urban eden's plant rant

Beschorneria yuccoides

noreply@blogger.com (Saskia) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:43:00 +0000

(Quite a mouthful, I know!)

I have a big soft spot for this plant. Native to Mexico, it is in the Agave family so is tough as nails, drought-tolerant and all that good stuff. But unlike most Agaves, it is soft and pliable (graceful, even) and not thorny. Its foliage has a silvery sheen, not unlike Agave attenuata. Also like A. attenuata, it is a great plant to use for "tropical effect" in areas (such as the Bay Area) that are distinctly not tropical. It has a basal growth habit, meaning that it doesn't trunk and stays close to the ground.

I have used this plant in many gardens, juxtaposing it with softer grasses or using it as a low-growing contrast to a 5-foot Leucadendron. Like most plants I use, I do it primarily for the foliage. In fact, to be honest I hadn't seen it bloom in real-life until quite recently. I knew from the descriptions that the flower is pretty spectacular (and one of my favorite garden hues, coral), but all that was secondary to me.

And then, in the spectacular planting outside this company's showroom, I saw this:

And the deal was sealed.

Current ambivalence...

noreply@blogger.com (Saskia) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:05:00 +0000

...and its cure.

I'm not all that jazzed with my own garden at the moment. It hasn't been its best year, although there was a fleeting moment in April/May when everything was going through its growth spurt, its first flush of bloom, that it looked pretty hot.

Right now, there are cut-back areas that will fill out come September, and second rounds of bloom that are just getting going. A bit gappy and bedraggled.

A colleague of mine recently asked me, while lunching in my garden, if I liked it currently. We agreed that we are both dissatisfied about the same thing in our respective gardens - lack of cohesiveness of planting (despite a clear color/texture/scale plan), general unkempt-ness of the specimen plants that we were crazy for when we planted them.

This all being said, I am so not ready to myself have the type of garden I would design for someone, well, less garden-y. While I long for an allee of Leucadendrons underplanted with one or two types of succulents, that will just have to wait for when I have my, hem, estate in the country. In the meantime, my little 25' x 30' garden will continue to be my proving grounds, my lab. I have to be able to say "in my experience with X plant", and I have to continue to fall in love with a new plant every week and want to bring it home. That's just how it is.

Today I decided that there needs to be some attitude adjustment around here, so I went out armed with the camera to look for vignettes and individual plants that still flip my skirt up.

Here are the results:

I love the textures and colors in this bed, especially the peach colored Cotyledon that has been blooming for months now.

Brugmansia sanguinea, eat your heart out. This thing is so incredible - it grew from a 4" plant to an 8' tree in two years. It blooms like clockwork, and adds a nice scale to the garden.

This shade bed is actually just coming into its own, despite all my bitching. There are a couple of background plants that need to grow a bit more (my fault for buying everything in 1 gallon containers or smaller...), but this particular vignette I do like. I should clear some of the Oxalis and Plectranthus so that you can see the Bromeliads better, but... later.

The Dahlia coccinea is the current dah-ling of the garden, sprawling against a 6' tall rose, its blooms peeking through.

Like I said, ambivalence. But, as I always preach to my clients, the garden is never finished.

quote of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Saskia) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:27:00 +0000

Talking to a potential new client, I asked her what aesthetic she liked for her new garden. She replied that she liked a kind of "overgrown, messy" look. I qualified that it would be really well thought-out without looking fussy, and she said:

"yeah - like putting on makeup to look natural!"

Classic.

Re-conceptualizing the lawn

noreply@blogger.com (Saskia) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:12:00 +0000

I am killing my lawn, and my husband is not happy. It is ugly, and the plan has not manifested itself yet. But, oh, there has been a lot of lawn-pondering going on this summer.

To give a little background: I grew up in suburban San Diego where there are lawns aplenty. Folks have property, and it was the 70's (only 20 years after the advent of "a man's lawn is his estate" thinking of the 50's) and the 80's ("I have money and so must spend it on a staff to keep the expanse of green in front of my house sparkle-fresh.") Of course, the drought that lasted the 6 years of my middle & high school tenure meant that you had to water your lawn at night. Not get rid of it in favor of something more appropriate to the, um, desert. Just water when it's dark instead of at noon.

Skip past the years spent on the East Coast where it rains during the summer and hence waters the lawn (New England, surprisingly, has a similar climate to England where the lawns are simply breath-taking.), and past the years in Manhattan where a pot of wheatgrass on your kitchen counter constitutes green space.

Enter the San Francisco years.

I confess, in my early gardening days, I seeded & tended a grass lawn in the garden of the rental where I lived in the Upper Haight. If you are familiar with SF geography/geology at all, everything from the ocean eastward to where Haight Street drops down the hill at Buena Vista Park is a big 'ole sand dune. Lawns are thirsty, and sand doesn't hold water well. Hence, to keep that sucker alive I had to water pretty much every day in the non-rainy season. I dragged the hose out and attached the sprinkler ft-ft-ft-ft attachment, set the kitchen timer for 20 minutes, then went back downstairs and reversed the process. I spent many a sun-drenched Sunday afternoon on my stomach eradicating everything that wasn't a product of the grass seed I had sown (including the glass shards and chicken bones of tenants past). I developed a really good tan on my back. I was dedicated. It was cute, all that green, and sometimes we had parties out there, and did yoga and stuff. But, when I decided to move out of that house I stopped watering the lawn and the traitor died in about 3 weeks. End of story.

Fast forward again to the career change to professional gardener. We learned in school how to lay sod and put in a PVC sprinkler system, how to use the gas-guzzling, noisy tools that go along with lawn maintenance. We were exposed to some of the chemicals used to keep the things nice and green and a weed-free monoculture of grass. We learned about the right mix of seed for warm season areas, cool season areas, perennial grasses & annual grasses, shade-loving and sun-loving. And I decided that in my professional life, I did not want to deal with lawns.

So why did I open this post by telling you that I'm killing mine? When my husband and I met, he had a lawn. He had rescued it from near death, re-seeding and watering and mowing it faithfully. Then, as the garden gradually came under my control (mwa-ha-ha-ha!), he wanted me to take over lawn duty. I told him that if I had to take care of it things were going to change drastically. That scared him into a year or so more of lawn care, but now circumstances have changed and the lawn has been officially handed into my loving, plant-tending hands, and I am killing it.

But, the hardscape being what it is in our garden (read impenatrable if we don't want to rip up the whole thing, which we don't), there is this square patch smack in the middle that just cries out to be walked across and lain on on a sunny afternoon. So what to do??

bright idea...

noreply@blogger.com (Saskia) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 02:22:00 +0000

Whose genius idea was it to try & start a blog during the busiest time of the year for gardeners?? Oh yeah, that would have been mine... At least I'm racking up some great material to chat about once things slow down. If they slow down.

In the meantime, here's some visual coolness...

These are "weeds" at a nursery on Kauai - would that we had such weeds here in SF! Ah, but what is a weed other than a plant in a place where you don't want it?

quote of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Saskia) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 06:56:00 +0000

We're going to have to play a bit of catch-up with some of the gems produced by friends & co-workers... here's one from back in January:

"There's nothing more offensive than Algerian Ivy gone arboreal." - CR

getting started

noreply@blogger.com (Saskia) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:50:00 +0000

This spot is the future home of ramblings, botanical & otherwise, that enter the mind and merit (at least in my opinion...) putting down for posterity. Enjoy!