[ Lost in the Landscape ]

controlled chaos

I often have trou­ble mix­ing orna­men­tals and veg­eta­bles together in a gar­den bed that’s sup­posed to be “for com­pany,” a bed that’s meant to be attrac­tive as well as con­tain­ing tasty-looking plants that you’d like to take to the din­ner table.

Some parts of the gar­den where I’ve snuck veg­gies in with the other plants look a lit­tle chaotic, but here’s a patch that I really like the looks of. Ear­lier I showed part of this cor­ner that the bed­room win­dow over­looks. But new things are start­ing to bloom, and the col­ors are start­ing to really click for me.

When I was putting this bed together, I set myself the main rule of “noth­ing yel­low.” In decid­ing what veg­gies to place there, I just stuck to that orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple. (Okay, can you tell that I work in libraries and orga­nize infor­ma­tion dur­ing the week?)

This bed fea­tures sev­eral edi­bles: red-stemmed chard, orange-stemmed chard, Red Win­ter red Russ­ian kale, red beets, plus cat­mint for tea (and for the cat). The orna­men­tals include scar­let geum, pur­ple heliotrope, vio­let blue-eyed grass, the salmon-colored bulb Home­ria col­lina, two blue sages (Salvia sagit­tata and Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia) plus a few other things not in bloom.

For sure, there’s a lot of red and blue and pur­ple going on here. But sev­eral vari­a­tions on green in the back­ground green do won­ders to pull together what might oth­er­wise be chaos.

I’m going to hate cut­ting any of these veg­gies for dinner…

April 04 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: blue • color • color combinations • flower beds • purple • red • vegetable gardening • vegetables • violet | 9 Comments »

gbbd: pretty purple

For this Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day I’ve picked some pre­dom­i­nantly pur­ple spring-flowering plants that are start­ing to do their thing in my gar­den. All but one of these are Cal­i­for­nia (or Baja Cal­i­for­nia) natives, and all would be seri­ously water-wise choices for the gar­den. Some would even make it through an entire sum­mer with­out water, though they’d look just a lit­tle bet­ter with a sip once or twice a month.

Blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum): What a great name for a great plant. This iris rel­a­tive is happy coex­ist­ing in a moderately-watered gar­den with other plants, though they can stand drought. Here they are liv­ing along­side some chard and heliotrope.

Blue dicks (Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum) are com­mon here near the coast and are one of our reli­able signs that it’s spring. They self-sow and spread around the gar­den, but not obnoxiously.

Black sage (Salvia mel­lif­era) is one of the local canyon plants that’s earned a place in the gar­den. In life the flow­ers are a slightly stronger pale mauve color than here in the photo. It’s just begin­ning to come into flower and should be a lit­tle more intense in a cou­ple weeks. Though not one of the “look at me” sages, it’s still qui­etly beautiful.

Ver­bena lilacina orig­i­nates in Baja. The plant shown here is just get­ting started. It should flower much of the year and require very lit­tle sum­mer water.

This one’s maybe closer to blue than pur­ple, the South African bulb Morea tripetala. I stuck it in a really dry spot, and it’s now prob­a­bly just bloom­ing on the reserves in the bulb. We’ll see how well it does after a sea­son of tough love in the garden.

And with the last photo we come back to Cal­i­for­nia with the jus­ti­fi­ably ever-popular Pen­ste­mon Mar­garita BOP (some­times sold as Pen­ste­mon het­ero­phyl­lus ‘Mar­garita BOP’). The flow­ers are a wild mix of blue and magenta pink, giv­ing the over­all impres­sion of pur­ple. The open tubu­lar flow­ers have some­thing of the look of a fox­glove which would require a cer­tain amount of water, but this pen­ste­mon actu­ally does just fine with almost no added water.

Thanks to May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day. Check out the page with glimpses into what’s bloom­ing all around the world.

