Agita in the garden

My elderly next-door neighbor recently went into assisted living and her grand-niece sold her home to some friends who want to start a business flipping homes. I'm very relieved that the home isn't going to fall into developer hands, which would result in the house being torn down and replaced with two or three skinny houses. This is happening all over Portland right now and I hope the developers responsible get shunted to the really humid part of hell. No dry heat for you!

This weekend the flippers, in their infinite wisdom, removed all but two of the mature (mostly native) shrubs in the back yard and limbed up the Doug fir. And because they decided to have some beers on the back deck afterward I realized that we no longer have any privacy between our two yards. This was my view:

Fun fact: if you google "jerkface" this weightlifter's mug pops up.

I was trying to work in the yard but the fact that I could see these guys and they could see me got me all worked up. I was practically hissing at them and I think I had a tiny stroke when one of the guys tried to engage me by yelling, "Hey, gardener!"

WHAT THE FUCK, I'M IN MY BACKYARD, WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO BE PRIVATE. I HATE YOU, I WISH YOU WOULD DIE.

Greg got home and I informed him that we needed to erect some sort of blind and also I wanted to move to the country so we wouldn't have to have neighbors. Back in the glory days, this was the view of this area:

My garden looks like shit but it's private!

Nice canopy cover, lots of mature shrubs perfectly obscuring that area. Those shrubs (one a flowering quince) weren't just trimmed this weekend, they were completely removed. So they won't grow back to obscure the area.

I went into burn it down! mode and decided that not only did we need a screen right there right now but we needed to make a point while we did it. So I headed out to Bamboo Craftsman and explained my problem. He steered me toward Green Temple bamboo (Semiarundinaria fastuosa 'Viridis'). This is a tall bamboo that is very erect, with most of the fullness at the top. You can read more here. It's excellent for tall, narrow screening. It fills in quickly and thickly.

The best part is that the plants I bought are already tall enough that they'll screen out that area immediately.

We've knocked out the little pony wall that used to have a gate attached to it. I liked having it there but Greg wanted to remove it to open up the entrance to the garden. I liked the slow reveal.

It's gone now. You win, Greg.

The plan is to install a stock tank here (it'll be ready for pickup on Wednesday) and soften the area in front with pots and grasses.

Behold my MS Paint skills!

Any advice on making this look not-dumb is welcome. I want my garden to say, "Welcome to my garden! Unless I haven't specifically invited you; then you can get the hell out!" I need my quiet space.

More to come once we get everything installed!

Garden bloggers' bloom day April 2014

Note to self: everything that was blooming last year at this time is blooming now.

With our crazy winter, my garden's timing is a little off from last year. My camassia and lewisia were a tiny bit later than last year to bloom.

Camassia leichtlinii 'Blue Danube'

While my Salvia 'Caradonna' May Night is blooming earlier than it did last year.

I have some new introductions, like this Pacific Coast iris.

Iris x pacifica 'The Eyes Have It'

Geranium renardii and Tulipa 'Flair'

Fothergilla 'Jane Platt'

Geranium phaeum 'Darkest of All'

A very happy bloom day to you! Thanks to our host, Carol. To those of you still under snow, why haven't you moved here yet? I'm feeling for you.

I love spring

I love spring. It's all tulips and plant sales and the anticipation that I've finally figured out that area of dry shade and it's going to look amazing (I haven't and it won't but it's nice to think otherwise). 

Mukdenia 'Crimson Fans'

It's lengthening days and stubbornly sitting outside drinking beer at night, even though you're freezing.

It's mourning the loss of your favorite canna ('Wyoming') and being giddy over the fact that your Ceanothus thyrsiflorus is going to bloom for the first time.

It's yelling ROBIN RED BREAST! and also OH MY GOD, WHERE ARE ALL THESE ANTS COMING FROM, IT'S LIKE A FREAKING HORROR MOVIE IN OUR BATHROOM! and marveling that the bees are back and sighing that so are the wasps.

It's dandelions and being behind on mulching, already! How is that possible?

It's that perfect week when the daphne is still going and the tulips are all yodeling and every day there's something new blooming to make your allergies terrible but it's okay! It's so worth it!

Isn't it marvelous? Here's to hoping you're enjoying spring as much as Portland is, wherever you are.

Garden bloggers' bloom day March 2014

Better late than never edition.

