Party plants

Last weekend was our son's bar mitzvah (lots of family in town, proud grandparents — and parents, a great time had by all). We shared the day with our former next-door-neighbors, whose daughter was our son's bnei mitzvah partner. Malka — the mom — and I became gardeners together. We both started gardens of mostly native plants about the same time, more than ten years ago. Over the years the gardens between our two houses merged into one. We shared and swapped plants and seeds and advice with each other.

Then a couple of years ago, Malka and her family moved about 20 minutes away and we haven't seen nearly as much of them since. But before they moved we made a plan for our son and their daughter to have their bar and bat mitzvahs together. When we moved into this house, our son was six months old and their second daughter was a few weeks old so the two of them grew up together. When they proposed that the kids share their bnei mitzvah day, we agreed immediately.

The day's events included a luncheon following the bnei mitzvah service. Malka and I talked about centerpieces for the 20 tables and I told her how much I had admired their decision to use small, one-gallon native trees as centerpieces at their older daughter's bat mitzvah luncheon several years ago. Guests were encouraged to take the trees home and we still treasure a Texas mountain laurel from that occasion. For various reasons the tree idea wasn't feasible this time around so we decided to go for flowering perennials.

Malka and I met at Barton Springs Nursery week before last and pondered the possibilities. We wanted to keep it to $5 per plant which meant we needed sale items. We also wanted flowers so we looked for plants that were either budded out or already flowering. We ended up with various salvias — red salvia greggii, some kind of pink salvia (greggii-like, but I don't think that's what it was), salvia "Indigo Spires" and salvia leucantha/Mexican bush sage. We also got fleabane, Chrysanthemum pacificum, and bamboo muhly.

As we wandered through the nursery, enjoying the chatting about plants that we haven't done together in two or three years, Malka suddenly said, Oh, I have a great idea. Instead of getting flower arrangements for the front of the sanctuary, let's get some kind of small flowering trees. So we wandered some more, looking for something in bloom. We narrowed it down to mock orange or Barbados cherry and ended up with two of the cherry trees, covered in small pink flowers.

At the end of the afternoon we lingered beside Malka's car after we had loaded the plants. Our children brought us together in the first place — years back and forth from one house to the other, sitting together under the magnolia that shades both our houses while the kids played incomprehensible games up and down the front yards. And now it was our kids that had brought us back together again. But just as our gardens sealed our friendship years ago, I know that one of my fondest memories of this bnei mitzvah celebration will be that hour wandering together through the garden store.

Malka kept the plants at her house for a week, watering them and protecting them from the winds and lashing rain of last week's thunderstorms. Last Thursday we met to wrap the black plastic pots in layers of colorful tissue paper and shiny mylar. We trimmed back some broken branches and spent bloom stalks and then set the decorated plants out and admired our handiwork.

During the luncheon on Saturday, as I wandered from table to table, chatting with the friends who had come to celebrate with us, people kept asking, Is it true we can pick a plant and take it home? When I told them that was the plan, they had questions. Would this one do well in shade? What about this one in a pot? I watched people make their choices, make trades to get a plant they liked the looks of better. Several friends came up and said, Look what I got. This is going to be lovely in my garden. I have just the spot for it. Many of these friends have gardens I know and imagining the plants growing in them was an added pleasure on an already extraordinary day.

I had my eye on one of the bamboo muhlys, which I staked a claim to early, and we also brought home one of the Barbados cherry trees. I have a spot in mind for the muhly but I'm not sure yet what I'll do with the tree. It may have to live in a pot for a while but I know eventually I'll find the perfect spot and then every year when it blooms it will remind me of this lovely weekend with our beautiful son and our family and friends all around us. And maybe I'll visit some of those other gardens and see the party plants growing and — I hope — thriving there as well.

Construction clarification

After my extremely long post yesterday complaining about our neighbors' new parking lot and their apparent plan to build a second-story overlooking our backyard, I wanted to make it clear that we don't have to look at the parking lot from our backyard or porch (thank goodness). Fortunately our addition wraps around the garden, with no views to the alley or across the alley, except when you're standing in the backyard itself and then you just see the top of the house, not the parking lot.

Here's the view over our back fence, looking west. You can see the top of the house (that's the top of the current one-story house), with the back section of the roof removed.


Without a second story all we could see was the peak of their roof (but before the tree-clearing for the parking lot we couldn't see even that). Someone was standing up in the newly exposed attic space last week and I was in the backyard poking around and I could tell that from there he could probably see most of the backyard (but not onto the porch, which is to the left in this picture).

Here's our current view from the new porch. This is looking to the northeast (our backyard is to the west of the original house and north of the addition).


The white house with green trim that you can see through the garden is the duplex I mentioned in yesterday's post. Over the weekend they hired a guy to "neaten up" the — admittedly — overgrown vegetation around the duplex. As far as I can tell he just hacked down anything that was close to the building, including a pomegranate tree covered in those startling orange buds. I do mean hacked: small trees and shrubs chopped randomly, left standing waist high with no foliage remaining, ends of branches shredded. Ah, neighbors.

In a comment on yesterday's post, Annie from The Transplantable Rose suggested a fabulous solution to our potential view problems. On a garden tour last year she saw a tall trellis built in front of a wooden stockade fence but taller than the fence, creating the possibility of something hedgelike but with a small footprint at ground level. I have an image of a rose I've always coveted, Zephirine Drouhin, rising ten feet tall all around my garden. Do any of you remember the huge Zephirine Drouhin that used to cover the roof of the big shed at Barton Springs Nursery? That was some rose, beautiful and fragrant. It would make a magnificent screen.

