Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Those who think gardening is a safe haven from the nasty divisiveness of politics haven’t been keeping up.

Whether it’s choosing to grow vegetables or a lawn (if one is even permitted the choice by one’s neighbors), calculating how much water to use in the time of drought, or even releasing carbon into the air by digging in the soil–no matter your choices, you will run afoul of someone’s politics.

Even the seemingly innocuous winter pleasures of perusing seed catalogs can have public consequences. Are the seeds treated with fungicides? Are they genetically altered? Are hybrids an attack on genetic diversity and the economics of seed-saving? Perhaps you subscribe to a native plants only policy. Is growing flowers a waste of land, water, and energy that should be reserved for growing food? Or is it our duty to grow flowers in order to provide wildlife habitats and encourage biodiversity?

What of the seed companies themselves? Aside from the almost universal agreement that Monsanto is a bad actor, do we care who develops, selects, and distributes the seeds we depend on?

I usually buy sweet alyssum in six-packs from a big box store. I love it’s thick honey-scent on a warm spring day and the flowers last usually until mid-May or until Austin’s high temperatures are in the mid 90s.

This year I decided to see if I could grow it from seed and it was ridiculously easy.

Botanical Interests ($1.69 250mg). Alyssum, sweet ‘Tiny Tim’. Packet blurb, “Much superior to ‘Carpet of Snow’—dense, compact dwarf plant never needs to be sheared. Fragrant white flowers all summer!”

Garden History

2008-10-12.
Plant two rows (the whole packet) of sweet alyssum ‘Tiny Tim’ in raised vegetable garden.

2008-12-19.
First flower. And I haven’t even gotten around to transplanting them yet!

Morticia Addams was my second role-model as a child, a fact that becomes more evident in April when the bluebonnets and larkspur come into flower and I run around the meadow busily snipping off flowers as soon as they open. All winter and early spring I cultivate and nurture my wildflower meadow waiting impatiently for the flowers to open, checking every day, poking at buds. Then. They open. And it’s off with their heads!

My meadow flowers are rampant self-sowers. In the larkspur, especially, there is wide variation. I’m notoriously selective. I save the seed of my favorites and throw out the rest. I hoped, over time, to develop a strain of larkspur that favored the exact conditions of my micro-climate and of the variations I like best.

I used to simply collect the seeds from the plants I liked and cut the ones I didn’t like out before they set seed. Someone laughed at me and said they were probably cross-pollinating anyway. So now I cut off the flowers of the ones less favored as soon as they open.

I always collect and label seed but nature typically has a head start on me so much of what sprouts the next year is from seed I didn’t sow. I do find repetition over the years which makes me think the seed does come true. But there is variation, too, like the strange green-flowered larkspur in 2008 (which unfortunately didn’t set seed).

This year I decided to take a more scientific approach. I sowed the seed in marked rows and I’m transplanting each type together so that I can see if the seed comes true and to what extent.

I’ve always been interested in selective breeding. As gardeners we can pick and choose the characteristics of our open-pollinated plants, keeping those with the characteristics we favor: best flavor, disease-resistance, color, size, early blooming or late bolting. Indeed we reap what we sow. These last 20 years has seen an resurgence of interest over heirloom varieties. Someone (I can’t remember who) made a point about heirlooms that I found quite interesting: the ‘Persimmon’ tomato that I grow is not the ‘Persimmon’ tomato that Thomas Jefferson grew–although it may be a descendant. In each generation we select a few choice tomatoes for their seed and over the generations, they vary (not from mutation but from selection–gardeners and farmers are the intelligent designers). So even the same open-pollinated tomato variety from different sources may differ.

All the larkspur in my garden comes from two sources. The first was a packet from central Texas-based Wildseed Farms (which they label as Delphinium ajacis, rocket larkspur) which I bought at Barton Springs Nursery in 1994. The other was from Select Seeds (so appropriately named!) a selection named ‘Earl Grey‘. The ‘Earl Grey’ has never been silvery or slate grey but always a strange muddy mauve. I thought they’d died out of the garden completely but one or two comes up every year.

I began transplanting my larkspur seedlings on New Year’s Eve….very, very late but it has been so dry and the meadow (and thankfully the weeds) are off to a slow start. Already I’m impatiently waiting to see what will develop.

Dateline: 2008
Two out of three of my ‘New Dawn’ roses have been flowering all December. The flower above is from a bud I didn’t see and pick before our last hard freeze. It survived and opened but you can see from the brown spots that it is frost damaged.

