Zanthan Gardens
Category: Garden Essays

I enjoy weeding after a rain. The air is fresh and the plants perk up. Best of all our clay soil becomes soft enough to relinquish its hold on the weeds.

Today I decided to work on the southwest corner of my yard which I refer to as the back forty. It’s part of my mini-woodland and I leave it mostly in a natural state to provide habitat for birds and lizards, as well as a hiding place for possums and armadillos. I’m glad I have room in my yard to allow for a little wildness.

2007-08-17. Before. Strangled in bindweed.

With all the rain Austin’s received this summer, the back forty has become a spot where you can no longer see the garden for the growth. Most of it is bindweed, wild ruellia, and turk’s cap. Underneath there somewhere is my ‘Little Gem’ magnolia and two tiny Texas mountain laurels that I’ve grown from seed.
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Friday a week ago, I was feeling rather frazzled and just needed to get out of the house. I sought solace in the Zilker Botanical Garden. It’s just down the street from my house and I can’t think why I don’t visit it more often. The crowds, probably. But last Friday was a rainy day in a week of rainy days. The gardens were almost empty.

I wended my way through the butterfly garden and slipped in the back way to the Hartman Prehistoric Garden. I’ve never seen it look so lush. The waterfall was flowing well and it looked like I had walked onto the set of some jungle movie…complete with surprises lurking around the bend.

I went back and snapped this photo today which was sunny and hot. It’s much more mysterious and evocative in mist and rain. I regret not carrying my camera with me always.

What attracted my attention most was this large white flower with an intoxicating scent. I couldn’t get enough of it. Whatever it was I wanted it for the bog garden-to-be next to my new pond.

I grew up in the desert and don’t have any experience with tropical or pond plants. A week passed and I stopped in at Emerald Garden to see if I could find it. I think I saw the plant but it wasn’t in flower so I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t find a label or anyone to help me, so I left.

Then yesterday, I visited Annie in Austin because her new Adirondack chair has inspired me to paint our outdoor table the same bright yellow…and I wanted to see what the color looked like in real life. Of course, the first thing we did was sniff around her garden. Everything is in bloom and looks lovely. And there it was. The mystery flower. It’s a ginger. And she gave me one! I’m so excited.

We also had a lovely conversation which ended up lasting all afternoon long. Both Annie and Pam/Digging have graciously acted as sounding boards this week for a decision I’ve been toying with. They allowed me to toss ideas around and provided tons of encouragement. I hope they know how much I appreciate it.

On the last day of my vacation, Margaret treated me to a gardeners’ field trip to Fryer’s Roses which is located only a few miles from her house. Fryer’s both sells and breeds roses. It’s been racking up the awards this last decade, receiving in 1999 The Queen Mother’s International Rose Award and then going on to win gold medals at Chelsea Show, Hampton Court Show, and Tatton Park Show. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, rent that movie Greenfingers.)

Established in 1912, Fryer’s remains a family business and is run by Gareth Fryer, grandson of the founder. He lives in a very nice house on the grounds of the garden centre. Margaret and I talk about how disheartening it must be to try to run a nursery business in a cold, wet summer like this one.

The first thing we did when we arrived (free parking! –that’s so unusual in England) was rush over to the roses growing in the fields.

No amount of mud was going to stop us from viewing the roses nor did a the little bit of rain dampen our spirits (although it did make it hard to take photos).

Rather than in display gardens, the roses (mostly Hybrid Teas) are grown in long (labelled, yay!) rows. I don’t grow any Hybrid Teas myself, so almost all of these roses were unknown to me. I liked the form and color of A Whiter Shade of Pale. The Floribunda Alderley Park caught my eye but I was particularly impressed with Champagne Moment with creamy apricot colored flowers and very green and glossy leaves showing absolutely no black spot despite the weeks of rain. And it was very fragrant.

Not all the roses fared so well in the wet conditions plaguing England this summer. This is “Pride of Cheshire”.

I was intrigued by the Fryer’s-bred Belle Epoque which has a very unusual bi-toned color. I couldn’t decide if I like it or not but I think that if I grew it, it would win me over because it is so different than anything I grow now. I got a nice glossy catalog from the man in the rose department to peruse on the airplane. I can dream of roses even if they aren’t likely to be available in the US. The rose man cautioned that roses that grow well in England might not take favorably to Texas. Don’t I know it!

