Just a girl with a hammer

Tag: garden

  • Oh thank goodness

    Oh thank goodness

    Spring is here–the lady ferns arrived! I was so worried they would never show up. I have no idea how this lady fern took up residence with a sword fern. I have tried to extricate them from each other but they seem to be in love. So I let them cohabitate.

    SINNERS!

    In the summer the lady fern really takes over, just like a woman (ba dum shish!).

    I moved a bunch of lady ferns in the side entrance last fall and they have yet to pop up again. I don’t know if they’re dead, pouting, or just traumatized. My wild ginger, which every book and website promised would take over this area, has sat like a bump on a log for two years, neither dividing nor conquering. But if you get very close you can see that it’s flowering.

    Asaraum caudatum
    Of course, all the ginger I planted will have to be moved, since I had the cedar tree underlimbed and this area is no longer shady. I have to rethink this whole area and plant things that like dry, sunny spots (can you hear Loree’s pulse quickening?).
    The first tulips arrived! I honestly can’t remember what these are, only that Greg wanted orange bulbs so I planted orange bulbs. What baby wants, baby gets (as long as it’s tulips).
    The tufted-hair grass (Deschamsia cespitosa) is growing by leaps. The common rush (Juncus effusus) sits and waits.

    Mojiiiiiiiiitoooooooooooooooooosssssssssss!

    My climbing hydrangea (Schizophragma hydrangeoides ‘Moonlight’) is leafing out but I hear it can take four years for this vine to really get going. So I have to be patient. Perhaps I’ll make myself a cocktail to pass the time.

    The leaves of this tiny trillium are not much bigger than my nail and I’m so pleased that the house painters didn’t destroy them. I actively fretted about my stupid trilliums.

    I moved a potted flowering currant here and I think the hot pink blooms are looking nice against the new paint job. So I guess it was worth all the worrying.

    I cannot bring myself to trim my sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ of its summer seedheads. They are too pretty.

    But you know what I should be doing, instead of taking pictures? Getting all of these in the ground.

    My shipments from Annie’s Annuals and High Country Gardens came this weekend while I was in California, helping my niece turn 8. I love my niece but do you know what torture that was? To know all of this was waiting for me?

    Happy spring! For reals this time.

  • Oh boy.

    Oh boy.

    I’ve been doing things in the garden, mostly a lot of getting tired and staring slack-jawed into the distance. Do you do this? I do it in full view of my neighbors, who already think I’m crazy because I’m removing parts of my lawn. I just stare and stare, usually at a spot in the yard where there are no plants. I think of it as “imagining the possibilities.” Others might call it “gawping.”

    I also rigged up this little nightmare landscape.
    Cryptomeria japonica ‘Elegans’
    Way back when it snowed so hard, my poor cryptomeria got all bent up top where it wasn’t staked. I thought, “I’ll just remove the nursery stake and put a longer one on!” I did that and the tree promptly fell over. And then it started pouring rain and I decided to half-ass staking it and instead use the recycling bin to prop it up. It looked super classy. And it didn’t work. All of which is to say, this is a vast improvement! Really.
    I’ve also been moving this euphorbia, which already gets moved twice a year. I can’t seem to find a place where it looks quite right and it’s starting to suffer for my indecisiveness. It’s leggy and prone to falling over but I think the colors are so pretty right now.
    Euphorbia ‘Blackbird’
    This weekend I spent the most money I have ever spent at one time on plants. I put in huge orders to Annie’s Annuals and High Country Gardens (I had coupons!), then picked up the plants I ordered from the Audubon Society native plant party people for the rain garden out front. Then, for good measure, I took a trip out to Cistus and bought a fern and a vine but no agaves, which was stupid, stupid, stupid. Agaves were 40% off and I forgot to claim my Hardy Plant Society discount, to boot.
    This time of year makes me feel panicky–must fill dead spaces! Everything is still below ground and I’m already worrying about how much blank space is in the garden. I am like a teenager who can’t wait to be older so I can drink and smoke and vote and rent a car. My garden is young and it wants to be older. I’ve been so preoccupied with blank spaces (that probably won’t be blank in two months) that I failed to notice that my pieris is really pretty right now.
    Pieris japonica
    I started clearing sod near the roses so I can plant my perennial lab. I hate clearing sod, even when it means getting rid of these crazy curves.
    Before.
    I really wish I had used a hose to mark out some gentle curves here. Now this is too straight.

    I haven’t finished because I got tired and I needed to stare into the distance. Maybe I’m just struck dumb because I caught a whiff of my daphne.