After the droughts of 2006 and 2008, I don’t have very many roses left in my garden. The David Austin ‘Heritage’ rose which was blooming on Christmas Day 2007 died. However, ‘Blush Noisette’ is still going strong, blooming in what passes for cold in central Texas but also doing well in Austin’s summer heat. This Christmas Day her flowers are either bud or blown.

‘Blush Noisette’

I’m bending the rules this year to show you my newest amaryllis, ‘Amoretta’. It opened about a week ago and has had to be protected from two hard freezes and then be immediately uncovered as temperatures soared into the 70s. As such it is a bit battered. I notice with roses that cold weather tends to intensify colors and I wonder if this is true with this amaryllis or whether this is its true color.

Amaryllis ‘Amoretta’

Dateline: 2007

2007-12-25. Roses blooming on Christmas Day in Austin, TX. ‘Blush Noisette’
This has been a very good year for December roses throughout Austin. Two light freezes, last weekend and this, haven’t damaged the roses much especially those growing in a protected area along walls or privacy fences. The white flowered China rose, ‘Ducher’, is my only rose that is covered with flowers. Looking over my history below, I see that ‘Ducher’ and ‘Blush Noisette’ are my most reliable Christmas roses. Around town ‘Mutabilis’ also seems to do very well in this cooler weather.

2007-12-25. ‘Ducher’ is the only rose in full bloom; the snowy white against the red of the nandina berries is about as close to Christmas colors as we get in Austin.

The freezing night temperatures intensify the colors of ‘Heritage’. The flowers also opens more slowly last longer than in spring or summer.

2007-12-25. Another flower opened on ‘Heritage’; this one is a little smaller and more ragged than the one that opened for GBBD.

The downside to winter roses is that the buds are vulnerable.

2007-12-25. Freeze-dried buds on ‘Blush Noisette’.

The ‘New Dawn’ rose that I started from a cutting has a bud.

2007-12-25. A cane of ‘New Dawn’ has sprawled across the pinks; this bud didn’t quite make it open for Christmas Day…but we have 12 days left of Christmas.

Read the rest of this entry »

Carol at May Dreams Gardens invites us to tell her what’s blooming in our gardens on the 15th of each month.

Paperwhites and roses. Crocuses and coneflowers. English peas and summer squash. To you gardeners with more distinct seasons, you probably think Austin gardens are a bit dysfunctional. And so we are. Last week we tied a record high of 81°F; the same night it snowed.

Our ground doesn’t freeze but neither do our plants go dormant. Yesterday we basked in the enviable 70s; tonight we face our first hard freeze of the winter–down to the mid-20s. Oh, I know that’s nothing compared to the onslaught of ice you northern gardeners are struggling with. Did I mention, our plants don’t go dormant?

Tonight Austin gardeners are racing around to bring in potted plants and cover everything tender with old sheets and blankets. Friday it will be in the 70s again. The hope and heartbreak of December are in every bud. Like the crocus above, most flowers decided to hunch their shoulders against the cold today, and huddle petals closed.

Buds

The coral vine, Antigonon leptopus, hasn’t frozen back to the ground yet, but it’s flowers refuse to come out and play.

I had hoped my most recent amaryllis acquisition would flower in time for GBBD but it is just as likely to freeze tonight without ever opening.

Last week the ‘New Dawn’ rose along the front fence was flowering nicely. This ‘New Dawn’ in the back yard was just about to open. I cut it after this photo and brought it in…

…along with this ‘Blush Noisette’ bud which has already opened in the vase.

Most of the rest of the roses look like this ‘Blush Noisette’–browned by recent light frosts and a bit windblown and worn.

Summer’s Decay

I rather like this faded coneflower and it’s valiant attempt to keep blooming despite summer’s passing.

I don’t care at all for the Port St. Johns creeper but it is the only thing in the garden that is blooming with abandon and I have to admire that. Perhaps by morning it will be frozen and I can hack it back and uncover the rose it’s smothering.

Vegetables

My attempt to grow summer squash in the fall failed. I only got one small squash off of eight plants.

The English peas just started blooming last week. No peas yet. I think, with the row cover on, they might survive tonight’s low temperatures.

Herbs

The lavender just started blooming this week.

The rosemary has been blooming all month. It was too gloomy and windy for the camera to focus.

Seasonal

Let’s end this bloom day with December’s own flower…the only thing blooming “in season”–the paperwhite narcissus.

Postscript

Not pictured but flowering, the duranta and some very faded roses on ‘Ducher’.

