Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Retama (Parkinsonia aculeata) forms a small, airy, lime green tree that appears as fresh as spring on even the most droughty summer days. You can use it as a specimen plant or to create a vicious hedge. The smooth green trunks and branches are covered with serious spiny thorns hinted at by one of its common names, Jerusalem thorn. Retama can photosynthesize through its green bark; its Spanish name is palo verde (green bark). From a distance retama looks like it’s covered in stringy green streamers which cast a filtered shade. Having such very small leaves it loses little moisture to transpiration making it extremly drought and heat tolerant. Overall, it has a delicate, feathery appearance. Flowers are bright yellow.

Latin names are a bit confusing as the Parkinsonia clan used to be called Cercidium. The common names are worse as nurseries in Austin usually sell this as retama but it’s not the same as weeping white broom, Retama raetam. The City of Austin Grow Green site hedges its bet and calls it Retama Jerusalem Thorn.

Perhaps, as one reader suggested, it is overused in Phoenix. I imagine that when people first brought it under cultivation in those desert towns they were thinking, “Green! Green! Green!” And it’s such a carefree plant that it’s perfect for those median plantings along highways and outside of subdivisions. However, in Australia it’s an introduced invasive weed.

In addition to being spiny, retama has a reputation for being a messy tree. Mine is too small to make much of a mess. If you have small children, or a small yard, you might prefer to admire retama from the comfortable distance of your car. I’ve neither, so I’ve taken a chance with it. Give me another five years or so and I’ll tell you whether I think it’s a curse or a blessing.
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Rose dieback is not a disease, I’ve read, but it sure acts like one. The canes begin turning brown and dying back. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the rose just needs a little more water and extra loving care. Then, more and more canes die back and the rose is dead.

Your supposed to be able to squelch the spread of the dieback by pruning the cane low where it is still green. If you look at the the place you cut, there should be no brown center. Howeever, with ‘Ducher’ and major cane had died and I couldn’t cut it out without cutting the bush in half. No matter. The whole thing is dead now, to my regret. I always thought of ‘Ducher as my New Year’s rose as, here in Austin, it seemed to bloom best in the winter. I don’t know if that’s because it preferred temperatures in the 50s, or it was just relieved to be out of the shade of the pecan. I loved its lemony scent, its very reddish new growth, and that it formed a neat, dense shrub.

I lost “Caldwell Pink” to dieback last year about this same time.

I’ve always thought I was good pruner, but the primary cause of rose dieback is poor pruning–pruning too far above a node. Given that ‘Ducher’ was very dense and twiggy, she was difficult to prune. So I guess it’s my fault. Darn!

For us Austin gardeners worried about the effects of drought, heat, overuse and abuse on Zilker Botanical Garden, the gardens at Japan’s Adachi Museum of Art demonstrate what is possible under very different circumstances. Tuesday (6/20) Waturu Takeda and John Powell provided a window into another world of gardening to a room packed with eager gardeners at the Austin Area Garden Center .

Imagine a garden where a staff of gardeners works often 14 hours a day, every day of the year…a garden where vast beds and paths of gravel are swept every morning using a special technique, where the zoysia grass is clipped with small, electric hand shears, where brown leaves and clippings are brushed off the bushes and mosses, where hundreds of pine trees are pruned several times a year. And if there has been no rain by the end of the day, the entire garden is carefully drenched by hand with huge hoses.

In Austin, we argue about charging an admission to Zilker Botanical Garden to help protect it from boneheads who treat the garden like another playscape and thieves who walk off with the plants. In stark contrast, no visitor is allowed to walk through the gardens at the Adachi Museum of Art. Rather, the gardens are viewed from inside the museum, through windows designed to look like hanging scrolls. Each view of the gardens appears to be a living picture. All the intensive work of the gardeners is to ensure that the gardens remain picture perfect. The garden becomes part of the museum collection, complementing the seasonal changes of the artwork. The garden surrounds the museum, but the museum encapsulates the garden.

