An Old Friend Takes a Tumble

 Way down at the bottom of the Laguna garden is a grove of eucalyptus trees, two of which are silver dollar eucalyptus, one of my favorite trees. This is a picture taken eight years ago and you can see the one in the center of the photo has a definite "lean" to it. it has been this way since we moved in and it gives it a lot of character and makes for a good tree to climb and sit on. Hawks, peregrines, and many other birds frequent these branches. These trees have held up many hammocks over the years, still hold up odd little bird houses that were occupied again this spring, and ten years ago I had a stage build between them where a blues band played in the afternoon while the audience sat on the grassy knoll for my DH's birthday party.

It had been a few years since I had the tree trimmers over to do any maintenance on them and when I went down to check the trees out before I had them come to do the trimming, the large silver dollar eucalyptus had grown and reached way up, covering most of the hillside! I was shocked at how large it was. It rained that weekend and unfortunately by the time the tree trimmers came later that week the large tree had fallen over, pulling up some of the roots out of the ground. If only I had been a few weeks earlier getting my act together!

 It really broke my heart because I love this tree so much, so we decided to trim it back and just kind of leave it and see what happens. It really can't go anywhere and it isn't hurting anything, having landed on the open space on the hillside. So if it lives it will make an interesting tree sculpture and a good place for kids to climb next summer. If it doesn't make it, we'll have firewood for many winters to come, but I will really miss it.

And so will the birds I suspect.

Buddha in the Garden

 Sitting quietly, way on the back of the gravel garden, is Buddha. Most of the winter he is surrounded by white azaleas. The rest of the year, by various cool shades of green succulents and tropical plants.
 

It is hard to see in this picture, but there is a perfect umbrella of duranta over his head. Duranta, if you are not familiar is a flowering shrub that has arching sprays of blue flowers (at least this one does). I always seem to miss it in bloom back here. Buddha's hands form a perfect cup to hold enough water from the sprinklers to keep blooms fresh for a few days and I try to keep them filled with long lasting flowers when I pass through this garden.

But Tilly seems to think that Buddha is there solely to offer her a little refreshment, for her own personal benefit, just like the rest of the gardens, and everyone else in the household for that matter.

Mid-Winter Updates

Thanksgiving and Christmas are big holidays at our house, but Super Bowl Sunday takes the prize for sheer volume of people at the house and I work all month trying to refresh the mid-winter gardens so that they at least look presentable since this is the only time of year many of our friends come to the house and most of them associate me with being a gardener and have high expectations. The camellias and azaleas are lovely, but I have been taking advantage of the lovely weather and abundant rain we've been having to add some pretty seasonal color that I have skipped the past few years. After the poinsettias were retired from their showy pots around the entrances, there were empty pots for many weeks until I got busy at the last minute to drop in some winter bloomers. I even updated this wooden planter with tiny succulent cuttings that will look good for months to come. Amazing how inspirational a little rain and sunshine in the middle of winter can be to a gardener!

Refreshing a Winter Focal Point

October 2014

 Somehow it has worked out that most of our entertaining at the SJC house takes place in the winter months. Dozens of relatives come from all over the country to visit and dare I say hundreds of friends stop by some time between Halloween and Valentines Day. Needless to say, they are certainly missing the prime time in the gardens which I would have to say is spring, followed by summer and then fall.

November 2014

By the time winter rolls around most of the prettiest scenes are tired and taking a rest. Roses are either spindly or cut back, most iris are sleeping and of course the clematis, wisteria, flowering shrubs and vines are either bare or devoid of blooms at best. Even the willowy grasses are often cut back to bristly stubs. I am thankful for the azaleas and camellias, of which I have planted many, and there are always the plants that look good consistently year round which add the foundation to the gardens. I do try to add some seasonal color in the way of cool season annuals that I probably would skip if not for the onslaught of guests. As you can see by the top picture, the Moonlight Garden was showing signs of a long hot summer a couple weeks ago, so a carload of bright white perennials and annuals in addition to some organic fertilizer has brightened up this focal point and will go a long way to keep this garden looking good until the spring plants start to wake up. If you look closely, my 'Golf Ball' (more like Basketball) pittosporum look terrible, having been covered with blight all year. They are supposed to stay small and round, hence the name, but these became so large and gangly they were trimmed back at the wrong time and have become a mess. I'm debating whether to remove them all together or just cut them back and
give them another chance. But enough about problems! I've been out every weekend with a watering can and some seaweed fertilizer to make sure this area is robust for the upcoming months and all our guests because next weekend there will be soccer balls, baseballs and maybe even a few Frisbees landing among the newly planted daisies and phlox and they need to be as robust as possible!

