Past prime-time pansies?

Here's a slightly different example of the should-it-stay- or-should-it-go dilemma I was musing about in my last post. In this case the problem is more about when than whether or not to make a change.

Last fall I planted a big pot with an assortment of brilliantly colored orange and purple pansies and violas and stuck the whole pot into a blank space in the long leg of the L-shaped bed. They have flowered profusely for months, nipped back a bit by mid-winter freezes but returning stronger than ever. But for the last few weeks, as temperatures have risen, I've known their days are numbered. I'm having to water the pot twice a day now and even so, the plants look droopy most of the time; the stems are lanky, even with my daily pinching off of spent blooms, and the size of the flowers has decreased. I suppose it's time to pull the plants up and replace them with something else, something more suited to the coming heat.

But . . . the flowers are still lovely every morning and are welcome this time of year in the lull between the spring flowers and the onset of the summer bloomers.


Here's what they looked like this morning (a lovely cool morning for this time of May, it must be said).

Complicating matters is the fact that I've already bought the replacements — an opal basil, a Thai basil, and flat-leaf parsley — and they are now languishing in their small plastic pots, waiting — dare I say begging? — for a better situation (I admit it: I jumped the gun but I was sure the pansies were done for when it got so hot a couple of weeks ago). And that pot is it: I don't have any more bare dirt in the garden and I don't have another suitable large pot.


Herbs waiting on the edge of the porch; they've doubled — at least — in size since I bought them about three weeks ago.

I'm with Carol, who said in a comment on the previous post that she has a hard time getting rid of a plant that's in bloom. This situation is certainly different than the problem with the red yucca because the pansies and violas are doomed, whether their death is the sudden one of me ripping them out of the pot or a slow one caused by inevitable increases in heat and humidity. Even so . . .

I was just out looking at the pot of pansies and I know in the next day or so I'll get up the nerve and it will be good-bye pansies, hello mini herb garden. I'll keep you posted.

Plant or pet?

Closeup of the salmon-pink bloom of the red yucca


Pondering a few changes in the garden has reminded me of something D always says when I'm trying to decide whether I've reached the point of no return with one plant or another: "Well, it's not as if it's a pet." Sometimes I find it easy to agree with him and out that plant goes, sometimes dug up and moved elsewhere, sometimes passed on to a friend, sometimes into the yard waste bag (yes, I know. I should be composting).

But, as in so many other parts of my life, I rarely come to a quick decision. Usually I waver, considering all the possibilities. Sometimes I consider for so long that the plant finally dies and the decision is made for me.

Occasionally though the plant takes matters into its own hands (leaves?) and renders the decision even more difficult. A plea for survival? Who knows.

Last year I lost patience with the one remaining clump of red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) in the long upstairs bed. For the second year in a row it didn't send up even one bloom stalk. And it is an incubator for hackberries and Turk's cap. The seedlings spring up amidst the yucca fronds and are impossible to eradicate.

When I originally planted the L-shaped bed in 1995 I put in three clumps of the yucca (two one-gallon plants in each clump, I think). The idea was that the salmon-pink bloom stalks were attractive in their own right, and also that the rigid but arching stalks of the plant itself would add structure and give some winter interest to a garden made up mostly of plants that froze to the ground.

All well and good for a number of years. The clumps got larger and bloomed profusely. At some point, for reasons lost to memory, we dug up two of the three clumps. The remaining clump is in the long arm of the bed, between the Old Blush rose and the Climbing Pinkie on the steel tepee. The clump is about three feet deep and five feet wide, a substantial amount of real estate in my relatively small garden.

This spring I had every intention of pulling out the entire clump and replacing it with something new. I hadn't figured out exactly what that something new would be so I delayed removing the yucca. And then one day I noticed the reddish tips of several bloom stalks. And then more and more. All told the plant has sent up twelve stalks. The most ever, I think, and for no clear reason. I didn't fertilize it at all or water substantially more. We have gotten a fair amount of rain this spring and the pruning of the wisteria off the utility pole increased the amount of sun in that area of the garden.



So now I'm deeply conflicted. On the one hand, the yucca blooms are lovely, both up close with their yellow interiors and in a mass. And they are a hummingbird magnet. On the other hand the plant takes up a lot of space. And the salmony color of the blooms doesn't really mix well with others, particularly not the pink roses on either side. But the upright leaning stalks are an interesting companion to the wands of orange bulbine planted underneath (purely by chance; I'm sure I didn't give this a thought when I did the planting).

