When tans go bad

I returned from Kauai a little (not a lot) tanner and found that some of my plants were tanner as well.

Even though temperatures were dipping into the thirties, my cannas were still blooming.

Then the temperature dropped below freezing and my poor cannas and Echium candicans 'Star of Madeira' turned my front garden into a swath of brown.

Luckily my Mahonia x media 'Arthur Menzies' has recently erupted in blooms.

And my Geranium 'Rozanne' is completely unfazed by the temperatures.

And my Clematis jackmanii just put out a new bloom! Thank you Laurrie, for suggesting this one.

And my Fatsia japonica is doing its wonderful Sputniky thing.

Thank goodness for these late season blooms. I'm itching to get back in the garden but this cold dry weather is making it hard (I feel like a mummy!). Better to enjoy the blooms from inside the house.

Have a happy thanksgiving, all you turkeys!

Aloha!

Greg and I just returned from ten days on Kauai and we're slowly adjusting to a cruel lack of sunshine, maitais, and the gentle smell of plumeria on the air. It's cold and rainy in Portland. 

I gave in at the airport and bought this tree fern (Cibotium splendens) and popped it in a weirdly wonderful pot I found at Digs.

I think it looks like the Grinch without his hat on. I've set it up in the bathroom where it should get the humidity it likes. Anybody have any luck growing one of these?

I'll be back online with garden tours soon!

Fall color I'm digging

This spring I went on the hunt for Fothergilla gardenii 'Jane Platt,' which was rumored to have the nicest fall color of all the fothergillas. She did not disappoint.

A few weeks ago some of the leaves starting changing, turning a screaming red at the tips.

Now it looks like this.

WHAT. Some of the green is deepening to a dusky purple that looks so nice with the hot carmine leaves.

I love! I read somewhere on the internet that its color can vary from year to year, though I can't find where anymore.

This spring I kept looking for 'Jane Platt' and finding only Fothergilla x intermedia 'Blue Shadow,' which has the most beautiful blue foliage. I am definitely making room for one of these next. Even if the fall show is half as good as Jane Platt I'll be happy.

Image source: Rick's Custom Nursery

I bought my Jane Platt from Gossler Farms Nursery, if you feel the need to add one to your garden.

I'm also deeply in love with my Spiraea japonica 'Magic Carpet.' In spring it is the most wonderful zinging chartreuse.

It mellows a bit in summer.

And then in the fall it turns every color imaginable.

I hesitated to add this shrub to my garden because it's used so widely in grocery store parking lots here. It's really tough and can take a lot of abuse, though it tends to get sheared into unsightly blobs by landscapers. I will never understand the need by landscaping crews to shear everything into blobs. I know it's fast and easy but it looks terrible.

When I am dictator people will prune with hand pruners until they've been deemed worthy of using tools of mass uglification like hedge trimmers. Anyway. I'm glad I added it to my garden because the color is totally doing it for me.

I just picked up another spirea for the front garden at Xera Plants recently: Spiraea betulifolia var. lucida. I waited until it lost almost all of its leaves to get my act together to take a picture, so this doesn't really show off the kaleidoscope of colors this native boasts. It's stunning.

One of my Epimedium 'Black Sea' went rogue and turned completely red.

. . . While the others look like this. If I could get them all to spread out, bulk up, and turn that blazing red color next to the Hakonechloa grass, I'd be the happiest of campers.

You know what else would make me happy? If I could go back in time and not buy this Sedum cauticola 'Lidakense', AKA "Clown whore sedum."

(Shudder.)

Rules I have flouted, grasses I have loved

If there are two things I should've learned by now, they would include:

1. Short plants go in front and tall plants go in the back.
2. Read the plant tags (and then count on them getting bigger).

When I asked Scott to help me design my meadow he gave me these really great plant lists and three different planting schemes but I went sort of off-script and then I forgot about the two bullet points above. I planted little bluestem grasses (Schizachyrium scoparium 'Blue Heaven') right in the front of the meadow, thinking they'd stay two feet tall even though the tag clearly said they'd get four feet tall (and because this is Portland they'll probably grow to six).

So while the grasses were beautiful, they were obscuring the lovely fountaining of the Pennisetum 'Redhead' just behind them and generally looking inappropriate for front and center placement. And they were straight up hiding the Panicum 'Shenandoah.' They're in there, I swear.

So I relocated them to the back of the meadow. I'm hoping they'll continue to bulk up and I'll get a nice color block there. Even with their smaller stature I'm enjoying them in their new location.

And now Pennisetum 'Redhead' can really strut her stuff.