Just for fun here's a look at years past. If you are on Pinterest and 2010 looks familiar to you, it has probably been pinned a few thousand times!

2009

2010

2011

2012

Persistence Pays Off

I do love an arch in the garden and I have lots of them. I add them all over to create height and add a vertical element as well as acting as a way to separate spaces. Most of them are wire ones that I purchase from catalogs or a nursery.  This also allows me to utilize a whole new group of plants that would otherwise be left to an occasional fence or wall - vines. This arch in the Moonlight Garden has had at least four different kinds of vines growing on it that I can think of off the top of my head. When I put it in about seven years ago I planted the very prolific and popular at the time 'Avalanche' clematis. Of course the more I thought about it the more I regretted the chance to put one of my favorite fragrant vines in,  Madagascar jasmine, so I added that too. Neither vine flourished the way I hoped they would. So I decided to just go for it and add a white passion flower vine and at least have butterflies all over. I probably added a star jasmine too. One thing about vines that should always be a warning is that they can be very aggressive. By nature they are meant to grow from the floor of the forest, and scale up tall trees to get the sunlight at the very top. All of the vines I planted on this arch had no intention of scaling much of anything and most barely made it over the arch but the most frustrating thing was they just weren't interested in blooming. Here and there would be a bloom but nothing like I was used to in my other gardens. It may have been too shady. I have a hard time realizing that this area doesn't get as much sun as it seems due to the tall queen palms. The hard ground isn't very fertile either because of years of chemicals used on the lawn that was here previously. Then finally I broke down a bought a white Mandevilla vine. I am not crazy about Mandevillas for some reason. A little too showy and tropical for me, so I have no idea why I bought two and put one on each side of the arch last spring, just desperate I guess. But just to keep me humble I suspect, those Mandevillas are just as happy as can be and are blooming for months now! Go figure!

Summer Show Offs

Last February I was complaining about these narrow little planters and how bare they looked in the winter along side of the weeping cedar. I think I vowed to plant something other than the 'Black and Blue ' salvia that has been there for the past few years and only looks good during the summer months. But as I look at it now, it really does look quite lovely, and since I never did get around to replacing it, I guess it will stay for another year! I do love the combination of the bright green foliage against the dark purple flowers and it is hard to get a color combination that doesn't clash with the house color when it is that close. I must remember my own advice that not everything looks great all the time and just let the tree take center stage in the winter months!

Wisteria and Roses

 I just can't get enough of my wisteria and roses.

 When they start blooming I actually get a little sad because I know they will only last a few weeks.

 Their beautiful scent, the buzzing of the bees, the sparkling of the sunshine peeking through the flowers will only be fleeting for the first few weeks of spring.

 They seem to be the first signs that winter is on the way out and the warm weather is on its way and soon all the other flowers will be appearing.

I really need to learn to spend more time just sitting under this pergola enjoying the beautiful arrival of spring and less time regretting how quickly it passes.

Learning Lessons

 So, I was going to write this post about my weeping cedar tree, and how much I adore it, and how much it has grown, but now I will probably write about how much your learn writing a blog about your garden!

When we moved into this house in 2008 there was a big awkward King palm in this little carve out that had out-grown the spot and was learning over the driveway. It was the first thing I had removed and relocated and I chose a weeping cedar to replace it for two reasons. First, it can be trained into a rather columnar tree which is perfect for this tall, narrow space, and second because I love this graceful, soft tree. Sure, it didn't look like much at first, but I had faith and sure enough as you can see in the top picture, with some staking and some pruning it has filled the space nicely (in hind-sight an Italian cypress would have probably been ideal and fit in with the feel of the house too).

 But in searching for pictures among all my files over the years for photos of this spot to show the progression I have made a few observations.

At first I was going to qualify the top picture saying that the 'Black and Blue' salvia that fill this planter, along with the bright orange daylilies are all dormant and cut back so it looks rather bare at this time of year, but is lovely most of the time. I then spent a long time looking for at least one picture of it looking "lovely". There were none. I take a lot of pictures, especially when things are looking good which leads me to believe that this area, which is right next to where I park my car every day, (you can tell by the tire marks on the edge of the planter) rarely looks good. Now this bottom shot with the snapdragons is not bad, but I would say that is a good four years ago. Part of the problem is that this east facing planter is very shallow and narrow and right up against the color of the house and therefor the colors of the flowers I can use is very limited and must be carefully chosen, and there is not a lot of air circulation so the plants must be tough. There are some lovely stained glass windows here too that have a rather tropical feel to them (Toucans and such), so they must also be taken into account. When I think about it, it is no wonder I have had such a hard time filling this little space successfully!

