Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

The last nine months or so, I’ve neglected the garden. Some plants, like the roses and irises, really show it. Other really tough plants have surprised and encouraged me. This spring I’ve been very thankful for Acanthus mollis. Auralea japonica, Rhaphiolepis indica, Tacoma stans, and Salvia farinacea. Without them, I’d have no garden at all this year.

Yesterday I noticed a the first flower of the season on Salvia farinacea ‘Indigo Spires’. Thanks to the water that sprays over the fence when my neighbors water their lawn, my salvias have formed nice mounds of green this spring. I decided I should finally cut off the long arching stems from last year. I should have cut them way back last fall.

One advantage of my lazy housekeeping is that salvias self-layer and root wherever the joints touch soil. In my garden, plants die every year and new ones replace them. I let them grow where they’re happiest and they’ve arranged themselves around the cedar elm in the back of the stump garden. I do absolutely nothing for these plants except mulch them with leaves in the fall and prune them back once a year.

Gardeners in Austin are typically crazy for salvias. They come in many varieties, sizes, and colors. In addition to being heat-loving, salvias have the reputation of being deer-resistant. (I can’t say since there are no deer downtown). One drawback I’ve heard, however, is that some salvias dislike Austin’s alkaline soil. I haven’t noticed that problem either in my garden or around town. I’ve tried a couple of other salvias, but Salvia farinacea has proven the most carefree in my central Texas garden. One plant, eleven years. That’s got to be a record in my garden. Only the plumbago, which I bought and planted on the same day, has done as well.

By the way, I’ve had a hard time trying to peg down exactly what type of salvia I’m growing. When I bought my one plant in 1995, I wrote down Salvia farinacea ‘Indigo Spires’. Apparently the salvias cross-pollinate easily and some sites list ‘Indigo Spires’ as a hybrid, not a cultivar. As for common names, I’ve found both mealy cup sage and mealy blue sage and even plain mealy sage.
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Ever since Sunday (3/12), half a dozen monarch butterflies have been hanging out in my yard. They like the Texas mountain laurel and Meyer lemon best. It was exciting to look out my kitchen window while washing dishes and see two or three of them flitting around the lemon tree. I don’t have Valerie’s patience or skill for insect photography and am not pleased with any of my shots. Unlike flowers, butterflies don’t hold still for the camera.

Monarch butterflies migrate through Austin in the fall on their way to their winter homes in Mexico. Several of my neighbors in north Austin see them regularly each fall, but I rarely do. Does the migrating horde avoid downtown? or is it just me?

Unfortunately I don’t have any milkweed planted.

Update: 2017-10-18

Getting a better camera helps. A tool might not make an artist but good tools certainly bring out the best in our efforts regardless of artistic talent. My latest camera is a Sony a6000. It has a high-speed capture feature and a real telephoto lens that helps a lot in photographing the movable garden.

Monarch butterfly on white boneset.

I’ll take up the challenge thrown down by Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening via Chan at Bookish Gardener.

1. Total Number of Gardening Books I Own:I count 96 that I can get to right now and probably another 20 or 30 in the back room that I can’t get to because of our kitchen deconstruction project.
2. Name five of your favorite gardening books:
• Passalong Plants.
• Collected essays by Henry Mitchell. Essential Earthman and On Gardening.
• A Woman’s Hardy Garden. Helena Rutherford Ely. This book and the catalog from Select Seeds helped me fall in love with old-fashioned flowers.
• The Rose Bible. Rayford C. Reddell.
• Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Michael Pollan.
3. What was the last gardening book you bought (or brought home from the library)? Garden Lunacy: A Growing Concern. When I saw it in the library, I thought the title sounded familiar. Then I remembered, Art Wolk asked if he could reprint one of my anecdotes. And yep, he included it in his book along with my name and this website. Cool!
4. What was the last gardening book you read? Texas Gardening the Natural Way: The Complete Handbook. Howard Garrett. I found the style to be a bit grating. I prefer his Texas Bug Book.
5. List five books that have been particularly meaningful to you:
   • The Rodale Herb Book. The very first gardening book I ever bought: 30 years ago.
   • Garden Bulbs for the South. Scott Ogden. Started me on my obsession fo. heirloom bulbs for the south like Tulipa clusiana and oxblood lilies.
   • Roses in the Southern Garden. G. Michael Shoup. Started me on my obsession for heirloom roses for the south.
   • A Southern Garden and Gardens in Winter. Elizabeth Lawrence.
   • We Made a Garden. Margery Fish.
6. Name three gardening books you’ve been dying to read but just haven’t gotten around to it: These are books I own that I’ve never gotten around to reading.
• Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers. Sharman Apt Russell.
• A Gardener Obsessed. Geoffrey B Charlesworth.
7. What gardening books would you most want to have on hand when shut up in the house by a blizzard? Kathy added this. My initial response was, “Blizzard? What’s a blizzard. These are all books that get me in the mood.
• The Gardener’s Year. Karel Capek.
• Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden.
• For Love of a Rose.
• Tottering in My Garden.
• Thomas Jefferson: The Garden and Farm Books.
• Tasha Tudor’s Garden. Tovah Martin. Made me fall in love with the idea of gardening.