I think my real problem is an inability to get rid of anything that's blooming. I love flowers (although I have become more interested in foliage over the years) so a plant that's supposed to bloom but doesn't is an easy mark for me. But show me some flowers and I'm much less decisive.

What do you think? Should it stay or should it go? Or should I just procrastinate a bit longer?

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.

Looking better

I've been frustrated by my inability to get good images of the garden, especially close-ups of individual buds or flowers, to include with the blog. Yesterday I e-mailed Pam, whose images at Digging I've admired (and envied) for months. I asked her some questions about what kind of camera she uses and for any other advice.

I was amazed to hear from her that she is using basically the same camera we have (a Canon Powershot A85). She made some suggestions about using the macro feature and about stabilizing the camera and the results, if I don't say so myself, are an immense improvement (and I've finally got the close-ups with the background out of focus that have been eluding me!). The thanks go to Pam, both for the inspiration to attempt to improve the images and for the encouragement to try to get the best out of my camera. Thanks Pam.

In addition to taking her advice, I spent some time with the manual (I've tried to parse it before but it puts me to sleep) and at the same time my techie husband went off to do some experiments that mostly involved increasing the resolution of the images we were shooting and changing the compression factor from normal to superfine.

The image at the top is the corner of the long L-shaped bed in the upstairs backyard; the pink rose is Climbing Pinkie, growing up through and spilling out of a steel teepee-like thing (I'm sure there's a name for it — tuteur?). Below is a cluster of Climbing Pinkie buds, with one bloom open; the plant is covered in bud clusters.




This is the first flower on the yellow columbine plant that the foundation crew had to dig up last spring when they were building the giant french drain through the garden. They positioned the drain so carefully that the columbine was the only plant that was disturbed and they dug it up and I've saved it in a pot ever since. I just got it in the ground this week and now it's flowering.



And these are the buds at the end of one of eight bloom stalks on the clump of red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora). I mention the number of stalks because last year it didn't bloom at all. Not one stalk. I was ready to dig the whole clump up (it's been in the ground for 12 years and I thought maybe it was too old to bloom) but now it's redeeming itself (although the salmon color of the blooms does clash with the pink roses on either side. Oh well).




And finally, this is one of many clusters of flowers covering the Anacacho orchid tree (Bauhinia congesta). I'm going to try to get a close-up of one of the unopened bunch of buds when the light is better later; they look like tiny bananas to me.

Spring planting and party plans

For the last 10 years we've had a big party in late April, timed mostly to coincide with various April events that deserve celebration, but not coincidentally also coinciding with the garden's best moment. Or is it the other way around? Have I gradually created a garden that looks its best at a time when we want to have a party (we've found that mid to late April gives us the best chance of relatively cool weather and no mosquitoes, at least at our house).

We skipped the party last year, which would have been the 11th annual, because of the construction. We actually toyed with the notion of having it in the midst of the building project and, if we had been at the just-framed stage, it might have worked but by mid-April we were into drywall and that was a mess that wouldn't haved mixed well with a party, even if the garden was looking better than I would have expected with no attention and construction going on all around it.

The first year we had the party — 1996 — the long back bed had been planted for one year. (I wish I had some digital pictures of the garden from those days; surely I have prints that I could scan. I'll have to look). In the intervening years that long L-shaped bed has changed and evolved. The only plants left from my original plan are a couple of red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora). The picture at the top of the page is the long leg of the bed today, looking from front to back, past the wildly blooming Old Blush rose and the orchid tree, covered in its white flowers.

That original configuration also included the only plant that existed in the back yard (other than weeds and Turk's cap) before we built the bed: a large multi-stemmed yucca, possibly twisted leaf yucca. Over several years that yucca deteriorated, plagued by various insect infestations. About five years ago we cut it down and thought we dug it up but it returned and we let it grow back, filling in the back of that part of the bed. This spring we decided that it just looked straggly and unattractive and were determined to be done with it once and for all. My able assistant worked long and tirelessly until, finally, he extracted an enormous, bulbous root, about three feet long and probably 18 inches around. After that I got the bright idea that I wanted to dig up the hamelia patens that had been in the ground beside the yucca for the past seven or eight years. It was the orange variety and I much prefer the red one I have in the far back. Besides, witih it gone (it was HUGE in the summer, six to eight feet wide and tall) I would have the perfect place for the agave parryii that I bought with my birthday gift certificate. So Dan set to with my new garden fork and extracted the hamelia.