Another observation I have made today while writing this post is that I take a lot more pictures of my grandchildren now than I do my gardens! That doesn't bother me a bit!

A Do-Over For An Arbor

I remember when we first looked at this property I was already mentally choosing what I would plant on this arbor before we even decided to buy the house. I love arbors and use them all the time in my gardens to add interest and height to an otherwise flat area. This one is tall and very sturdy, however, I don't think it has ever lived up to its potential and a week ago I looked at it in dismay and told my garden helper to just strip everything that was growing on it off and we would start over. (By-the-way, this is a garden technique that I find much under appreciated, ripping everything out and starting over!) We will relocate the plants that were growing there to a bare spot on the always needy fence on the back lot.

It's not that I hadn't tried. Here is what was tangled together growing on it; 'Graham Thomas' rose (not a climber but it does grow very tall here and it did grow up over the top), 'Sally Holmes' climbing rose, purple potato vine, a variety of passion flower, and a clematis of some kind, I think.

I've decided to just go and buy two of the same kind of climbing rose and plant one on each side and then monitor them weekly and tie the growing canes horizontally along the sides of the arbor. I started to do this on the previous roses planted here but obviously got distracted as evident by the top notch of blooms showing in the pictures. This is the key to getting climbing roses that have flowers all along the sides of the arbor and not just at the top like the yellow Graham Thomas rose in the picture above. They must be diligently tied in a zig-zag pattern so they will bloom on the horizontal branches like here or here. Which roses I choose will be somewhat dictated by my choices in the nurseries or whether I am willing to order on-line. Usually we are better off choosing ones that are available locally because they are typically proven to do well in our area. We need ones that will put up with June gloom for months without succumbing to mildew. Strong foliage is always good to discourage those pesty sawfly larvae that haunt us all.  I looked a couple weeks ago and although some of my favorites from my Laguna Garden were at the nursery I usually go to, like 'New Dawn', it typically only has one long and full bloom in the spring and is flowerless the rest of the summer. They also had 'Polka', a beautiful peach colored climber that I find very difficult to get to bloom. Of course there is always the popular 'Eden', but I find it so disease prone, at least in my area, that I am a bit wary of the maintenance involved. Oh well, the search begins!

A Little Late Fall Color

We are having summer like temperatures this week, but my SJC liquid amber tree thinks it is autumn and the leaves are just starting to turn yellow and fall to the ground. I had planted this tree, of which there are many in our neighborhood that turn beautiful shades of red, burgundy and orange in the early to mid fall, right outside the dining room window to add an ambiance of autumn color to our Thanksgiving holidays, but it is putting on the show a little late, not to mention somewhat less colorful than I had imagined. I am going to be patient and give it more time, assuming it is still young. I still love it though for the pretty color of green and the shade it gives us all summer, but I am still hoping for next year.

Bones

After cutting back all the summer perennials and flowering shrubs, the gardens are looking a bit bleak. These are the times that it is good to have focal points and good "bones" in the gardens to carry us over until there is more color and blooming plants to add interest.

Fall Refurbishing

With a large property and lots of areas in need of some gardening attention this fall, it is a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what to focus on first. Then I remember my own advice to other people and break the task down into smaller areas. I tell others to start with a spot that they see every day, preferably right when they enter the property. Focusing on one small area and making it a lovely setting that brings you joy every day, a few times a day, will be encouraging to continue on to the next area. A lot of the projects I did last spring had to been done and are not exactly the highlight of the garden, and in fact can hardly be seen and will not look the way I imagined for a few years (the back fence for example) so I need to indulge in a little eye candy for a change. This area was first done about six years ago (hardscaping was already there, instead of dealing with the leaky fountain, I turned it into a planter) when we first moved in and is need for a face lift. The lavenders are scraggly, the iris need dividing and the roses have never done well, probably not enough sun. I will have fun picking out some new perennials and groundcovers and give some thought to new vines. Time to get busy!

Easy Elegance

If I had to make a list of "bang for the buck" plants in my gardens, surely Calla Lilies would be on that list. So dramatic and so easy, especially for shady areas that need a bit of drama. These ones are five foot tall and thrive on little attention other than regular water. The blooms are so pretty and make lovely cut flowers that last a long time, but do not overlook the foliage. I often use Calla Lily leaves in arrangements that don't even have any of the flowers in them. A tall vase of foliage alone will work indoors and last forever. So lovely and elegant, so easy, what more could you ask?