When we hit single digit temperatures in December my Daphne odora 'Aureomarginata' was badly burned and lost almost every single leaf. It produced buds where the leaves dropped off. I am a HUGE fan of this. More blooms? Go ahead and lose your leaves every winter, girl.

My Daphne odora 'Mae Jima' bloomed for the first time, too!

Arctostaphylos bakeri 'Louis Edmonds'

Pieris japonica

The hellebores are still going.

Euphorbia 'Blackbird'

Euphobia myrsinites

After this we really get rolling. April is one my very favorite months in the garden! Happy bloom day, a little bit late! Thanks for hosting, Carol!

I did a bad, bad thing

Last fall I bought a Mahonia x media 'Underway' from Cistus at their "tough love" sale. It was gorgeous. I tucked it, still in its nursery pot, into one of the beds so we could mow the lawn. Unfortunately I tucked it too far under the eaves of the house and it got totally dried out. And then the poor thing lost most of its branches.

Now it's the Charlie Brown Mahonia. Uggggggghhhh. This is why we can't have nice things.

Eventually it will put out new growth from the top and fill out that way but I don't think it will produce any new shoots below. Am I wrong? Should I cut my losses and buy a new one?

Yard Garden & Patio Show - The birds and the bees - and the bugs!

Portland's Yard Garden and Patio show was this weekend, which always signals to me the beginning of the gardening season. The display gardens are fun but I look forward to the seminars most of all. I woke up on Saturday with a terrible sinus headache, then I took medicine on an insufficiently full stomach, then I started throwing up . . . I realized that the show just wasn't going to happen that day. So Sunday it was!

I made it to only one seminar: "The birds and the bees - and the bugs!" which was moderated by Nancy Goldman (of Nancyland). The panel included Glen Andresen or Bridgetown Bees, Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society, and Nikkie West of the Audubon Society. So we had a honeybee keeper, someone focused on native pollinators, and a bird expert.

There was a lot of conversation volleying around about honeybees versus native pollinators and whether we should care about honeybees (who are not native to North America), none of which was resolved in an hour. The one thing that the panel could agree on was that native plants provide the best nectar for native pollinators. Most of our native pollinators are solitary, which makes it hard to study them like we do honeybees. They don't produce honey, so it's harder to evaluate the quality of their diet like we do honeybees but preliminary studies are showing that non-native plants are a bit like junk food. They provide energy but not necessarily as much nutritional value as natives.

But I don't want to become a native purist! I can hear you saying. Me neither!

Here were some of the takeaways:

• You don't need to have all natives in your garden. You can get a lot of bang for your buck by making sure you have one native in bloom at any time throughout the year. In theory you could get away with including just four or five natives in your garden.
• But which ones? For those of us in the NW, The Xerces Society has created a document highlighting some of the best of the natives with their bloom times. It's located here. The best part? They are some of the prettiest natives like lupines, camassia, and milkweed.

Camassia leichtlinii 'Blue Danube' handles soggy clay soils like a champ and it's GORGEOUS.

I planted straight species Camassia quamash this fall (from Brent and Becky's) and I'm noticing it is showing up in nurseries right now. The foliage of my Camassia doesn't turn ugly after blooming the way daffs and tulips do, which makes it extra appealing. It's tall and structural and gorgeous. I can't recommend it enough.

Anyhoo, more takeaways:

• The city of Portland maintains a list of natives to our city, so you can claim to have planted hyperlocal natives. Think of how miserable you can be at dinner parties! The list is located here. Go get your smug on!
• If you want to provide shelter for mason bees, less is more. Smaller boxes or bundles of bamboo (or whatever) in several locations around your garden are better than having one gigantic box. When you get a lot of pollinators in one spot you increase the chance of disease and pestilence. 8-10 holes are plenty.
• Bumblebees need cavities to nest in, like old mice nests. Xerces has instructions on building boxes, if you want a fun project.
• Keeping your garden untidy is a good thing. Bare soil, just a little, allows bees access so they can build underground nests. When you cut back grasses and perennials, bundling them and leaving them on the ground instead of composting them gives pollinators habitat to raise their young. Glen calls it "Laissez faire/laissez ass" gardening.
• We need to look at aphids differently. 96% of terrestrial bird species feed on aphids. They are an important food source, so having them in our gardens isn't a bad thing. 