I built a circle of stones to elevate the agave a bit and improve its drainage and transplanted a Pride of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) seedling from the front yard behind it. I put (probably too many) annuals and a couple of small perennials around it: some rather sad California poppies in 4-inch pots that I've had since December but never planted, three bat-face cupheas, three winecups (the creeping kind not the standing which I prefer but couldn't find in 4-inch), three 4-inch cleomes, and two one-gallon salvia superba "May Night" (I have some other salivas called "May Night" but they were labeled salvia nemarosa; they look identical to me). Also the one-gallon dark blue plumbago I bought last fall and couldn't find a home for. Oh, and I plan to plant the Cecile Brunner rose that my mom sent me in a big pot in the spot where the hamelia was.




I also finally got the yellow columbine that was dug up when the French drain was built last spring back in the ground (just in time for it to bloom) and put the salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" that's been overcrowded in its pot for several years in the ground too (that's the pot I'll use for Cecile Brunner). Now I just have a few more plants to get in the ground (some inland sea oats and a couple of salvia roemarianas/cedar sage).

It's a good thing I'm finally getting everything in the ground because we finally decided yesterday, a bit late, to go ahead with this year's party and now I have a little less than three weeks to get the garden in shape (with the added incentive of a visit by the Austin garden bloggers on the day following the party.

The back garden is actually looking quite lovely right now. Hopefully it will hold up for a few more weeks.

Belated birthday

Today I received not one, but two, belated birthday presents — and both were for the garden. First, when my husband went out to bring the papers in this morning he found a box from the Antique Rose Emporium on the front porch. Apparently it was delivered yesterday afternoon but the UPS person just dropped it off without ringing the doorbell and none of us happened to notice it. Inside was a robust, one-gallon Cecile Brunner rose from my lovely mom and dad in Dallas. When I called my mom, she said the Rose Emporium people told her Cecile Brunner was a small shrub, perfect for a pot, which is just where I intend to put her (as soon as I can find the perfect pot). According to the Rose Emporium's website, Cecile Brunner has light pink blooms and is nicknamed the Sweetheart Rose. It tolerates poor soils and even partial shade. I'm thinking that, for now at least, I'll put her in a pot, maybe up on a plinth of some kind, in the far back, providing a focal point back there while the hamelia, yellow bells and Pride of Barbados resprout and fill in this spring.

Then this afternoon my friend Alisa came by to take me out for a birthday lunch (we've been trying to find a time when our schedules meshed since my actual birthday in late February and we finally made it work today) and she brought me a present that I can already tell is in the category of "how did I ever garden without this." It's a garden fork and I've been out digging up various parts of the garden with it all afternoon. I mean really, I've been digging in this garden for nearly 13 years and at my other house for seven or eight years before that and I've never had a garden fork. It's been on my wish list for a while (clever Alisa for listening to me ramble about my travails in the garden) and I even thought about a trip earlier in the week to look for one but was put off by the rain. I can already see that the fork will make digging up and moving plants much easier and I've got my eye on several to experiment with. In the picture my new tool is next to the hypericum that really needs to be moved.

After lunch Alisa and I headed out to do some garden shopping. We didn't make it past the Natural Gardener (we meant to go to Barton Springs Nursery too, to make a dent in a birthday gift certificate I received earlier — do you sense a birthday theme? — but we ran out of time) but we made our time count. Alisa, who rarely sees a plant she doesn't want, a woman after my own heart, bought a lush orange tecoma stans and a leatherleaf mahonia (she loves the berries) as well as a bamboo muhly (Pam, I told her you had recommended it to me and that sealed the deal for her) and various other things. With the Barton Springs gift certificate in my pocket, I restrained myself (I even put a few things back after they'd made their way into the wagon!). I bought three 4-inch bat face cupheas, three 4-inch winecups and one extremely cool euphorbia rigida, also known, the tag says, as gopher plant (that's it in the picture). How could that be anything but cool? They had one in the ground in one of the display gardens; like most euphorbias I'm familiar with, it doesn't exactly flower but gets these interesting chartreuse and yellow bract-like things on the tips of each branch in the spring. I'm thinking of putting it into the spot where the hypericum now is (the hypericum gets too tall and wide for the Maggie rose next to it but I think the euphorbia will stay low and kind of sprawl under the rose).