Progress or problems?

I've been meaning to post some images of changes going on across the alley from us for some time and yesterday I finally got around to taking the "after" picture.

Our neighbors catty-corner across the alley bought the house directly across the alley from us some months back and in January or so told us they were taking the fence down as the starting point for some renovations and additions to the house. We park one of our cars in a spot just off the alley and it was thoughtful of them to notify us of the work beforehand so we could move our car out of the possible danger zone. We knew that they were also planning to cut down the trees (most of little value except as greenery) but we really weren't prepared for what happened.

Here's what the alley looked like before.



And here's what it looked like yesterday.



Quite a change.

In my long-winded way, a little background:

When we moved into this house nearly 13 years ago, the alley was part of the attraction, both because of the availability of off-street parking and because it was such an overgrown, leafy-green tunnel. At the time, the alley itself was hard-packed caliche and gravel and, although probably half our alley-mates used it to access parking, it saw little traffic. Our kids and the neighbors played back there, learned to ride their bikes back there.

Five years ago the city-owned electric utility cleared trees under and around the electric lines that run on poles down the alley. In our backyard (the rear 10 feet of which is an easement) they cut down a large number of hackberries, mostly smallish but one fairly large. Around the same time they resurfaced the alley with asphalt. The alley was less shady but also less muddy after heavy rain and much improved for bike riding.

We took the opportunity of more sunlight to plant a Texas pistache (Pistacia texana) on one side and a tecoma stans (the yellow variety) and a Pride of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), both of which tolerate extremes of heat and drought. That bed has done well and has, in fact, been expanded post-construction. Earlier this spring we thought about putting a Texas redbud (Cercis canadensis var. texensis) into the expanded area.

Then our neighbors started the work across the alley and we're having to reconsider.

When the parking lot went in — concrete lotline to lotline — we were shocked. The shock has worn off a bit but then the actual work on the house started.

If you enlarge the "after" image you can see that they've taken off part of the roof and are, apparently, planning a second-story addition. That addition will have, we think, an excellent view of our backyard. Hence the reconsideration of our back bed plantings. Maybe we need something bigger, taller (but not so tall the city will want to come cut it down in a few years) and preferably something that keeps its leaves in the winter. Something like the pistache.

But that would mean losing the yellow bells (Tecoma stans) and the PoB, which are both in the way and need quite a bit of sun. And I don't want to block the western sun from my long bed since those plants are also mostly sunlovers.

We'll probably wait and see what happens before we make a decision about revamping the whole bed but the situation has inspired a lot of thought about how powerless we are regarding what happens in our immediate surroundings. We have created a house and a garden that we love but something our neighbors do could change our whole experience of those spaces.

Our area has been in the midst of a serious real estate boom for years now. We are close-in, about one mile south of downtown, an attractive neighborhood of trees and hills with a long park running beside the banks of a creek straight through the middle. The original houses are a mix of mostly small two-bedrooms and a few much larger houses; the larger houses were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s (some of the first built on the south side of the Colorado River; downtown and the Capitol are to the north), while the smaller ones mostly date from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, with unbuilt lots filling in since then.

We've been here for nearly 25 years (which explains why we can afford to be here now) and have witnessed a lot of changes but the last few years have been extreme. Starting two or three years ago we finally started seeing the teardowns that have plagued other similar neighborhoods here and elsewhere. Developers bought vacant lots or smaller, run-down houses and in their stead built enormous monoliths, some as large as 4,000 square feet, on fairly small lots. Some of those structures were the impetus for a new city ordinance passed last year that became known as the McMansion ordinance. I'm not an expert on the details but I know it applies to central city, older neighborhoods where smaller houses were being overwhelmed by out-of-scale newer structures. The ordinance limits the size and height of both new houses and additions more strictly than the previous ordinance and, while some of us applaud it and hope it will help maintain the character of these older neighborhoods, it has been controversial.

We built an addition to our house last year (designed and permitted before the new ordinance was initiated) and we felt a responsiblity not to build something that would tower over our neighbors or intrude more than was absolutely necessary on their ability to enjoy their outdoor spaces. I don't mean to be too self-congratulatory but I think we succeeded in that goal. It was an important part of the process for us.

I suppose we knew all along that others might not have the same attitude. We've witnessed that all over the neighborhood so why not next door to us? Of course, we don't know for sure what our across-the-alley neighbors are planning (although we have been analysing their building permit, available on-line) but we've now started pondering the implications of the duplex next door to us on the north. Prime development potential, we now see. Rental units in the neighborhood have disappeared as house prices have gone up (we both moved to the neighborhood initially as renters) and the lot is surely worth a fortune, while the duplex itself is rather dumpy. If it was razed and a new structure — even one meeting the McMansion ordinance requirements — replaced it, it would overlook our backyard and our up-to-now lovely and private new porch.

Yesterday we were talking about calling the duplex owner (who doesn't live there) and telling her that, if she ever decides to sell, we'd like to make an offer. Then at least it would be in our control. I don't know that we could afford such a step but at least then I wouldn't be considering the need for a 10-foot-tall hedge along the north edge of my garden.