Random rose!

Last year, there was an apparently-dead stump of wood on the hill that runs down from the pool area. Very close to one of the privet trees that were removed. Nothing doing: just another old stump,

Then late last year, a rose-shaped twig appeared. Just one. Thin and weedy. After a while, I cut it back. A couple more appeared during the winter... then suddenly, with the new year, a whole rose bush sprouted, and now it's rambling over the slope, covered with buds.

No perfume, just pretty.

So where did it come from? A random seed, dropped by a rosehip-feasting bird? A long-dead rosebush resprouting now that there is no privet sucking the life from the soil? The root stock of a grafted rose, just doing its own thing?

Whichever... it's pretty!

Gloves for foxes...

Tall spires of foxglove flowers. A year ago, they were seeds.

... and a perfect fit for big, bumbly, bumblebees.

Almost-blue

A group of these in the little garden between the deck and the pool. I think they are the ones that came "free", inside the planters at a yard/estate sale last year. Amazingly beautiful.

Horton’s Iris Garden, Loomis, California

Today I visited, for the first time, Horton’s Iris Garden in Loomis. Not very far away, and will need to go back in a couple of weeks or so to see more of the wonderful irises that are growing there. What an amazing collection of flowers. And it all started with a hobby,,, (When I arrived back home, Karli told me that Mrs. Horton was her friend Jenn’s teacher when she was at school!)

There are irises for sale in pots, but the best way to buy is to go to the garden and look at them all. List the ones you like best—their names are all on tags in front of the flowers—and then order them, and pick them up in late summer to plant in your own garden. (This means of course that you’ll have to visit several times between early April and the end of May, because different iris bloom at slightly different times. What better reason to walk through masses of wonderful, wonderful flowers?) You can also order from the Horton Iris Garden website, or from their printed catalog—and they will ship too.

Peggy Sue

Beautiful flowers, all named (who has the job of naming irises?) “Debrenne”, “Gypsy Glitters”, “My Friend Jonathan”, “Peggy Sue”, (I loved Peggy Sue), “River Siren”, “Smiling Duncan’s Eyes”, to name but a very, very few.

Places to sit in the shade and just relax… or wander among the flowers… or visit the playful goat kids. Lizards were scooting around through the plants today, zippy, fast as the temperature rose to the highest so far this year. A very, very nice place to go.

Just one more iris, today. More soon!

This one is more blue than purple, but the camera has captured what it saw as the sun played on the petals. This is to the right of the front door, towards the side of the house; the others are under the kitchen window.

There is another, with buds almost bursting... tightly-packed petals looking almost black. Tomorrow? Maybe.

Ad then... this one appeared. Quite, quite magical. In the shade, the colour appeared more blue: when the sunshine fell onto it, as in these pictures, a more mauve hue dominated. And orange fur a doormat for pollen-sticky insect feet.

Yellow iris

And then the yellow irises bloomed...

Iris weekend



 The sun started shining again on Saturday, and the first of the irises, this delicate mix of white and purple, opened on flower. By Sunday, there were several open, beautiful. All the more remarkable because they had been ordered online when I lived on Long Island, arrived too late to be planted as I knew I'd be moving, were brought to Sacramento and stuck into planters for the winter, and then replanted last spring when this house became home.

Hey up!

With all the rain this week, the ducks have been a little confused. Here's another visitor to the swimming pool. She could raise the feathers on her head, like a little punk duck.

Another visitor, just outside home office window

Welcome visitor; dining on slugs and bugs and snails. Both on the ground, and in the crevices of tree-bark. And sometimes heard, loudly, drumming out a rhythm on the trees in the greenbelt.

He's a Flicker, a woodpecker.

Spring flowers

Calendula--which we used to call marigolds--are happy flowers, like petalled sunshine. And they are friendly flowers, keeping bugs away from the vegetable garden.

I have happy memories of planting their large, curly seeds by sticking a twig or pencil into the earth to make a hole and then dropping them in, one by one, in the border of my parents' garden in Syston, at the house at the top of Albert Street. I wonder if they are still self-seeding there?