And when I get finished in the garden I can come in and slather on some avocado butter, olive and basil body butter, another gift from the lovely Alisa.

Clean-up, continued

I've spent several more hours hacking through various portions of the upstairs bed. I've got everything cleared and then some.

First, can I just mention my lack of enthusiasm for Turk's cap. I actually love the little swirled flowers but, in my garden at least, Turk's cap runs rampant. When I'm at the garden store and see Turk's cap for sale I find myself rolling my eyes. When I moved into this house I was mildly excited to find the various outcroppings of the plant. Now, 13 years later, I'm considering Round Up. I've cut it back, tried to dig it up. Nothing works. It spreads, it doubles in size every year. It dies to the ground and comes back at twice the size. The flowers look good for a while and then the leaves go all crinkly and half dead and it quits blooming and all I'm left with are straggly, six foot tall stalks that lean every which a way. Okay, I'll stop babbling.


Today I chopped — and chopped and choppped — down the eight or so major clumps of Turk's cap in the upstairs yard. And found even more spots where it's doing its best to spring up. And then just for good measure I chopped down most of the misbegotten yucca from the corner of the long bed. I left a couple of pups in the far back but I opened up some serious space for something new. In the picture you can see the two trunks of yucca that I sawed off (as well as piles of various other debris waiting to be bundled up).

The space is backed by the wisteria (which is on the arbor in the downstairs yard but which tries its best to creep into the upstairs bed) so whatever I put in there needs to be able to fight that off or cohabitate politely. I have a Pride of Barbados volunteer seedling in the front yard that I may try to move. And then there's the question of the monster hamelia just to the right of the new bare spot (well, in three months it will be a monster; right now it's a few bare sticks poking up out of the ground).

On a happier — or at least less agressive note:


Here's the manfreda "Macho Mocha" that I bought late last summer. It's grown enormously and has now taken on its characteristic spotted coloration. And it's got at least three pups growing under the bottom fronds. The pot stayed out during the cold weather; we might have been able to move it but I decided to take the chance. I covered it during the ice storm and on a couple of other cold nights but the cold didn't seem to bother it at all. I'll give it a bit longer and then I'll try to remove the pups and repot them.

The day after

The new house and the garden stood up to the inspection by the multitudes yesterday. Well, not quite multitudes but the upstairs porch was certainly crowded for a while last night. The predicted cold front never quite arrived, although the afternoon was overcast and a fine mist fell for about 20 minutes — enough to cool things off a bit but not enough to drive people off of the chairs and bench out in the garden. Mostly though, everyone gathered on the new porch, sitting on the wide steps just as I'd envisioned during all those months of construction.

Here's a view of the garden D took before anyone arrived.



And here's a lovely little succulent Lauren brought me, carried home with her from a recent trip to Los Angeles (next to an agave of unremembered origin and variety, in a pot it's outgrown; I'm afraid I'll never get it out without destroying one or the other, plant or pot).



Of course, despite all my best intentions, I spent most of Sunday rushing around, trying to whip the garden into shape (or at least to camoflage the problem areas). I pulled the raspberry salvia gregii out of the big pot in the front yard, where it has languished since we stopped parking out on the street (once the carport was finished). Since I stopped walking past it every day about the same time it stopped raining, it's gotten more and more bedraggled. I had thought of putting a big bougainvillea into the pot, just for the party, but instead I pulled up one of the larger agave americana pups from the big mama plant (which has recovered some from freeze damage suffered last winter) and stuck it into the pot where it at least looks better than the salvia. I've got the salvia in a pot under the arbor along with the salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue," which I pruned back severely in the hopes of some kind of recovery. Also in the recovery ward are the yellow columbine the foundation crew had to dig up when they were putting in the french drain and the verbascum (I think that's what it is) that I bought several years ago on a trip to the Antique Rose Emporium with Alisa. Maybe with the weather a bit cooler and rain in the forecast they'll all perk up.

I also neatened up the stacks of pots that have found a temporary home under the arbor and managed to wrestle the old hot water heater (such a wonderful garden ornament) a little bit out of sight. I found a varigated agave that someone gave me a few years ago languishing back in the stacks of pots and moved it into the upstairs garden, up on a pedestal in the far back, next to a pot of succulents discovered under the tumbled-down stalks of Turk's cap growing out of the old fireplace.

And then I finally had to stop and sit down for a few minutes before people started arriving.