Dateline: 2008
I finally followed through on my resolve to buy more fall crocuses and purchased 96 Crocus speciosus bulbs from McClure & Zimmerman ($23.95) and planted them on September 6, 2008. This time I bought the Crocus speciosus speciosus which the catalog assured me was the “earliest autumn flowering crocus to bloom…” with a “profusion of deep violet-blue flowers”.

The first six bloomed on November 23, 2008. I’m not sure what happened to the other 90. I suspect squirrels. I did cover them with wire after I noticed that the squirrels had been digging them up, taking a bite, tossing them to the side and digging for more. Hmmm. $23.95 for 96 teeny-tiny bulbs seems economical; for 6, not so much.

In Adventures with Hardy Bulbs, Louise Beebe Wilder is enthusiastic about the autumn flowering Crocus speciosus. It “is infinitely worth growing, all its ways are seemly, all its forms lovely.” For color in the garden, she much prefers it to the saffron crocus, C. sativus.

The flowers of [C. speciosus] are distinguished by their remarkable (for a Crocus) blue tone–it is the bluest of all the Crocuses–and they are very large, the outer segments marked with fine veining, while the stigmata are conspicuous for their size, and the fact that they are divided into a mass of orange-scarlet threads. It is the first autumnal species to flower, and it is always startling when it comes bubbling through the earth, innocent of leaves, usually after a warm rain in late September.” — LBW

Dateline: 2007
Despite my failing to buy more fall-flowering crocuses, as I vowed to do four years ago, two little blue jewels revealed themselves among the orange cosmos today.

Crocus speciosus. December 4, 2007.

In my garden, the autumn crocuses usually bloom, not in September but, in mid-November. I was disappointed when none did this year and thus even more delighted than usual when a late bloom surprised me today. Despite being described as the largest fall crocus, they are a tiny delight. I’ve never had any luck with the far showier spring-blooming crocuses.

Crocus speciosus. Austin, Texas. December 4, 2007.

Dateline: 2004

Crocus speciosus. November 11, 2004.

This one has different petals than all the others I’ve photographed. One is ‘Conqueror’ and the other is ‘Cassiope’. I know longer know which is which. When I buy more I’ll have to buy some of each and keep them in separate parts of the garden.

Dateline: 2003
One little crocus opened today, and four more promise to follow tomorrow. I must remember to buy some more next year. Even though, they disappear (maybe stolen by squirrels?), they bring unexpected pleasure every November.

Crocus speciosus. November 11, 2003.

I remember telling a coworker once that I had planted 100 crocuses. He thought I must have a yard full of flowers. But they are only about four inches tall. It would take 1000 of them to make a drift that anyone other than a gardener, who is always looking for the little things under leaves and among the weeds, to notice.

Crocus speciosus. November 10, 2003.

Dateline: 2002
One of the first bulbs I bought for the meadow garden was a type of fall-blooming crocus, Crocus speciosus. In the fall of 1996, I planted ‘Cassiope’. And later I planted ‘Conqueror’. They both bloomed beautifully in their first years and have waned in each succeeding year. However, every fall a few return to surprise and delight.

Crocus speciosus. November 6, 2002

Today, five bloomed. I think they are the ‘Cassiope’ since those have yellow throats. They have been described variously as sky blue, pale blue, and aniline blue.

Crocus speciosus. November 6, 2002

Carol at May Dreams Gardens invites us to tell her what’s blooming in our gardens on the 15th of each month.

Second fall has finally come to Austin. Temperatures were in the 80s yesterday and will be in the 30s tonight. We’ve had a few cool spells this month and the leaves are finally beginning to turn color. The Japanese persimmon is a deep gold, the crape myrtles a dull red, and under cover of a bright green canopy the red oaks are are changing. That surprised me because they are usually the last to color and lose their leaves, often not until the New Years. But the pecans remain stubbornly green and leafy still shading my winter garden. (This is an improvement on last year when they were shrouded in webworms.) The cedar elms remain green, too, but at least they are finally dropping leaves. The leaves on the bananas are looking ragged and yellow.

By the way, first fall is when the hurricane rains break the summer heat. We had a chance of that happening on September 13th when Hurricane Ike was forecast to dump six inches of rain on Austin. It veered to the east and north and we got zero. We had one rain in mid-October. Since then, no rain has fallen on Zanthan Gardens. Although some lucky Austinites benefitted from scattered showers earlier this week, we did not. So the garden is left high and dry. I don’t so much reap what I sow but reap what I water and that, the last six months, has been very little.