I think this is called Jacob's Ladder? It's growing in the Japanese garden and is very pretty.

Garden update

Six square yards of spent mushroom compost were delivered on Saturday, and I spent a lot of the weekend shovelling it into the wheelbarrow and then lugging it over the steep garden behind the pool, where the daylilies are. Hopefully this will help retain moisture and prevent all the topsoil washing away as I gradually replace the weeds with perennials. Now it's going to rain for the rest of the week, so the remaining pile of compost has to wait.

Planted beans this weekend, but didn't get around to sowing the runner beans until last night (they'd been soaking in a jar of water overnight). This morning, I find that someone (squirrel? raccoon?) had dug them all up again, but hadn't eaten them. So I planted them again. This may be a daily activity until they dig their roots in.

The baby peach tree has lots of baby peaches--but it also has peach leaf curl. Sad face. Can't do anything about it now except for pinching-off the badly-affected leaves. At least the tree is still small enough to do that easily. Will have to use a preventative spray in the winter.

The Jerusalem artichokes are beginning to sprout--two have emerged so far. And the horseradish is sending up leaves. The rhubarb seems to be struggling a little but not giving up yet. The asparagus, however, has failed to show: I may have planted it in the wrong place. That's part of the discovery process. This garden is teaching me something new every day.

The mystery of the disappearing peas... and the daylily fairy

All of the peas that I have planted, with the exception of those in the raised beds (which are growing like triffids) have disappeared. This includes garden peas, sugar/snap peas, mange-tout and sweet peas; those that were planted late last year and this spring, those that were pre-sprouted and those that were not.

Either there is something in the soil that they don't like, or there's someone/something diligently following the plantings and eating them as soon as they have been sown. I think they did it to the dahlia tubers too.

Maybe I'm wrong and they'll all suddenly appear in a glut of pea-ish-ness just in time for Sacramento heat. But it seems strange that they would flourish in the raised beds, and not in the soil (raised beds are topsoil too and in a less-sunny area of the garden to those that were planted directly in earth).

But the daylilies... I think the daylily fairy godmother has been helping out. I know I bought a lot last year and tried to divide as many as possible (using them on a hillside to help control erosion). But not this many... they are appearing all over the place!  Magic!

Sunday was fine!

Planted the new salvia(s) in the front garden, the herbs in the herb garden, and finished the first of the three vegetable beds with more sowings of parsnip, lettuce, mesclun, beetroot and peas. Weeded the side foundation bed (where the raspberry plants are starting to grow) and added two blueberry bushes. Will have to add a cage or net very soon.

Drove the truck to the feed store on Greenback--the one with the life-size model horse in the parking lot, which they dress up for Hallowe'en), bought four bales of straw, and used them to mulch the potatoes. I am not going to trench them up--rather mulch them down. Will see if it works, or if I end up with masses of green-and-poisonous spuds. Some of them are blue potatoes--how can you tell if they are green?

Also planted two dormant tall phloxes--one blue, one white--behind the pool fence, one near the globe artichokes, and one closer to the vegetable garden.

I have a mass of gladioli and dahlia corms/tubers to plant. Where to begin?

Plant-sale plants

This morning--just before the rainstorm arrived, and stayed all day, heavily--there was a plant sale at the Shepard Garden and Arts center, part of McKinley Park in Sacramento, organized by the Sacramento Perennial Plant Club.

In a part of Sacramento where all the streets are lined with trees and cute cottages, it's just where you'd expect to find lots of people in their gardens and sharing plants and cuttings and seeds.

A house on the corner, close to where I parked, had a beautiful mature dogwood in full-white bloom. I found an Eastern Flowering Dogwood seedling at the sale, and brought it home. Maybe in fifty years time, it will look like the one on Park Street.

Also brought home:

• two bamboos from Mad Man Bamboo, including the long-coveted blue bamboo
• a cuphea "Caribbean Sunset"
• a Salvia mellifera or Black Sage (to go in dry front garden)
• a Valeriana officinalis or valerian
• Salvia "Wendy's Wish"
• Thymbra Spicata, or... yes!   ZA'ATAR!
• Tanacetum vulgare var. crispuni (curled tansy--I may need to plant this in a container. Wondering if it will keep the coyotes away?
• Salvia discolor or Peruvian Sage
• three sorrel plants
• and a baby penstemon.