Along the Street

I must confess that I don't see much of this garden in SJC. It runs between the front wall and the street and because I pull in and out of the driveway before I pass it I usually only glance at it once in a while.
It is fairly large and was one of the first things I worked on when we moved in four years ago because it was some really bad grass around the tall queen palms and not what I wanted the world to see. It is comprised of a gravel path, rocks, a pot of succulents as a focal point and a number of native and drought tolerant plants. I use woolly thyme and rosemary as groundcovers.

Many of the plants here, especially the succulents, have been started as cuttings from other places in the yard. It does get watered in the summer from the automatic sprinklers that have been adjusted from when it was lawn.
There are summer blooming shrubs and perennials such as lavender and lantana for color. Every once in a while when I go out the gate specifically to look at what is happening out here I am pleasantly surprised that it is doing so well and there is always something that amuses me. Usually it is a really big, thriving weed or a piece of trash that has ended up in a bush (I have to get out here more) or even a small aspen tree that has sprouted from seeds the giants across the street drop. But this week there were some interesting things in bloom that I will share later.

What The Visitors Will Miss

There is no perfect day to have a garden tour, at least not in my garden. When you plan for a four season garden there are always blooms coming and going and it is hard to say when the ideal time to open the garden to visitor should be. The first of the tours in my garden start in three weeks and by then I'm afraid this display of Spanish lavender and roses will be past its prime, having already been in bloom for a good month or maybe longer. But other roses are just starting to open and there are only a few iris and daylilies doing their thing right now so as the season progresses there will be other scenes that come into their own in time for guests. And I always have to remind myself that although I will miss these beautiful beds when they are done with their first flush, they will still be lovely, just not so colorful.

Lions Spitting Water

My DH and I have a running joke about "lions spitting water". When we were first married and house hunting it seemed like we had very different tastes when it came to real estate. I liked quaint, funky places and he liked stately, dignified homes. To clarify my point one frustrating day I told him that I would never live in a house with lions spitting water. What is the first thing you see when you pull in the driveway of our SJC home? Well it used to be a lion spitting water. Now it is a lion overlooking a funky basin of succulents spilling into a basin of "splashing" liriope. A fitting compromise I would say!

While I'm On The Subject

Planting "en masse" isn't just for garden beds. This old wooden container that sits by my front walkway in SJC is usually filled with annuals. When the spring annuals were spent, only the dirt remained, I'm embarrassed to say, all summer. I was walking by the other day and on the spur of the moment decided to do something about it. With a few minutes I had broken off about a dozen young aeonium off shoots and filled in the container. No tools were needed and it has been over a month and they are doing quite well. I will probebly rotate the container 180 degrees every once in a while so they grow evenly since the light is to the left. Now why didn't I do this earlier?

Crazy About Coreopsis

Do you ever forget about plants that you like a lot? That is what happened to me with coreopsis. I had grown it before in my Laguna garden and I don't know what happened to it. It must have disappeared during some hardscape project or maybe the voles got it. Anyway I know it was a good summer plant, blooming for all the warm months on end with regular deadheading. It is very colorful and has those tall blooms that sway in the breeze that I love. The butterflies love it too. I had originally put in marigolds around this birdbath in the vegetable garden in SJC, but I always prefer a perennial if at all possible. I had to wait until it became available at the nurseries (it was not around in the fall) but I finally got it established this spring. It is a jolt of color that pulls the eye from across the garden to this focal point. Now if I could only get that jacaranda tree behind it to bloom the picture would be perfect!

Conceding

My peaceful Buddha sits in the very back of the serene gravel garden in a flower bed that I have replanted every year we have lived here. The white carpet roses do fine but I have a terrible time keeping any other groundcover thriving there. While adding some gravel to the back area, my son went ahead and covered the bare soil with some of the remaining gravel. I must admit it looks better than it did and there is a good chance I was not going to get around to adding more doomed plants anytime soon. The beauty of it is that I can always take up the gravel if I get ambitious in the future and want to add more plants, but for now, this will work fine for me. I concede!

Room With a View

I try to be conscience of what my gardens look like from the inside out. My dining room especially has a huge view of the back yard and previously it was just grass and one lonely queen palm tree planted smack dab in the middle of the lawn in front of the window. As the palm grew taller than the glass pane, it had all the charm of a telephone pole as far as the view from the dining room. Over the past three years I have removed the palm and added a number of more interesting trees that will provide character and shade for the backyard, as well as structure in the way of shrubs and perennials, interest in the way of seasonal flowering plants and art. This time of year it is especially lovely, but I am focused on year round interest because there is always something going on in this room and the view adds to the ambiance.