The only obvious flowers in the garden at the moment are the two rabid pink vines, the coral vine and the Port St Johns creeper. Everything else you have to hunt for. There is also a stand of wild white asters along the front fence.

The St Joseph’s Lily is blooming out of season. It sent up a stalk after that October rain, began blooming on sometime in November (did I Tweet it?) and the last flower is just fading today. I’m glad it lasted long enough to get count for GBBD.

November 15th, 2008

The list of all plants flowering today, November 15th 2008, at Zanthan Gardens.

• Abelia grandiflora (can’t see it because it’s under the coral vine)
• Asclepias curassavica
• Antigonon leptopus (still rampant over the chain link fence)
• Cosmos sulphureus (one plant in flower)
• Curcubita pepo (straightneck summer squash–has been flowering but really put on a show today)
• Duranta erecta (small flowers but doing well; one bush covered with golden berries, too)
• Hippeastrum x johnsonii
• Malvaviscus arboreus (flowering but the leaves look terrible)
• Nerium oleander ‘Turner’s Shari D.’ (a few flowers)
• Oxalis crassipes
• Oxalis drummondii
• Oxalis triangularis
• Podranea ricasoliana
• Plumbago auriculata
• Rose ‘Blush Noisette‘ (a couple of flowers)
• rosemary (just starting to bloom)
• Ruellia
• Setcreasea pallida (quite a few flowers)

Visiting Peckerwood Garden leaves me examining, once again, what a garden is. The first thought that springs to mind, and what I find most around the garden blogosphere, is the ornamental garden. For many of us gardening is about growing pretty flowers. Some are talented enough that they also design with plants, arranging flowers and foliage in complementary ways, considering not only spatial relationships among plants but changes over the seasons and over years.

People who design ornamental gardens often complement the plantscapes with hardscapes, with garden ornamention and furnishing to create outdoor living spaces. All that can be found at Peckerwood but it was not the essence of the garden.

Others turn to gardening to grow their own food. I do a little of both but neither is the primary reason I garden. I am among the group that finds gardening restorative. I’m not a garden maker; I’m a garden putterer. I like to be in the garden because I need to touch the dirt, to crumble it in my hands, to ground myself in silence and the physical world after hours spent at the computer.

As we move across the gardening spectrum from those who design with plants to those who collect them, there is one category that I don’t come across often either in gardens blogs or in my other garden reading: the experimental garden. And that, I think is what Peckerwood Garden is—an experimental garden.

Which is not to say that Peckerwood is not ornamental. It is. Not only are the beds laid out in pleasing ways but there are sculptures, a fountain and reflecting pond, a wisteria trellis, and great tree-lined walk bordered one side by a spring-fed creek and punctuated on the far end by the only live oak on the property.

As natural as the scene below may look, it is a made garden. All these trees were planted by John G. Fairey who began the garden in 1971. In 1983, a tornado swept through Peckerwood Garden destroying all the old trees.

There is even a formal, yew-hedge encircled space, a memorial to an old friend. Despite all this, it did not seem like a “designed” garden in the same sense as Powis Castle, Arley Hall, or Tatton Park. I think the main reason for that is that, except quite near the house, it is relatively free of hardscaping. As our wonderful guide, Chris, said, the shapes and sizes of the beds change as the trees grow and the shade alters the understory plantings. The design is extremely fluid and curvaceous.

Peckerwood is also obviously a collector’s garden, filled with rare plants collected from all over the world, many plants and trees propagated from seed. Yet it is not a garden of rarities for the sake of possessing what others do not have. Quite the opposite. The beating heart of this garden is its quest for biodiversity and conservation of the world’s treasures in the face of habitat destruction and the American suburban predilection for monoculture.

Peckerwood is a garden laboratory devoted to collecting, propagating, experimenting, and sharing. John G. Fairey brings the spirit of Thomas Jefferson to the garden.

I learned at the garden that Mexico has a tremendous biodiversity and that plants from Mexico are extremely adaptable to extremes. Plants that have been gathered from 6000 feet adapt to the almost sea-level altitude of east Texas. Plants that we think of as desert-born thrive on the extra water as long as they are planted in well-drained soil.

The tree above and the tree below are both oaks from Mexico. The dense, shrubby one above looks almost like a weeping yaupon holly and the one below has an open willowy look. Chris not only encouraged us to examine some acorns but to take them home; then he told us how to sprout them. When I looked at my acorns closely, I notice they were all beautifully mottled, quite different than the chocolaty dark acorns of my red oaks.