The herbs were all from  Morningsun Herb Farm in Vacaville, where they apparently have a huge selection of medicinal herbs and perennials available. Road trip anyone?

Now it just needs to stop raining and dry up a little so that they can be planted.

Greenhouse!

This is my greenhouse process... seed trays inside inflated plastic bags that in this picture have been flattened by last night's rain--luckily they still contain seeds, not seedlings. But look what just arrived!

A greenhouse! Yes! And it was hand-made from wood and plastic, all painted, it's greehouse-shaped and not a flimy wire frame. The windows are heavy-duty sheet plastic, which is fine for now. I would love a real Kew Gardens type greenhouse one day, but a) I don't have the money for that and b) this is Norther California not the East Midlands.

So today I have a big grin on my face. And lots of things to do this weekend that involve pots, potting compost/potting soil, seeds, cuttings and seedlings.

Wind in the willows; tales of the riverbank

Usually, the creek that winds around the garden is a trickle at the bottom of a steep, sandy mini-ravine, about six feet below the surrounding land. But when it's in flood, like this week, after a sudden downpour, it fills the ravine with raging brown water. And as torrents do, it washes away some of the bank each time.

Obviously this has been going on for a long time--as the sandy soil in the lower part of the garden and in the "green belt" bear witness. But to help the lower part of (what will eventually all be) the vegetable garden, and to provide twigs for fencing and other crafty stuff, I've started some cuttings.

These are cuttings taken from two bunches of willow branches, green and yellow, that I found at Carmichael's farmers' market a couple of weeks ago. After standing in a bucket of water, they produced their first rootlets. Now they have been cut down and potted-up, with the pots standing in saucers of water. The remainder of the branches are still immersed in the big orange bucket; maybe they'll root again.

I also have to pot up the pussy willow too. We'll have a nice variety of willows one day!

Monty Don--Gardening at Longmeadow

My copy of Monty Don's latest book, "Gardening at Longmeadow", arrived a couple of days ago. Another beautiful inspiration... reading about gardening is what you do when it's too dark/rainy/cold to go outside.

America: you can find his books on Amazon.com or http://amazon.co.uk/

Monty talking about the book:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7wlliaxXqE

 (I wish they had sent him with it, but Amazon doesn't give that option!)

California oaks, end of March

There is something so majestic about California oak trees, regardless of the time of year, and whether they stand lonely in a summer-dry field, or, like these, in a community of trees. I am learning that "live oaks"--the evergreens--while always bearing leaves, are always losing them too: autumn clean-up twelve months a year, and their leaves are hard and sharp, almost like English holly.

Right now, the live oaks are flowering; mild green, almost-catkin flowers. And the deciduous oaks are just starting to find their new leaves: this acid-green haze has only appeared, it seems, today... contrasted against the stormy-grey sky, they are shouting, awake! Spring is here!

Amazing trees. Just amazing.

A lot of water under the bridge

It feels like it's been raining forever, but it's only a matter of a few very soggy days. "We need it", or the reservoirs and the ski resorts do, and spring will be (back) on track shortly... but it's frustrating looking-out at soggy earth, not able to go dig and plant and rake and start things growing.

If nothing else, gardening teaches us patience, and acceptance of some things that we just cannot change.

Put on my wellies and did a quick, muddy tour:

- cat or raccoon or coyote has so far only dug up two baby lettuce seedlings
- Dutch iris are starting to bloom
- dahlia cuttings have perked up--they wilted badly at first
- a couple of gladioli have sprouted in the middle of the vegetable bed--I guess I missed a few bulb-lets when lifting them last year
- and a couple of random lilies in the same place? Where did they come from? Don't remember planting them!
- the cosmos and/or other annual seeds are just starting to sprout in the new flower bed and the turkeys haven't found them... yet
- still no sign of the missing sweet peas or garden peas. They are probably inside a turkey, which itself is probably inside a coyote by now.