I’m curious whether other people at the presentation found inspiration in the beautiful film shown, “The Garden in Fours Season”. (I thought this mistitled as it showed the garden in spring, May, rainy season, summer, fall, winter, and early spring.) Is such perfection even desirable in a garden outside of the museum concept? Or did it feel sterile? too manicured? Each view of the garden is beautifully composed. But the real interest was noticing how the garden changed in time, through the seasons and through varying degrees of sunlight, rain, mist, and snow. The one view that I wanted to see that wasn’t in the film was the garden in moonlight.

Although John Powell hinted that concepts and techniques of Japanese gardening are transferable to the heart of Texas, the presentation did not touch much on that. Certainly there’s a big part of the summer in Austin where our gardens are best viewed from indoors. Aside from the concepts of borrowed views, strolling and viewing gardens, what can we learn from Japanese gardens?

I’m a hands-on person and a garden that is experienced primarily through sight ignores the textures, scents, and sounds that I think are vital to a garden. Zenko Adachi’s accomplishment in creating this magnificient garden must be admired. I’d love to visit it in person but it is not a garden I would want to replicate even on a small scale. Lacking the same resources of helping hands and water, my tiny Zanthan Gardens will remain mostly a garden of the imagination, hardly recognizable as a garden what with the laundry on the line, the sawhorses in the driveway, and hoses and tools lying about.

When those enemies of biodiversity, the fire ants, came marching in they cleared Texas pastures of chiggers and ticks, our suburbs of fleas and cockroaches. However, fire ants like moisture and our recent years of drought have driven them underground resulting in a such a resurgence of ticks that some Texas ranchers are wondering how to bring back the fire ants.

Of course, fire ants don’t just ravage populations of insects that humans find pesky. They kill young bird and reptile hatchlings and eat up wildflower seeds. They aren’t too kind to electrical wiring either.

In defense of the fire ants is Messina Hof Winery owner, Paul Bonarrigo, who says that having fire ants in the vineyards means he doesn’t have to use as much pesticide to protect his vines as he once did.

Entomologist John Ruberson is studying how fire ants loosen the soil with their many tunnels. Compacted soils make it difficult for plants to get optimum water and oxygen to their roots, which is why gardeners have embraced our friends the earthworms. But, our friends the fire ants? As the Dixie Chicks would say, “I’m not ready to make nice.”

— Via incandragon. The original article appeared in the June 12, 2006 edition of The Wall Street Journal. A reprint is available here.

That last cool and rainy week in May I popped in at Barton Springs Nursery as a reward for my taking my car in for it’s yearly inspection before the sticker expired. My wandering into a nursery is as wise as an alcoholic browsing at a liquor store. The last two years I’ve put myself under a strict plant-purchasing moratorium, taking advantage of these drought years to focus on the hardscaping of the garden in hopes of adding some structure and manageability.

Like everything marketable, plants are subject to human whims in taste, to horticultural fashion. Before me lay all sorts of plants I didn’t know, but the first to catch my eye was a tropical looking plant with lime-green leaves and delicate panicles of violet blue flowers, Duranta erecta. It’s common names are golden dewdrop, or pigeonberry, for its golden fruit which is poisonous to humans but beloved by birds. It is an attractive nectar plant for butterflies and hummingbird. Golden dewdrop is very trendy in Austin this year because it’s been named a Texas Superstar plant.

Disregarding my own advice about buying plants in the summer, seduced by the cool light drizzle stirring up memories of my recent week in England, I bought three of them. After all, they were on sale. [They’re on sale because it’s summer. They’re doomed. Don’t do it! — Your Rational Mind]

Everything about golden dewdrop reminds me of plumbago: its multiple, arching stems form a small fountain of a bush; its five-petaled flowers hang in loose racemes at the tip of each branch; its glossy, green leaves withstand heat and sun. Also like plumbago, golden dewdrop will die back to the ground in a freeze. So, although it is naturally a large bush or small tree, in Austin it will remain a mid-sized shrub. In colder climes than Austin, golden dewdrop is often grown as a potted plant and brought indoors to overwinter.

In its native South America golden dewdrop grows on limestone which means it should be happy in Austin soils as long as it is planted in a well-drained spot and not in heavy clay. (The requisite caveat in all garden writing.) It is reputed to tolerate drought (What do gardeners in Puerto Rico consider a drought?), poor soils, and some shade but it grows and flowers best if planted in a nice garden bed and watered.