    Daphne odora ‘Goddamn it, why didn’t I document the tag?’
    Anybody have a sod cutter I can borrow?
  • Foster Botanical Garden

    Foster Botanical Garden

    When we went to the big island of Hawaii we visited the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden in Onomea Bay. It was absolutely spectacular and it focused on understory plants. The place, a former dump site, was chockablock with gorgeous tropical plants.

    The Foster Botanical Garden on Oahu is mainly focused on giant old trees, some dating to 1853. They were awesome.

    Cavanillesia platanifolia

    This quipo tree was planted in 1930 and its trunk was more than 10 feet in diameter. It was gorgeous.

    Spanish cedar Cedrela odorata

    This baobab tree was planted in 1940 and it has night-blooming flowers from which bats feed.

    Baobab tree Adansonia digitata
    Baobab tree Adansonia digitata

    The fallen pod of an Encephalartos gratus fit right in, as this part of the garden is called the “prehistoric glen.”

    Encephalartos gratus
    Ferrrrrrrrrns. I’m drawn to them. Except that I’m pretty sure this was a cycad, sometimes called “living fossils.”

    They are HUGE!

    This is the be-still tree. It looks pretty normal . . .

    Thevetia peruviana
    . . . until you look up. So very beautiful.
    Thevetia peruviana

    So many of the trees had roots like this. They looked like shark fins.

    Silk-cotton tree Bombax ceiba

    This tree has a Latin name but I don’t care what it was because, hello, that’s the Sweetums tree.

    Sweetums was always my favorite muppet. 
    Corypha sp.

    Kalanchoe Pumla

    Queen Emma lily Crinum agustum

    Flapjack plant Kalanchoe thyrsiflora

    I thought this was a rose bush but it’s a euphorbia!
    Crown-of-thorns Euphorbia milii
    They also had a greenhouse where they had all sorts of plants I loved that would never be hardy here.

    Finger palm Rhaphis multifida

    Anyone know what this is? It didn’t have a sign and I WANT ONE.

    Air plant Tillandsia funckiana

     

    And three big boulders set just so. I really want to do this in my yard.
  • The Yard, Garden & Patio show

    The Yard, Garden & Patio show

    So I did finally make it to the Yard, Garden, and Patio show after mistakenly arriving at the gun show. Gun show people are really different than garden show people. They don’t smile, they don’t share coupons in line, and they don’t compliment your scarf the way the ticket guy did at the YGP. 



    I have never been so happy to arrive safely at the Convention Center. And thank you, random people behind me at that seminar, for being nice when I rudely eavesdropped on your conversation and demanded that you show me your hellebores. Gardeners are really wonderful people.

    Once there I rushed off to the Japanese Garden Elements for the Home Garden talk by Sadafumi Uchiyama. I took a Japanese art history class in college that left me permanently enamored of all things Japanese. They can take an artform from China, Korea, India, or wherever, and do it better.

    Winter Landscape by Sesshu



    Mr. Uchiyama was a lovely man who spoke about his work at the Portland Japanese Garden, his training in Japan, and about how gardening is great because it’s a level playing field–you just need to push that wheelbarrow across the yard a hundred times and you’ll get really good at it, regardless of whether you’re an idiot or a genius. That’s probably why this accidental-gun-show-attendee likes gardening so much. I take terrible notes and I have a crappy memory, so if anyone attended this session and feels I’m misquoting, please chime in.

    He spoke about gardening mostly being maintenance and how the Japanese look at the life of a garden in terms of more than 50 years. One family might tend a garden for ten generations, during which time trees will die and need to be replaced but the structure will largely stay the same. He showed us pictures of the Japanese garden thirty years ago and how it’s changed (or not changed) throughout the years, including some dramatic photos when a Douglas fir fell and took out the waterfall.

    Photo from the Portland Japanese Garden’s Facebook page

    Finally, he offered some practical tips to incorporating this tradition into your yard. The first lesson: 

    • Kill the corners

    Ease the corners of buildings, either by planting on the corners of the back of your house or building a fence that defers the edge of the house, even if it doesn’t offer privacy. 



    He said that foundation plantings in a yard “kill the corners” by easing the transition from a vertical fence to the horizontal ground. He talked about how important rock is to Japanese landscaping and how it must look like it does in nature. He said you can use them to kill corners, like if you’re transitioning a wide footpath to a narrow one. Stick a rock at the corner and the width change won’t be so noticeable. I’d think that plants in ceramic pots could likewise be used to kill corners.