March 15 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • plant profiles | Tags: black sage • blue dicks • blue-eyed grass • color • Dichelostemma capitatum • drought-tolerant landscaping • gbbd • native plants • Penstemon heterophyllus • Penstemon Margarita BOP • purple • Salvia mellifera • Sisyrinchium bellum • Verbena lilacina | 12 Comments »

garden-deficit disorder

It’s get­ting to be that sea­son. My morn­ings are now see­ing me at work around sun­rise and home at a time when it’s almost dark by when I’ve fin­ished prepar­ing and eat­ing din­ner. And for the next two months it’s only going to be get­ting worse as we head towards the dark­en­ing maw of win­ter. At least I only do these long days four times a week. Still, I’m get­ting a seri­ous case of with­drawal from the garden.

This is the time of year when I really start to feel envi­ous about John’s posi­tion, work­ing out of the house. In between doing what he does on the phone and com­puter he gets a chance to keep up with the hap­pen­ings on the street. The neigh­bors across the street just had a new baby, John reported, and he’s really cute. John also reported that the mother of one of our neigh­bors just died, and the neigh­bor two houses down is now in a nurs­ing home, com­pletely inco­her­ent, after being ambu­lanced away from the house not much more than a week ago.

Look­ing at the implaca­ble facades of the houses on the street, it’s hard to tell that any­thing is hap­pen­ing. But being home, around the neigh­bors, John is able to keep up with dramas.

John is also able to keep up with things hap­pen­ing in the gar­den. A story from the past week was of look­ing out the win­dow to see the cat din­ing on the ten­der new leaves of the mil­let seedlings that I’d set in the ground not many days before.

“You didn’t stop her?” I protested.

“It was soooo cute,” he said.

Well, this was the cat over last week­end. How can you dis­ci­pline basic instinc­tual behav­ior in such a sweet cat? Okay, okay, I calmed down a bit.

But I was still wor­ried about the mil­let plants.

Left: Orna­men­tal mil­let, Pen­nise­tum glau­cum ‘Pur­ple Majesty’ [ source ]

Orna­men­tal red mil­let hit the gar­den world in a big way with the intro­duc­tion of the Pur­ple Majesty F1 strain in 2003. This slen­der four– to five-footer was awarded the All-America Selec­tions Gold Medal, which basi­cally assured that the plant would end up in gar­den cen­ters and seed cat­a­logs all over. That strain spawned oth­ers, includ­ing the shorter ‘Jester,’ which I’ve been start­ing to see a lot of–even at the Home Depot gar­den center.

Even though pur­ple mil­let is now so déclassé, now that it’s hit Home Depot, I decided I wanted to try it. A seed order a few weeks back brought me a hefty packet of the orig­i­nal Pur­ple Majesty. Some of the seeds went into pots and they sprouted in less than a week. And then the lit­tle fel­las were ready for the gar­den, when they were adjust­ing and start­ing to increase in size. And then the lawn­mower cat attacked.

Well, I’m glad to say, I could hardly see any cat dam­age to the seedlings–a chewed blade here and there, but noth­ing major. Here’s a lit­tle clump of them as they stand today. The largest is push­ing eight inches tall, and the red col­oration is start­ing to develop now that they’re bask­ing in full sun half of the day. It might be too late in the year for them to develop the dra­matic seed heads, but I’ll have some nice pur­ple, ver­ti­cal plants in the gar­den in no time. Since these are hardy to zone 8, they’ll make it through win­ter just fine and be bloom­ing away before you know it.

Any­way, now that I’ve have a cou­ple hours in the gar­den this morn­ing I’m feel­ing reju­ve­nated, espe­cially now that I know that the plants I’ve been slav­ing over lately have come through unscathed. And of course it’s been nice to have some gar­den time to spend with the cat. To pro­tect the mil­let, I’ve been point­ing out to her the lit­tle grass seedlings that are real weeds. So far the feline lawn­mower seems con­tent with the other options.