After our tramp through the mud and flowers, Margaret took me to lunch in the cafe. We had sandwiches (I had to try watercress since I was in England) and coffee and a scrumptious dessert. It was raining and the cafe was packed. I can’t imagine going to a cafe in a nursery in Austin but it made so much sense in England where it rains a lot and the general lack of parking makes doing everything in one stop sensible.

After lunch we wandered around the massive garden centre, which includes plants, tools and chemicals, garden books, and a gift shop. (Austinites imagine Breed & Co.) We sniffed the confederate jasmine and I was transported home. We looked greedily at the passionflower vines and the clematis. Indoors, I was especially fascinated by the local foods, marketed as “The True Taste of Cheshire”. I saw my favorite, Tyrell parsnip crisps and discovered discovered Moffat Dollop. I passed, this time, because I’d already bought Moffat Toffee on this trip.

Fryer’s also has a section of glass conservatories, children playscapes, outdoor furniture, grills and heaters (even Mexican chimineas), landscape paving and gravels, pots, and statuary. Of all the nurseries/garden centers in the Central Texas area, Fryer’s reminded me most of Wildseed Farms (although Fryer’s is a bit more upscale…upmarket, they say in England.)

If I lived in Knutsford, I imagine that I’d go to Fryer’s Roses frequently just to have a cup of coffee with a friend and then walk around chatting and picking up odds and ends for the garden or the kitchen and gifts for just about anyone.

We made a dinner of tomatoes, fresh mozzarella (from Central Market), salami, and southern burgundy walnut bread (also from Central Market).

The yellow tomato ‘Persimmon’ was the best tomato I’ve ever eaten in my life. It was both tart and tomato-y. The texture was fantastic, almost like a ripe mango (but not stringy). It was all flavorful flesh and very little gelatin.

The ‘Black Krim’ continues to be a disappointment. Two of the five that had ripene. ended up having split without my noticing and were rotten. For the most part they make a very pretty fruit but they seem watery and bland. Neither of us liked ‘Black Krim’ at all and I’ll never grow it again.

Here’s something you don’t see very often at Zanthan Gardens…a green lawn. Yep, June is my best month for lawns and the reason why, in my mind, June is the merry month of green. May showers bring June lawns.

2006-06-11. Even in the midst of the 2006 drought, some late May rains greened up the back lawn temporarily.

This year we’ve had May showers and June showers and April showers. In fact, it’s been raining in Austin since SXSW in mid-March. Today we had another inch to 4 inches, depending on where you were in Central Texas. (I think Zanthan Gardens got about an inch.) I’m not complaining! I’m celebrating. According to Jim Spencer, just half way through 2007 we’ve already received our normal annual rainfall.

Is your xeriscape rotting yet? The tallest of my yuccas keep falling over.

Over the years I’ve replaced quite a bit of my lawn with flower beds. But as you can see from the photo, this area is a bit shady for flowers or cactus or ornamental grasses or roses or herbs. The St. Augustine is more or less happy. And even after one of its unhappy years it always makes a comeback. I have not yet watered my lawn this year. In fact, I rarely water my lawns any year. Nor do I put any chemical fertilizers on it. This lawn is entirely caffeine driven. I mow it with a push mower so I feel absolutely zero lawn guilt.

I don’t usually write movie reviews on this site but then again I don’t usually come across a movie that involves gardening as a major plot device. (The only other one that comes to mind is The Secret Garden.)

I rented Greenfingers primarily because Clive Owen is in it. But I stuck around for the gardening.

Gardening is a national passion in Britain. From the fancy designers at the RHS Chelsea Show, to rural villages competing in Britain in Bloom Campaign, to urban guerilla gardeners, everywhere you look, you’ll find gardeners. Even in prisons. Clive Owen plays a murderer who is sent to a progressive prison where he discovers he has greenfingers (the British equivalent of our greenthumbs).