In order to get them through the summer, I put the golden dewdrops in the front planter as potted plants. Recently, in order to clear the driveway of the gravel pile, AJM moved the stone into the reconstructed planter until I can use it elsewhere in the garden. Then I thought, hmmm, this looks like a design.
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Dateline: 2006
Austin’s heat wave continues, but it could be worse. It has been worse. In 1998, we hit a record high of 108 degrees on June 14. Today it was a mere 95–a breath of fresh air after yesterday’s 101.

We typically get an average of 4 inches of rain in June, making it one of our rainiest months. So if we Austin gardeners are grumbling and shaking our fists at the sky, we feel completely justified. Looking back over the last eleven years I see I note every shower and thunderstorm, wondering if it will be the last before the heat of real summer sets in. Not to worry. This year misery has already arrived. You northern gardeners can imagine it as the equivalent of an early frost which cuts down your plants in their glory and then is followed by a balmy Indian summer.

When June is a wet and mild month, I find it easy to succumb to the tempations of the nursery and plan and plant. Over the years, I’ve become suspicious of June’s charms and learned to put off any planting until fall. As heat wave 2006 continues, I am only in the garden between 7 and 9 in the morning. Almost all my time is spent watering with little time left for cleaning up seedy plants and dead-heading.
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Garden blogs have been all abuzz this week over lawns. In Austin we’re encouraged to replace our lawns with beds of native or xeriscape plants in order to cut down on our water usage especially if we want to enjoy our yards without being enslaved to a high-maintenance landscape. I don’t think the issue is so cut and dry. Typical homeowners, at least in South “Keep Austin Weird” Austin, don’t spend a lot of time watering or mowing their grass. Replace what passes for lawns in a lot of Austin with other plants and I think a lot more people will be spending a lot more time using a lot more water.

Those people unfortunate enough to live in places like Circle C where they’re required by neighborhood covenant to keep the grass greener on their side of the fence, even in periods of extended drought when we are under rationing, I’m guessing are rich enough to pay other people to do the maintenance. (How will this dynamic change with the current crackdown on illegal immigration?) Are they even allowed to replace their lawns? Ah, I digress.

When I acquired this house in April 1993, the entire front and back yards were covered in St Augustine grass. I was happy to have inherited an automatic sprinkling system until we got our first water bill. After I recovered from the shock and swore never to use the system again, I bought a sprinkler to fit on the end of the hose and watered only the healthiest parts of the lawn. In June of 1993, one of the cedar elms snapped in half during a storm. Suddenly the north quadrant of the backyard was baking in full sun. I let the marginal grass die, covered it with mulch, and began planning a wildflower meadow.

Over the next few years, I planted buffalograss, bluebonnets, larkspur and various small bulbs like rainlilies, species tulips, and fall crocuses. The meadow looked great in the spring, but very patchy and weedy the other 9 months of the year. Although buffalograss spreads by runners, it forms clumps rather than a smooth lawn. Therefore I don’t think it looks particularly nice mown. And the same characteristics that make it a haven for small bulbs and flowers, provide the same haven for weeds. I’m constantly battling horse herb (which grows up over buffalograss, shading and killing it) and other undersirables.

The blades of buffalograss are narrow and sharp. It is not a grass to wiggle your toes in or lie back in and watch the clouds. Over the years, various trees on the border have made the once sunny meadow area quite shady. Buffalograss does not like the shade at all. I like its color of dry hay (of green tatami), but in the worst heat of summer, it is not a color which is restful to our parched eyes.

In contrast, the deep green coarse blades of the St Augustine grass makes me want to fling off my shoes and throw myself back on it in delight. I do not spend a great of water on the St Augustine lawn. Unlike some other grasses, St Augustine likes mulch. I learned this from watching how it took over any path I made around the yard. So every time I see a bare spot or thin grass, I mulch it with a combination of Dillo Dirt and Texas native bark mulch. I don’t feed it any lawn food and it rewards me by not growing too fast.

