual flowers that change from pale yellow to apricot to pink to deep rose in the course of a day.

Behind the rose is pot of salvia and behind the salvia is a Mexican Fan palm in a big pot.








The salvia next to the rose is Salvia 'Hot Lips' - temperature seems to affect the colors. There are a few solid red, a scattering of 'lips' and some solid white flowers right now.

I spray out and refill this birdbath several times a day and now the area around it has the best grass in the entire yard. The flower bed along the back fence has red flowers for hummingbirds, tall white flowers in the center and large white leaves in front of some glossy-leaved shrubs toward the right.

Take a closer look at those white leaves - they're caladium bulbs that were planted in the ground back at the beginning of May. They have nice patterns but no names - the bag just said 'White caladium bulbs'. Next fall I'll try to remember to dig the bulbs before the leaves disappear. They'll bloom again if kept in a bag of perlite in the garage until spring.

Do you recognize the tall white flower? It's the 'Blue River II' perennial hibiscus - a division from my old Illinois garden. This plant has done really well in Austin - a suitable subject for my first blog post two years ago.


Past the flower beds the deep shadows begin - with more than half the garden under the canopy of two big pecans. A bed edged with timbers and full of Asiatic jasmine was here when we came - the timbers are gone, I fight the jasmine and we're playing with rocks along the edge. Some kind of sandy soil was used to fill the original bed. Now bulbs like this calla lily seem to like it here where the shade is dappled. Two years seems like a long time right now. Those garden bloggers who have passed the five year point, like MSS of Zanthan Gardens (September 2001), Kathy Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening (August 2002), Entangled at Cultivated (April 2003) and Bill at Prairie Point (March 2003) have my deepest respect and admiration.

And to all of you who have stopped here during the past two years, many thanks!


"Year Three - Day Four" was written by Annie in Austin for her Transplantable Rose Blog.

The Essential Earthman

When Carol chose The Essential Earthman for her Garden Bloggers Book Club, I was pretty sure the garden bloggers would enjoy it, but wondered what an average new gardener would think about it. Henry Mitchell started writing his garden columns in the mid-1970’s, around the time that Philo and I bought our first house. Back then, the gardeners we knew might have a basic reference book or two, but were likely to ask friends for advice or use the library to look up plants and their care. Learning how to grow things came with homeownership, stick trees abounded, and the front yards in some neighborhoods became startlingly similar, as neighbors grew and passed around divisions of the same variegated hostas, orange daylilies, phlox and iris.
If you could remember a few botanical names, liked to mail-order unusual plants and were building a collection of garden books, you became known as a ‘plant nut’, and I earned the label while gardening at our second house in the eighties. At some point, I left the ‘how-to’ books on the library shelves, taking home writers like Allen Lacy and Henry Mitchell, whose detailed observation, passion for plants and personal garden philosophy outweighed many tomes of instruction.

Twenty years later, anyone can Google, so no one needs to search through 14 or 15 books to identify a single perennial. News stories tell us that few people will wait for shrubs or trees to grow – they flip the house after a short stay. I read that half the homes in the US use a lawn service - do the owners ever learn the names of what's in their yard? How can gardeners find a personal style of gardening when they learn about gardens from television? Those instant makeover garden shows instill the personality of the TV host, not the owner.

There also seems to be an undercurrent of antagonism in horticulture news – homeowners associations attack native plant advocates, lawn afficianados & and neat freaks square off with organic gardeners, and those newly converted to ecology seldom tend their own gardens, preferring to criticize everyone else’s instead.
It appears that a garden is now an investment; a garden is now a stage on which to display wealth; a garden is now a political battlefield.

Along comes Carol, sending today's gardeners out to find The Essential Earthman. I cannot imagine Henry Mitchell looking at his lot as real estate – this man inhabits every square inch of his garden! He jams the plants in too closely, grows difficult, exotic plants from all over the world, starts trees from seed, succumbs to zone-envy, takes an entire day to get three tomatoes planted, and is overcome by the beauty of roses and iris. He speaks of the impact of a single marigold in a sea of petunias. He rejoices in small triumphs like one perfect daffodil in bloom, he putters and fusses with his stock tank, gloats over his Chinese bronze dog, and loses track of time. He encourages us not to lose heart as we deal with unpredictable weather, because “It is defiance that makes gardeners”.
I hope he will be an antidote to these depressing news stories, and that H.M.'s words will be like oxygen for those who still want genuine, experimental, personal, overreaching, messy, ridiculous gardens, not reading the pages on fast-forward, but savoring his thoughts, like this one:
... it is the Spectrum not the color, that makes color worth having, and it is the cycle, not the instant, that makes the day worth living...
Henry warns us, “ Your garden will reveal your self. Do not be terrified by that…”
I pondered those words in June as I clicked ‘Post this blog entry’ for the first time, knowing that once seen, my garden was sure to give me away, revealing my self.
I believe in Henry Mitchell’s kind of garden philosophy. His plant-specific advice, however, was written a quarter-century ago, for gardeners living far from Austin, and being under that influence got me in a bit of trouble here.
By 2000, I’d read and reread H.M.’s description of the wonderful yellow ‘Mermaid’ rose. Deer ate the roses in my own neighborhood, and I couldn’t grow any, but my friend Diane needed a climbing rose for her large new wooden arbor. I talked her into buying a ‘Mermaid’ just so I could see this rose in full glory. Henry did allow that it could be a 'large' rose, but Diane’s plant went way past “Mermaid’-size, way past ‘Manatee’ size, all the way up to Rosa ‘Orca’.