    Second lesson: 

    • ease the transition from one material to another. 

    Instead of letting grass grow right up to a cement path, he showed us a picture of a sidewalk edged with a trim of poured cement with stone embedded, which was abutted with four inches of river rock, which was edged with clay ceiling tiles turned on their sides, which finally lead to grass. It was gorgeous.

    This wasn’t the photo he showed us but it’s a close approximation



    Or use pavers on top of your cement slab to ease that transition to a flagstone pathway.

    Click to embiggen

    Last lesson (and what landscapers always say): 

    • group your plants. 

    Don’t buy one of each. I hate this advice because HOW WILL I EVER FIT ALL THE PLANTS I WANT IN MY YARD IF I HAVE TO BUY MULTIPLES OF THE SAME THING? He says he tells his students that it’s okay to leave a bare spot rather than putting a single plant in. I say phooey to that, Mr. Fancypants with your multiple landscape degrees and years and years of experience!

    He said that Japanese gardens don’t use annuals or perennials. Their gardens rely on an relatively unchanging lanscape of trees and shrubs that don’t die down to the ground at the end of the year. The winter garden has the same bones as the summer garden. Lastly he talked about what a Japanese garden is not. It is not lanterns or footbridges or water features or tchotkies. I was so happy he said that because those lanterns and bridges to nowhere drive me crazy.

    I also attended a panel on hot plant picks for 2012. Sadly, there was no projector for diplaying images of the plants they were discussing. Good thing there was June Condruck from Blooming Nursery to deliver the horticultural equivalent of phone sex. She was so good at talking up plants (“An absolutely stunning blue eye surrounded by petals that fade to a dusky purple atop an unfurling mass of shiny green foliage . . .”) that I didn’t really need visuals. I think I put a star by everything she described.

    WANT. Eryngium ‘Big Blue’
    Photo from High Country Gardens

    And then I bought some hellebores and some hot pink bleeding hearts to drown out the mousy and diminutive pale pink native variety that I have in the shade garden. 



    All in all it was a very good time. Be sure to check out Scott’s photos of the feature gardens over at Rhone Street Gardens. And if you’re interested in attending the Spring Home and Garden Show, THAT’S at the Expo Center next weekend. 

  • Leap year

    Leap year

    There’s an old adage that in the first year your plants sleep, the second they creep, and the third year they leap. For some of the plants I first established at the house, this should be their leap year. Our weather has been lovely this week–cold but clear, which means perfect for weeding.

    I have never been so happy to weed! It was so nice to be in the yard again, muttering to myself and saying hello to the plants that are starting to poke out of the ground. We have lots of bulbs now starting to show, and the flowering currants and elderberry bushes are budding.

    The winter-blooming daphne is *this close* to erupting in blooms and the stonecrop is forming rosettes–hooray!

    I spent all day removing popweed (Cardamine hirsuta, street name: Jumping Jesus) and Herb Robert (Geranium Robertianum, street name: Stinky Bob). I also put down Sluggo, the only insecticide I’ll use. I had a moment of panic where I wondered if I was weeding all the forget-me-not that I sowed last fall. That’s the problem with wild flowers–how do you know what’s a good seedling and what’s an invasive weed?

    Remember when my aging next door neighbor thought I wanted her Doug Fir removed? She called a surveyor and had him mark her property lines, so I couldn’t “take over her yard” like she claims I’d like to do. I carefully pruned only the roses on my side of the surveyor’s white post. After I pruned them hard last year and didn’t kill them, I became emboldened and pruned them even harder this time. I might actually remember to fertilize them this year but I’m not holding my breath.

    I also did silly things like crumpling leaves that had accumulated under the shrubs by hand. Last fall I put uncomposted leaves on the beds, which is generally not advisable. In the wild, leaf mulch breaks down quickly because animals walk on it. In our urban and suburban yards, it just sits there and attracts slugs. But: if you put out a bird feeder nature does what it would do in the wild. To wit:

    What used to be three inches of leaves now looks like this

    So next fall I’m going to put out fresh leaves and a million bird feeders and I will sit back and know that I’m feeding the wildlife AND my plants.My transformation into That Crazy Bird Lady will be complete. I can’t wait.

    Also, remember my bird bath that I spent $5 on and drove all the way to a trailer park in Cornelius, which took two and a half hours during rush hour, and then I had to patch it with Liquid Nails so it would not leak? It holds water! So my cheap scavenging on craigslist, while dangerous and unattractive, totally works.