At Peckerwood Garden, they propagate plants, grow them on in the nursery for a year or two, set them out with shade cloth and irrigate them for another year, and then they are on their own. (Only 3 of the 21 acres are under irrigation.) Can they stand the alternating drought and flood, heat and cold that makes gardening in Texas such a challenge? The search is on for plants that can. And it is not limited to Mexico or the Americas. Complementary trees of the same species are sought out from China, Japan, or South Africa for comparison. Although careful not to introduce invasive species, Mr. Fairey does not feel constrained to stick just to local species either. Like the plant explorers of earlier centuries (including Thomas Jefferson), he is most interested in experimenting, making scientific comparisons, and finding out what works than promoting either local or exotics for philosophical reasons.

Peckerwood is having open days this weekend. They had begun setting out plants to sell. None of us could resist, of course.

Diana at Sharing Nature’s Garden organized a group of us Austin garden bloggers for this private guided tour. I’ll update this post with a link to the others as they become available.

1. Conscious Gardener @ Conscious Gardening
2. Libby @ Aurora Primavera
3. Lori @ Gardener of Good and Evil
4. Pam/Digging
5. Vertie @ Vert

Thanks, again, Diana! And to John Fairey who came out to greet us, and to our wonderfully informative, friendly, knowledgable and tireless guide, Chris.

I rounded the corner of the failed garden house and was stopped cold in my tracks by this sight.

I held very still, thinking I’d just come upon him unawares but then I realized he was lying on the ground and flies were hovering. I knew he must be dead.

He cannot have been dead very long because I didn’t notice him at noon when I took the compost out to the pile. Nor have the ants found him yet.

But how did he die? There isn’t a mark on him. And no, for all my railing against the raccoons, I didn’t kill him by poison or any other means. There is nothing in my own back yard to have poisoned him accidentally either.

I don’t rejoice in his death. I didn’t wish him harm. I just wished him life elsewhere.

None of my specially selected four o’clocks come back. But there’s no getting rid of this common one. It seeds prolifically and forms huge tuberous roots as well.

Aren’t those two colors just scary together?

lurid: very vivid in color, esp. so as to create an unpleasantly harsh or unnatural effect

I’m not, nor have I ever been, a fan of pink. Apart from a very pale ice pink of some roses—like my beloved ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison)—I don’t choose pinks on purpose. (And I’d love SdlM just as well if she were pale apricot–because what really I love about her is the quartered form of her flowers, not the color.)

I can admire the warming pinks of late spring and early summer. The colors of the meadow evolve with the season from the cool bluebonnet blues of March, to the larkspur purples of April, to finally the various warm May Day Pinks. Pink seems very seasonal–for Spring.

But Fall’s colors should be fiery.

Instead my garden is currently drenched in gaudy, garish pinks. And yes, these pinks have been blooming at the same time as the oxblood lilies, the turk’s cap, and the red spider lilies against a background of indifferent purple heart. The result is a garden colorist’s nightmare. Add in some orange cosmos and butterfly weed to complete the chaos.

Podranea ricasoliana is called desert trumpet/willow vine in Austin because the flowers look strikingly similar to the desert willow’s.

And what am I doing to resolve this problem? Nothing. Because these plants survive. They survived the entire summer without any attention at all. Not one drop of supplemental water. Although the coral vine did not climb 30 feet into a tree this year as it did in the rainy summer of 2007, it has covered my entire driveway fence (while trying to eat my husband’s car). And the bees love it. It drooped in the heat but never succumbed. Coral vine is just one of those plants I associate with old Austin. I’d as soon cut it out as move to the suburbs.

The four o’clock plants died all the way down to the ground during the summer but at the first hint of rain they shot up a couple of feet in a couple of weeks and have been flowering ever since. I like the scent and the plants get big only after most of the spring wildflowers are finished. So we have a truce.

Not so with the P. ricasoliana. I spend hours hacking back the Port St. Johns creeper (aka desert trumpet vine). The vines are voracious, swallowing up a large stand of yucca, taking over the entire north border by self-layering. They also form huge tuberous roots. There seems no way to get rid of them. I started out with three plants in 4-inch pots and they have swallowed up the north side of my yard, even though frost cuts them to the ground every year. Apparently they only get enough sun in my yard to flower about three weeks of the year, in late October. I think I could like them if they were less vigorous and flowered in spring. As it is, I regret I ever introduced them.