Zanthan Gardens
Category: Week by Week in the Garden

Dateline: 2006
The year continues to be remarkable for what’s not happening in the garden. No rain, of course, and that’s the cause of the rest of it. Despite the full sun (last week the last of the leaves fell) and English summer temperatures, no roses are blooming. The bluebonnets are only about 4 inches across. A few larkspur seedlings are up, but no cilantro and no nigella. The few tufts of false dayflower are dry and the tradescantia is up but feeble and withered.

On the upside, there are no weeds either. Usually goosegrass, henbit, and chickweed are choking every bed this time of year.

The dryness has taken on a quality quite unlike Central Texas. It’s not just the lack of rain, it’s the very low relative humidity. The air feels more like Santa Fe, or Las Vegas. Skies are desert blue and the visibility is so good that driving in from Houston Saturday, we could see Austin’s skyline almost from Bastrop.

First Flowers: Narcissus italicus (1/8).
Blooming: Unidentified paperwhites. Chinese sacred lily. Rosemary.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: 2006
I haven’t spent any time in the garden since I returned from Las Vegas (10/10). It’s been raining so I’m not needed in the watering for watering and I’ve been focusing all my attention on the kitchen remodel.

I do go out from time to time to check on my wards. The rain has brought up the paperwhite narcissus already! And here’s the Muscari six inches tall. And there’s the Narcissus simplex (given to me by kind reader, Shelly B, and obviously planted too late last year). The four o’clocks are in full flower and the oleander is looking better than its looked all summer but the plumbago has suddenly stopped flowering (too cold?)

The weeds are taking over. I prefer this problem to having to water.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: 2006
I return to Austin late Tuesday (10/10) night behind a line of thunderstorms. DFW was a mess after 5 inches of rain and flooding and flights were delayed an hour at minimum. However, I managed to fly standby on an earlier flight into Austin and my baggage made it on the plane to my utter amazement. I was hoping that the rain had also made it to Austin and it had.

By Friday (10/13) the meadow was aflower with rainlilies. And a late flush of oxblood lilies surprised me. The Nerium oleander is blooming again. Bluebonnets. cilantro, and daisies are popping up everywhere.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: 2004
If fall is the South’s spring, then oxblood lilies are our daffodils.

About three inches of rain which fell the other day have brought out the oxblood lilies en masse. A few had bloomed earlier when I watered the lawn near them. But those were just teasers. The garlic chives have been blooming since August 12. The hyacinth bean vines are flowering. I think they do best in the fall. The sago palm is putting out new fronds. I’m relieved since this is the first time since I transplanted it into the garden. Mostly I’m working inside the house right now, and just admiring the garden from within.

It’s in the 90s and muggy again this week after some cool dry weather last week. So it doesn’t feel like fall anymore. But we really needed the rain in the city. The last few storm systems to the northwest (which dumped 10 inches around Marble Falls) didn’t bring us any rain.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dateline: February 20, 2004

Valentine’s Day is usually when I mark the beginning of spring in Austin. The redbuds start blooming and spring takes off from there. But this year it snowed on Valentine’s Day. No matter. A couple of days later, the highs were in the 70s. With all the rain we’ve had recently, the flowers could hardly wait to strut their stuff.

Garden Spot in Houston reported her first Tommie crocus on February 16th. My first one opened today, on the 20th, as did the ‘Ice Follies’ daffodils, which is one of the most reliable daffodils for Austin.

Summer snowflakes and the Mexican plum started blooming yesterday.

And the yellow-flowered Sedum palmeri that Valerie shared with me have been blooming for a couple of weeks now. It’s just been too cold and rainy to snap a photo.

Dateline 2016

It rained all day. Luckily, I blew all the leaves off the roof and paths yesterday. It rained all day on Dec 3 in 2011, too. AJM went on the same 20 mile run while I worked on the computer huddled under the electric blanket, albeit on a different project. I did sow some larkspur seeds in the northeast corner in a spot I prepared yesterday. I can see why people who live in cold climates have so much time to bake and be crafty.