I think of St Augustine as a southern grass. It evokes summer days under shady live oak tree with the whine of cicadas filling the air. Buffalograss creates a praire mood with its tall, wispy blades and loosely filled clumps undulating in billowing waves under a withering wind. Austin sits on Balcones Fault and shares characteristics of both the old South and the desert West. I pleased to have a little of both in my backyard.

I’ve gotten rid of all the lawn I’m getting rid of. Compared to the rest of the yard, it is low maintenace especially in ratio to the pleasure it provides.

Last week May ended on a cool and rainy note. This week we’ve skipped straight to July. The sun is shining as soon as it’s risen; no cloud cover to burn off, nor any of the towering cumulus clouds that seem to me so much like summer in Austin. Just stark blue skies and the kind of sunshine that you can feel burning your flesh the second you’ve stepped into the sunlight. However, desert-like, this is a dry heat. As long as you stay in the shade, it’s more pleasant than a typical humid June day, even if the temperatures are reaching for record highs. Margaritas, anyone?

I’ve always thought that one weakness of a lot of science fiction is that the imagination of writers and movie makers just can’t compete with the variety of plants and landscapes we encounter right here on planet Earth.

A May day in England left me literally speechless; I didn’t have the words to describe what I saw all around me. I pressed the natives to translate.

“What’s that bush we saw on the way in from the airport–covered with golden yellow flowers?”
“What? The gorse bush?” (Update: considered an invasive weed in North America, gorse is dangerously inflammable. Planting gorse in drought-stricken Texas would be a bad idea.)

“Wow! Those azaleas look like they’re on steroids.”
“Oh. You mean the rhododendron?”

Even my transplanted husband, who swears he can’t remember the crape myrtle in our own backyard, seemed to be an expert on his native flora. As we drove from Cheshire to Gloucestershire the untrimmed hedgerows were covered in white flowers, looking like monster sprays of spiraea. Remembering my own sad spiraea, I was impressed. “No.” AJM corrected. “That’s hawthorn.” (Update: Both are members of the rose family, so perhaps my confusion isn’t completely laughable.) He also knew cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) which looks like a giant cousin of our hedge parsley (Torilis arvensis) I wondered if it shares the same nasty seeds that stick to your socks when you walk through it. Although we Texans consider hedge parsley to be a rank week, in the UK it has its own Biodiversity Action Plan. Take mine! Please.

I was amazed by the huge broad-leafed trees we saw in flower everywhere–panicles of white flowers with red spots. “Horse chestnuts.” Then I remembered that I had seen the tree before in New York, after the chestnuts had fallen and AJM and SAM gathered them to make conkers.

A horse chestnut tree on Wardens Way between Upper and Lower Slaughter. Watch out for the nettles!

At Hidcote Manor Garden, I suddenly caught a whiff of Texas. I stood still a moment, sniffing. Skunk? We looked around. I brushed against some large leafed plants growing in water. So this is skunk cabbage.

I recognized some things from books and movies: lilacs (Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn), English bluebells (Howards End), and laburnum (any book on Rosemary Verey’s garden at Barnsley House in the Cotswolds). And now I know the shade of blue named for forget-me-nots.

I fell in love with the laburnum which, to my mind, look like yellow wisteria trees. I succumbed to the temptation that every garden explorer feels; I wanted to bring it home with me. No matter how sensible we know it is to plant native plants in our gardens, who can resist the lure of all these unusual beauties? I rationalize: the laburnum is growing in the same gardens as wisteria; I grow wisteria; shouldn’t I be able to grow laburnum?

English bluebells in a field of bracken.

I was inspired by the specimens of old wisteria, carefully trained to frame the front doors of many a Cotswold cottage. Many of these houses have tiny front gardens, yet the owners managed stunning abundance of flowers by thinking vertically. My own house is sheathed in limestone which is very close in color to the creamy oolitic limestone characteristic of the Cotwolds. Now that we’ve trimmed back the cedar elms in the front, the area by the door gets full sun most of the year. Hmmm. A perfect spot for another wisteria.

Inspiring wisteria growing in Broadway.