Is everyone familiar with the "Everybody Reads/One City, One Book" idea? It's a program where they encourage everyone in the same city to read the same book, like we're all in a giant book club together. It was championed by a librarian by the name of Nancy Pearl. She has an action figure, guys.

I had the good luck of taking a class from her in grad school and the woman is a BADASS. Wouldn't it be great if our cities championed an "Everybody Plants" program? Is this already happening anywhere?

In Portland they could dispense camassia bulbs in the fall to residents. In the spring we'd have a city-wide wash of gorgeous blue flowers to link all of our neighborhoods together. If you get all the landscape designers and nurseries on board, you could hit a large number of home gardens. Then next year they could champion meadow foam!

Meadow foam (Limnanthes douglasii) is available from Annie's Annuals

It seems like the conversation around natives is changing to be less purist and sanctimonious, which I welcome. I think discussions about natives leave a lot of people feeling like they're being asked to rip out all the non-natives they love so much. I would never want to garden without agastache or agave or any number or plants that aren't native to Portland. But ask me to incorporate four or five natives that provide the most bang for the pollinator buck? I'm not just willing to do that, I'm excited.

Anyway, it was a good talk. I've had pollinators on the brain a lot so I really appreciated it. And (for me, at least) the gardening season has begun! Let's do this.

Oyez! Oyez!

Please don't hate me because we went to Maui last week, even though we'd just been to Kauai in November. My brother planned the trip for his family and asked us to come along. My nieces are 7 and 9 and the sweetest kids and I didn't want to miss seeing Hawaii through their eyes, especially when they're at such delightful ages.

I tried to convince Greg to come but wasn't having much luck. Then my nieces sent him letters, including this one from Tabi:

Greg hates glitter with a white-hot passion. Only a monster would say no.

At Christmas I told Tabi she was a genius and she sighed and said conspiratorially, "There's probably going to be some glitter." She's the best.

So. Anyway. We went to Maui and instead of visiting gardens we hung out with my nieces and swam and ate burgers and swam and swam and swam. It was awesome. How cute are they? They are still, for the moment, super affectionate and not embarrassed to hold my hand in public. So wonderful.

We went on a sunset sail the first full day we were there and humpback whales were breaching all around us.

All week you could just look out on the horizon and you'd see whales leaping, slapping their dorsal fins, or shooting plumes out of their blowholes. I've never seen a whale in the wild, so that was really neat. We also took a snorkeling tour and got to swim with the biggest green sea turtles. I could lay on the surface of the water and watch sea turtles forever. They're more transfixing than TV, though you can't play on the computer in your sweatpants while you watch them.

Greg and I stayed two nights longer than my family so we could have some time alone. Greg, unbeknownst to me, made arrangements for us to have dinner in a little bungalow by the beach so we could watch the sunset while we ate dinner. Then he shocked the hell out of me by asking me to marry him. After hanging out with my family for a week!

I reacted, not by crying like a normal person, but by getting really sweaty and forgetting how old I was. Our server asked me my age and I said, "37." Greg was like, "You know you're 36 for another month, right?" And I made him pull out a calculator and make sure he was right. I honestly couldn't remember.

So I think I got so happy I had a tiny stroke! I went to the bathroom and I saw a miniature frog, which I considered a good omen. In retrospect maybe he wasn't real? Either way, I'm really happy and I'm sure the feeling is going to come back to my arm soon.

Our server was so excited about our engagement, she didn't want to leave our sides. She told us about growing up in the Philippines, her son's job, the hotel where they stayed in Times Square, the time they went to Washington DC . . . She also took about a thousand photos of me and Greg, making sure to cut off parts of our heads so she could get the table settings in the photo. She was a hoot. She also told us the key to a good marriage was giving in, "And I guess the bible says women should submit?" which made Greg laugh and me shake my head vigorously. She really was sweet but very goofy.

Now we're trying to figure out where we can get married where we don't actually have to PLAN the wedding. Wedding planning sounds like the most boring thing ever. I love throwing parties but most weddings seem like a lot of work toward creating things that no one remembers, like decorations, favors, and ornamental poufs. Instead they remember if the food sucked and if your friend made a super awkward toast.

So if anyone knows where you can get married by a sea turtle, hit me up. If the turtle could do all the planning, even better.

Between this and spring coming, I feel like my heart may burst. It makes me feel even more passionately that marriage needs to be available to everyone. How anyone could deny this wonderful feeling to any of their fellow humans boggles my mind.