  • Front yard plans

    So. The side yard with its sad weird curves, its buried oil tank, and its random mohawk of roses.

    I’ve spent so much energy in the backyard focusing on shrubs and the structure of the yard that I haven’t gotten to have a lot of fun with perennials. I’ve decided that this is the area where I can get my rocks off and plant any perennials that I feel like and not worry about winter interest or anything. It’s going to be the lab and I’m just going to plant what looks pretty in the catalog and if it looks terrible I’ll just pull it up and plant something else. Anything softening that line of roses has to be an improvement.

    Don’t be jealous of my MS Paint skills.

    That’s not a dragon, that’s an approximation of the perennials I will plant and the pathway we’ll put next to the driveway. I’m going to plant things that butterflies and hummingbirds like and maybe put down gravel around the pavers, which butterflies use to replenish their salts. We already have a birdbath here and a hummingbird feeder, which is being thuggishly guarded by a male.  Hopefully this should draw all the pretty critters to the area viewable from my kitchen window.

    These are the plants that I’m ogling right now. The palate is kind of a mess (orange! purple! red! blue!) but I’m just going to plant them and see what happens.

    There are a lot of agastaches, poppies, and penstemons and a lot of plants I saw in Scott’s yard. I want to work in some grasses so if anyone has a favorite to suggest (cough*scott*cough), I’m all ears. Or if you have a great flower to suggest, let me know!

  • A very good idea

    A very good idea

    I moved the birdbath from the backyard to the driveway strip so I can see the birds playing from the kitchen window. I love watching birds in the birdbath. WHO THE HELL AM I ANYMORE?

    I know I’m really going to tempt the spambots by saying this, but BUSHTITS, you guys!

    They ARE bushtits, right?

    I’m too old for this shit, he thinks.

    And then this one gave me the stinkeye and I stopped taking pictures.

    Psaltriparus minimus

    I’ll tell you soon about the other birdbath I bought off of craigslist for $5. It was cracked, put back together poorly, and I had to drive to Cornelius in rush hour traffic to get it. It took 2.5 hours round trip. I patched it with Liquid Nails and we’ll see this weekend if it will hold water. If it does? Totally worth it.

    If it won’t hold water I’m declaring myself barred from using craigslist again.

  • Sludgestorm!

    Sludgestorm!

    Our rain garden is like a giant slurpee right now.

     

    My poor Cryptomeria japonica was bent over with snow, like someone was pulling its ponytail from behind. We’re going to have to restake it and give it some TLC this spring. Stupid snow isn’t even sticking around. Hrmph.

  • I think I’m going to have to declare this a garden oops

    Planting a Mexican Orange here seemed like such a good idea. It’s evergreen, pretty, and full of good-smelling flowers. But sadly, the color is all wrong for this area.

    Screaming yellow Choisya ternata ‘Sundance’ in late November

    Neon yellow just isn’t playing nicely with the rust and orange here. I need a small, evergreen shrub that will play nicely with this warm color palate. I’d love to put in a Fothergilla ‘Mt. Airy’ but it’s deciduous. But look how pretty. So pretty!

    Image yanked from here.

    I kind of want to plant it anyway. But I need evergreen elements! Maybe another daphne? Or maybe an Osmanthus delavayi? I was hipped to it by Loree and made sure to pay attention to it when I visited the Chinese Garden with my parents. Or maybe I should finally give in to Oregon grape. This is the corner that we look at from our bed, so whatever goes here needs to be beautiful in every season.

    The Choisya is going to move to the other side of the yard where it will get morning sun and a reprieve from the hottest part of the day. This supposedly leaves them less screaming yellow. And you know what? I KNEW that it would turn that color in full sun and I planted it anyway, thinking that it would magically behave differently. Like if I loved it enough it would just caramelize or something? It’s this same kind of thinking that makes me plant all of my shrubs too closely together.

    And I think the Lonicera nitida ‘Baggensen’s Gold’ is gonna have to go somewhere else, too. It’s just not the right color even though it’s going to be a pretty little shrub.

    One of you knows the perfect plant to put here. Come on, give it up already. Lend a fledgling gardener a hand.

  • Happy new year to ME!

    Happy new year to ME!

    My hellebores are blooming! Oh happy day!

    And then this happened. I’m assuming these are hyacinths that I planted last fall.

    Though I’m kind of wondering where the rest of them are . . . it looks sort of dumb to have two random bulbs in a sea of brown.

    And my daphne is forming buds!

    Is it time to start gardening again? How about now?