It's hard to tell, but there's a ribbon of Sedum 'Matrona' along the front of the bed. Hopefully that will bulk up next summer, too.

I am a little concerned that the little bluestems won't get enough sun next summer at the back of the bed. "Right plant, right place" has also been a hard one to learn. What other rules of thumb can I ignore next? Plant in groups of odd numbers, work the diagonals, never wake a sleep walker . . . what else?

Of course, all I can see when I'm in the front garden is Muhlenbergia rigens. I am so head over heels for this grass right now.

After its brief foray into bondage with the insulation installation, I decided to move it toward the front door. Greg didn't like the way it reached out and tickled him when he'd walk up the driveway (it's kinky, what can I say).

Because I'm a dick I moved it right in front of the outside faucet (M. rigens up! your! nose! every time you turn on the hose!). This grass can tolerate a lot of manhandling (especially after the bondage) so it will still look nice even if I drag the hose over it again and again. Or step on it to get to the faucet.

I've thought about getting bee hives but who knows what it would do with the hot wax?

It's mushroom season!

Ask me how I know.

Our wood chip pathway has gotten totally overrun with them.

The six inches of rain we got in September has turned our backyard into a terrifying fungal lab experiment. If only they were edible! "Do you like your lasagna? We harvested the mushrooms from under the Sedum 'Autumn Joy.' The mushrooms in the salad came from the walkway." Ick.

Very funny

I picked up a Begonia luxurians at the end of summer at Cistus for a few dollars, knowing it wouldn't get to spend much time outside before it had to come in for the winter.

Greg discovered that the smaller desiccated leaves look like spiders and he thought it would be hilarious to leave one on the floor, call me into the room, then point it out.

Guys, if Alfred Hitchcock had been in the room with me he would've offered me a contract on the spot. I don't think I've ever screamed like that before. I'm tempted to leave one on Greg's pillow but I know that I'll see it, forget what it is, and scare myself all over again.

The upshot is that I had to give a big presentation at work the next morning and I had not a drop of adrenaline left in my body to make me nervous. But still, revenge must happen. Ideas?

Done and done.

Well, our insulation is in. It was very stressful. And messy. Between weeks of the electrician and this project, I'd like to never have a sweaty man in my attic again.

The attic before

I've learned a lot from this whole project:

• I shouldn't schedule big projects for the summer. Because I am the type of person who can only focus on one thing at a time, this project (and worrying about it) usurped everything else from July onward. I didn't enjoy my garden this summer because I was worried about it getting trampled. I couldn't blog, read blogs, or focus on anything fun because there was fretting to do!
• I shouldn't be in the house when projects like this are going on. It's better for everyone if I just go into the office instead of working from home and stressing the whole time.
• If you are working from home, the workmen will use their radar to sense which room you're taking a conference call in, then work directly above you with as much hammering and boom-boxing as possible. Don't try to change locations, they'll just follow you. Loudly. It reminded me of this McSweeney's piece, "An Imaginary Conversation Between the Construction Workers Upstairs From Me."

We did the insulation in two parts: the attic and crawlspaces in September and the walls in October. I wanted to hold off on the walls as long as possible because I had to remove all the plants around the foundation of the house.

The first snafu came immediately. I'd been given a number of different options by Neil Kelly, one that included removing all of the old insulation from the attic. I chose this option because we had so much debris in the attic from when the last roof was installed. It seemed like a fire hazard and I wanted a clean slate. 

The problem? They sent me the contract that didn't include removal and neither of us noticed. So they didn't schedule the guys to do it and my financing didn't include it. I really didn't want to redo my financing and put up with that awful man at Umpqua Bank condescending to me. Neil Kelly came down on the price a little bit but I still had to come up with $1200 on the spot.

But I had a nice clean attic for one morning.

I hope we never need to access any wires in the attic because everything is buried in 18 inches of pink stuff.

The wall insulation required that they remove the siding, drill a hole in each bay, then shoot insulation into it.

In the kitchen the old fan in the ceiling was removed.

And patched.

And I sold the old Pryne Blo Fan on eBay. For $26. Oh well.

And now we have a practically normal looking kitchen ceiling.

There were some other mishaps during installation, like a broken window and an orange soda spilled all over the basement walls and carpet, which required a visit from a carpet cleaner. There was a nicked wire that required an electrician visit. All of these things are normal course-of-work things and they were fixed. My only beef at this point with the whole process was that contract issue.

On the outside wall of the dining room, where I removed the electrical panel, there's the old access box. We have proof that we're snug as a bug.

Now I can finally get to work on the important stuff: getting the thousand or so plants I bought between July and now in the ground. Whew.