If you believe in the restorative power of gardening, then you’ll probably like Greenfingers. It hovers in the territory of heartwarming without quite being treacly, thanks to a great cast. Helen Mirren is especially fun as Georgina Woodhouse, a Rosemary Verey/Penelope Hobhouse/Martha Stewart-type gardening doyenne.

I was hooked from the opening sequence because I recognized the village that Clive Owen was riding his bike through as Lower Slaughter, which we visited last year. England in the movies always looks so impossibly charming that it can’t be real. So I was very excited to recognize this very street.

Although we spent only a couple of hours walking around the Slaughters, they made quite an impression.

This is a very sweet movie; however, gardeners with children might care to note that it is rated R for language and sexuality (romp in the woods with visible male butt, unfortunately not Clive Owen’s).

Several people have asked me how to propagate bluebonnets…how to tell if the seeds are ready. It’s easy. Don’t cut back the bluebonnets or mow until the seed cases are brown and you can hear the seeds ratttling inside. If you tap the seed case and it pops open, you know they’re ready.

To release their seeds, bluebonnets pop open with a little twist.

You can let the seeds reseed on their own (a bunch will anyway, as long as you don’t mow). With this method, some will be lost to birds, fire ants, and hot weather. Or you can collect the seeds, store them in a cool dry place, and sow them where you want them in August before the fall rains. If we have a rainy early summer, some bluebonnets will sprout now but, unless you baby them through the long, hot summer, they probably won’t survive until fall.

Bluebonnets naturally sprout in the fall, grow all winter, and flower the following spring.

You’ll find all sorts of advice for nicking the hard seed coats or rubbing them with sandpaper. This might be necessary with old dry seeds that you buy. I never do it because my own seed is fresh. Sometimes I soak them overnight or until they plump up. I did this the first couple of years to get started but now I have more sprouts than I can deal with an so I don’t need to go to any extra trouble. I let them sprout and transplant them where I want them.

Bluebonnets have hard coats so that they don’t sprout all at once if it rains. In Texas, it might rain and some sprout, and then die off in a long dry spell. But since they don’t all sprout at the same time, some are kept in reserve until more favorable conditions present themselves.

I never thought I’d say this about Austin but it’s so GREEN here! I’ve just returned to the garden after a week in New York City. This was my first trip to New York and we arrived the day after a massive storm shut down jetBlue. The streets wer. snowy and then slushy and then just a mess. But I loved the novelty of snow. We threw snowballs at each other and I built a snow sculpture. I thought snow enhanced the romance of the city and it was nice to walk around without immediately breaking into a sweat. (I was back in the Austin’s muggy 70 degrees only 20 minutes before I smelled like I hadn’t had a bath in a week.)

2007-03-23. The bluebells are blooming in the south border. They don’t mind the shade. All the work I did lugging the Christmas tree mulch paid off. The path looks neat and woodsy, doesn’t it?

Austin had heavy rain last week and which obviously continued in our absence. The garden is transformed into intense green. The cedar elms have completely leafed out and at this time of year their green is dark and deep. Sitting at my kitchen table you’d think we lived in a tree house. The weeds in the lawn are a foot high. The tradescantia has taken over the back. The bluebonnets, baby blue eyes, and cilantro are in full bloom. The ‘Quail’ daffodils provide a bit of yellow to brighten all my blues and purples.

2007-03-23. The meadow looks like a meadow now.

I knew I was going to miss a lot of first flowers. The Tulipa clusiana is in full bloom. The bluebells finally opened. The rose ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ is full of huge flowers. She has a tendency to ball when the weather is humid and the day before I left I had to strip the outer petals of three buds that looked like they were about to open. I come home and she is blooming her head off. Other roses with their first flowers: ‘Madame Alfred Carriere’, ‘New Dawn’, and ‘Blush Noisette’. The new ‘Ducher’ has been blooming for awhile and continues to look nice.

No sign of the spring cankerworms yet. Hmmm. They usually show up when the trees are leafing out. (One hour later: Ah ha! Found one.)

Not very much ever seems to get done around here. I do almost everything myself and I’m not a very focused worker. However, there are times when I call in the pros, one of those being when I need to have trees trimmed.