October 17 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: cats • October • Pennisetum glaucum 'Purple Majesty' • purple • purple millet • the neighborhood | 2 Comments »

the little black book

I guess I’m a lit­tle old-fashioned because, yes, I occa­sion­ally still buy books. Even with all the infor­ma­tion you can find on the web, there’s some­thing sat­is­fy­ing in hold­ing a book in the hand. It’s the dif­fer­ence between look­ing at a cal­en­dar of flow­ers and actu­ally hold­ing one in your hand, feel­ing the soft­ness of the petals and tak­ing in the fragrance.

Last week’s mail brought me a copy of a book I posted on recently, Karen Platt’s Black Magic & Pur­ple Pas­sion: Dark Foliage and Flow­ers for the Gar­den. This is a slen­der lit­tle vol­ume that has its heart a long list­ing of plants that have black or dark pur­ple attrib­utes: flow­ers, foliage, or stems. Most of the plant descrip­tions come with brief infor­ma­tion on cul­ti­va­tion and propagation.

There are dozens of pho­tos of indi­vid­ual plants, but because of the eco­nom­ics of pub­lish­ing they’re all clus­tered on the glossy pages in the cen­ter of the book. It would of course have been more use­ful to have the images next to the descriptions.

Ear­lier I posted a cou­ple plants in my gar­den that I’d con­sider black or dark pur­ple, and this book listed one of them, black bamboo.

The book addi­tion­ally men­tions a cou­ple oth­ers that are already in my gar­den. Aeo­nium arboreum, shown here in semi-shade against the green leaves of an aloe, is a suc­cu­lent that has found a home in many South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­dens. I’d def­i­nitely con­sider it to have leaves that are very close to black. It’s incred­i­bly easy to grow as long as it doesn’t freeze.

Another of the plants listed in the book, Pen­este­mon dig­i­talis ‘Husker Red,” is one that I’d con­sider more to be more of a green plant that’s got gen­tle red-purple tints to the leaves. My plant lives in a semi-shaded loca­tion, how­ever, and given more sun it might develop darker foliage. Also, what one per­son would con­sider dark pur­ple, another might call a totally dif­fer­ent color. Time to get out the Pan­tone color charts!

Once you start think­ing about all the color you see in the plants around you, you could eas­ily add to the author’s list of dark plants. Here’s the ‘Pur­ple Vol­cano’ clone of a US East-Coast sage, Salvia lyrata. The flow­ers are insignif­i­cant, but the foliage is this gor­geous dark pur­ple. I have it planted here with yellow-and-red gail­lar­dia, though I think I’d have done bet­ter pair­ing it with pinks or blues. Well, it is trans­plant­ing sea­son, and it’s amaz­ing what a per­son can do with a shovel in five min­utes’ time…

Three plant­ing dia­grams in the book give some ideas about how these black flow­ers and plants could be used. One pairs the dark plants with gold col­ors, and a sec­ond uses silver-colored plants for a foil. The third shows an “island” plant­ing, where a walk­way sur­rounds a bed of dark plants. I’m sure that the plant­ing schemes would give you strik­ing results.

Unfor­tu­nately the book doesn’t have any real-world pho­tos of these plant­ing sug­ges­tions or of any of the dark plants in a real gar­den set­ting, and that’s prob­a­bly the books weak­est link. Per­son­ally, I can begin to imag­ine how a small hand­ful of plants might look together, but I really have to see pho­tos of the more com­pli­cated plant­i­ngs for them to make any sense to me.

Some­how all this color-theming seems like a par­tic­u­larly British thing–just think of Gertrude Jekyll’s influ­en­tial White Gar­den, planted in 1948 at Siss­inghurst. (And of course, Jekyll is well known for her dis­cus­sions of gar­den color.)

Even if you don’t want to cross over to the dark side, this books has many good ideas for plants that you could use to pro­vide pock­ets of dark inter­est through­out your own gar­den. What bet­ter way to appre­ci­ate the bril­liant flow­ers most of us have in our gar­dens than by hav­ing some sub­tle, dark plants to set them off?

October 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: black • color combinations • Karen Platt • purple | No Comments »