Dateline 2003

A very welcome gray day, misty, then drizzly, then a thunderous downpour. Just yesterday the Statesman was reporting that Travis County was under a burn ban, since we only received two-thirds of our usual rain for the year. All around us, the rain levels have been normal or higher than average. But Austin is in a little black hole of rainlessness.

And then today it rained. I gathered the rain harvest in every wheelbarrow and bucket I own. And, yes I do have a rain barrel. I just wish I had more.

A single rose blooms here and there. Today I cut ‘Peace’, ‘Souvenir de St Anne’s’ and ‘Blush Noisette’. I’m having a lot of problems with mildew especially on ‘Souvenir del Malmaison’ and ‘Madame Alfred Carriere’ which are along the same south-facing wall.

This year, I didn’t wait for a freeze to kill off the summer vegetables, but took action and cleared them out. A lingering death is so ignoble.

Dateline 2001

The weather is setting the holiday mood; it continues to be cold, gray, and drizzly. I like this weather in this season of Advent because it makes me feel like baking, or sitting in front of a fire writing Christmas messages.

The garden needs tidying, but it will have to wait. I’m not in the mood to rake sodden leaves and the lawn is too wet to mow, even though it needs it. The bright green annual rye has now grown 6 inches.

Only the trailing lantana is in full flower. Some of the Grand Primo narcissus are sending up their flower spikes. The nandina berries are brilliantly red against deep green foliage (the foliage in my yard has not changed color as I’ve seen in other places).

In past years, I’ve spent this week cleaning up freeze damage. There is a sense of relief in the finality of a really hard freeze. But Austin’s first big freeze two weeks ago did not affect our yard. Both in summer and winter, the buildings downtown store and radiate heat, always making our yard a couple of degrees warmer than the official temperature at Camp Mabry. So the old tomato and basil plants linger on and I’m in no mood to deal with them.

Sunday was clear and sunny and almost hot. The temperatures reached the high 70s and the men rowing and jogging along Town Lake had doffed their shirts. The car was so hot inside that we turned on the air conditioning.

This weekend I was busy noting numerous first flowers: the redbud, the viola (from seed), the ‘Trevithian’ daffodils, and the grape hyacinths. Several bluebonnets were flowering. The ‘Ice Follies’ and ‘Quail’ narcissus and the summer snowflakes were in full flower. The smaller Mexican plums were just beginning to bloom. And the Bridal Wreath spiraea and the Lady Banksia rose were covered in small buds.

Then Monday dawned drizzly and cold, as most of February has been. Around 5PM, AJM called me from North Austin to say it was sleeting. I went outside and it was sleeting here too. I moved the potted plants back inside, but there wasn’t much else I could do. I was completely unprepared for what followed.

The Big Freeze (a photo gallery).

Yesterday, I woke up with a splitting sinus headache, my personal harbinger of rain. In the morning, it drizzled on and off. In the afternoon, we had a nice rain.

This morning when I went outside, I was surprised by a shock of cool, dry air. The first cool front of fall had blown in and the temperature had dropped ten degrees (though the low humidity made it feel even cooler). What a glorious day! The sky is a vivid blue and it actually feels good to be outside.

I had no choice but to spend the day gardening.

In a typical summer, the six weeks following Independence Day is season special to the south that I call “the Dead of Summer”. Until autumn rains sweep up from the Gulf (beginning the last week of August when we’re lucky) our gardens are at their bleakest. Temperatures top 100 degrees. Rain is nil. Although the 100 degree days average ten a summer, in 1991 we had 40. And rains never came. Ditto 1990.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve completed another overhaul to the In Bloom calendar. I’ve separated each month into its own calendar page (and file) because the year-long calendar was getting too large to read and to maintain.

These changes required that I then update the four seasons pages as well. Now each season links to the In Bloom calendars and to the weekly garden diary pages for the associated months.

Here’s an example. A Central Austin Garden | Spring
Read the rest of this entry »