I was thrilled to see some old friends. I don’t think there’s a tree I love more than copper beech. I might try planting some purple-leafed ornamental plum trees just to remind me of my true love.

I’m always delighted by the chrome yellow fields of rape blossom.

Stunning fields of rape blossom on the rode from Moreton-in-Marsh to Oxford.

And I remembered the nettles from our previous visit. You have to meet a nettle only once and it will sear itself into memory.

Rain was falling on and off as we snaked along winding back roads through picturesque Cotswolds villages on our way to Hidcote Manor Garden. A covey of Japanese tourists flitting across the street in Chipping Campden was the first hint of the international popularity of Hidcote, which has been called one of the most influential gardens of the 20th century. Why? Despite its 10 acres, Hidcote is an extremely intimate garden. Lawrence Johnston created a series of small garden rooms, each with a unique character which comes into full bloom at varying times of the season. This garden room approach to design was adopted by Sissinghurst and Tintinhull.

As you step into the garden, the view of the whole is cut off by tall hedges. The first room we entered was the White Garden. The layout is small enough to fit in my back yard. Of course, I could never grow hedges like these in Texas and, if I could, I’d need an army of garden helpers with clippers to keep them looking this neat. I’ve seen many photographs of the White Garden and have to say that during our visit the flowers looked sadly beaten down by the rain. Even the best gardens have less than perfect days. The tulips and daffodils were mostly finished, anyway, and the roses (“Gruss an Aachen” which I had before the drought killed it) hadn’t begun blooming yet.

In the White Garden AJM examines the map of the garden and is surprised to discover that it just “goes on and on”.

The White Garden has an exit through the hedges on each side of the square which gave me the feeling of playing a video game as we tried to decide which way to go. We circled around several times trying to take it all in before heading through the Old Garden (which had an exuberant cottage garden feel), through the Circle (a restful circle of perfect lawn), and then down through the Fuchsia Garden (formal maze).

The Fuchsia Garden manages to look nice even when the Spanish bluebell (?) bulbs have died down. Knot gardens (aka parterres) became fashionable when people realized that the hedges used to line their borders could be just as interesting as flowers and a more reliable element in the design.

From the Fuchsia Garden, topiary birds guard the entrance to the Bathing Pool Garden (classically formal and elegant) which in turn leads to the Upper Stream Garden (semi-wild). What a place to play hide-and-seek!

The Upper Stream Garden.

We walked up to one of my favorite views, the Winter Garden. I think I liked it because it felt so open after the smaller garden rooms. This contrast between open and intimate, formal and informal, and of colors and textures is the genius of Hidcote.

The Winter Garden.

Running parallel to the Winter Garden is the Red Border. I really liked the color choices in this garden…all the maroon-toned leaves were a relief after the intense English greens.

In the Red Border clumps of red-toned trees and shrubbery contrast against the angular green lawn and hedges.

Just as Hidcote’s maze of garden rooms starts to become a little claustrophobic, the Long Walk suddenly provides a vista.

The Long Walk and its hornbeam hedges.

And still the garden goes on. We cross over to the famous Theatre Lawn, which is supposed to highlight a single beech on its stage. We didn’t see it though. Has the beech died? Then we went on through the Pine Garden and Lily Pool, took shelter in the Plant House, and continued down the Rose Walk which didn’t have any roses. Instead large purple alliums were in bloom, and so many other purple flowers that I would have called it the Purple Border.

I’m sorry to say that our interest flagged in the rain. There is simply too much to absorb in one visit–29 different gardens. I think we focused mostly on the layout of each garden and how they were interconnected rather than the individual plants. This is a shame because Lawrence Johnston is remembered mostly as an avid plant collector. Apparently he did not have a master design for the whole, but created different spaces, such as the Maple Garden, to highlight different collections.

We did see the odd handkerchief tree (Davidia involocrata) in the courtyard whose white bracts make it look as if someone has tied a thousand large white handkerchiefs to its branches. I also saw a Mahonia, which grows in Texas, and a magnolia where the white flowers drooped down rather than up. Some of the collection is labeled, but many plants that I wanted to know more about weren’t.

By the end we were all flowered out. As we drove away, feeling tired but satisfied, the sun came out.