I have ten trees over 30 feet tall in my yard. Most of them are 50 year old cedar elms which like to drop limbs on my roof or crush fences. I also have a difficult pecan tree which grows into the electric wires. The city came out about six years ago and hacked it back but in such a way as to make the problem worse–cutting it to encourage thin waterspouts to grow into the wires.

So I called Tree Masters because I was pleased with work they did for me before. Miraculously, the hour and a half that they were here this morning was the sunny period in this couple of days of torrential rain we’ve received. They dealt with the pecan tree in the electric wires and one large limb from a cedar elm with ease. I was making the bed when I saw the limb come down. They roped it first and it seemed to float down to the guys below who maneuvered it away from my flower beds without dropping it.

In the short term, Tree Masters is not as cheap as hiring two guys with a chainsaw off the corner but in the long term it is a much better deal. They are insured. They don’t free climb or balance on long ladders. Their people are experienced, efficient, and neat.

I wanted to keep the mulch but the arborist who’d come out to spec the job last week said that if they already had chips from a previous job that they’d have to dump them first because they wouldn’t want to infect my trees with oak wilt from another job. (One thing I like about professionals is the attitude that the customer is not always right; sometimes the customer needs to be educated so that she understands the ramifications of her choices.) As it turned out, the previous job was pecan, so I got to keep my wood chips plus what they had in the truck.

They warned me that there were some huge tree stumps in the back of the truck, but…greedy, greedy me! I just can’t turn down free mulch. I now have a pile of wood chips the size of a Hummer sitting in my driveway. What with the rain and all, I’m as happy as I can be.

Maybe I should have a mulch moving party. Everybody bring a wheelbarrow.

2007-03-14. The sight that greeted us as we walked out the door this morning. AJM dubbed it “Mulch Mountain”. Gee. Those stumps do look big.

I just came in to take a break from my gardening break. My indoor breaks usually involve a little surfing and over at Garden Rant a couple of entries lately have lamented the news that some Americans don’t garden because it’s work. Eeew! And dirty.

The 2 cents from some commenters is that gardens don’t have to be hard work. I don’t know what paradise they garden in but, honey, in Austin, Texas gardening is hard work. Hard, back-breaking work.

The twinge in my lower back today comes from turning the compost pile and moving half a dozen wheelbarrow loads of compost into the winter rose bed. I still haven’t finished last week’s project of putting Dillo Dirt around my large bushes and small trees even though AJM made it easier for me by helping me move a 22-liter bag next to each of the plants I wanted to fertilize. I thought that would take a day….so that chore is in overtime.

Let’s not forget th. 32 bags of Christmas tree mulch that I hauled from Zilker Park and spread over all my paths. And the still-to-be-blogged-about-when-it’s-finished front path project which involved me moving 3 tons of gravel a bit at a time because trying to put it in a wheelbarrow resulted in the wheelbarrow being too heavy to move. That damn project required all the levelling of the paths beforehand and laying down horticultural cloth so that the paths retained their shape and bindweed didn’t sprout through.

Speaking of chores I hate: pulling up bindweed and poison ivy and cutting back smilax and nandina; chopping out hackberry and chinaberry sproutlings.

Digging holes for new plants is also always a day-long struggle involving prizing out rocks and cutting out tree roots.

Then there’s just the normal boring stuff…not hard work but tedious, mindless stuff. I’m still cleaning up red oak leaves from all the beds and paths, hacking back English ivy, cutting back perennials, trying to get the trees pruned before they break dormancy, and watering. And then there’s always weeding.

All those chores take a back seat to the stuff I enjoy doing: transplanting seedlings and dividing bulbs and playing in the dirt. Fear of Soil? I’m not stricken with that phobia. I love gardening precisely because I like having my hands in the dirt. I never wear gloves. I get a thrill in squashing grubs with my bare hands. I love the feel and smell of rich, moist earth. Any veggies or flowers that result from my messing around in the dirt are a bonus. That’s why my garden is not a hot tour spot. It’s more for feeling than for looking at. You have to get down on your knees to appreciate it properly.

Do I ever just sit in the garden? enjoy a cup of tea? read a book? Nope. We bought a hammock years ago and an Adirondack chair. But I can’t sit down a second without seeing something that needs to be done.

I enjoy being in the garden, but relaxing it ain’t.