Those opportunistic plants, the weeds, have responded quickly to Sunday’s rain. The henbit was the first to flower. A winter annual considered by many to be a weed of turfgrass, henbit thrives in the damp and so is at home in our clay soil during the winter. AJM likes the little pink flowers, and so do the butterflies. So I always leave them a little bit of it in the meadow–until some other flowers are blooming.

2006-01-24. Henbit. Austin, TX

Henbit does get straggly fast as it sprawls over the bluebonnets. Then it’s definitely weedy and I swear that next year I’ll nip it in the bud. As soon as it gets hot, though, it disappears on its own, so it’s never any real problem in our central Texas climate.

In Japan, henbit is one of the seven herbs of spring and is eaten as a tonic on January the 7th. This tradition goes back to those days before frozen foods and refrigerated trucks, when people suffered vitamin and mineral deficiencies without fresh greens in the winter.

Perhaps like other oft-maligned plants (I’m thinking of dandelion and nettles, Margaret), we will soon be paying top dollar for henbit in Central Market’s “spring mix” salads.

Fellow Austinite and gardener, Annie, wrote to me about a wonderful idea that she and some like-minded gardening friends have carried out. These Divas of the Dirt get together once a month to do a big garden project in one of their gardens. With eight women working together, a daunting project can be tackled in a day with time for a nice breakfast together first.

As someone who has spent a lot of time struggling through garden projects on my own, often feeling discouraged and overwhelmed, I admire the Diva’s clever approach. I just wish I were as organized and as energetic.

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.
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Motivated by the nice weather that we get three weeks out of the year and inspired by my success with the bathroom project, I tackled another long unfinished project.

Years ago, we made two large planters in the front and I put in decomposed granite sand paths between them. But when the path reached the front entry, where there is a sharp drop, I didn’t know what to do and gave up. In the interim, I’ve made half-hearted attempts to move the uneven stones that made up the old path. St. Augustine grass overgrew its boundary covering the holes and creating the potential for a lawsuit by all of those people who can’t read the “No Trespassing No Soliciting” sign and insist on stuffing flyers into our front door jamb. The addition of a wooden sawhorse across the path did not discourage them. And so the situation remained.

A couple of Sundays ago, I cleared out the grass enough for AJM to see the stones. He moved them to the back yard. All of them. Yikes! Now the ball was back in my court. I began by cutting stakes and marking a path with twine. The project was really underway. Next I cut out roots and dug out stones and raked flat a good foundation for a path.

I checked Peter Jeswald’s How to Build Paths, Steps, and Footbridges out of the library and read for inspiration and instruction.

The next Sunday we went to Home Depot and bought metal edging for the paths. I also got some horticultural cloth. I had used some on the sand paths and discovered that it doesn’t do as much to keep the weeds down as I’d hoped (they sprout in the sand above the cloth), but it does keep the path medium separate from the clay beneath which prevents the paths from washing away.

2006-04-09. Texas bluebonnets and cleome demonstrate that gravel is an excellent medium for sprouting seeds. However, they are very easy to pull.

On Thursday I ordered 3 tons of Fairland Pink gravel. Before Custom Stone Supply could deliver it, I had to cut back all the Turk’s cap lining the driveway and move the mailbox.

Ever since I’ve been carting one wheelbarrow load after another to fill the paths. We had a nice rain on Monday, and the paths did very well. They didn’t flood and they didn’t wash away. I’m almost done. I’ll update with photos eventually.

Update

2003-01-08. The front gravel paths. From the date, this must just be the granite sand.

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.
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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.
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Dateline: 2005-10-09
After flowering for two summers, the mother plant died. Slowly its stalk rotted away and the pups (some of which were full-grown plants by this time) began to fall away from the center.

2005-07-28. Even in late July, the blue-green banana leaves looked crisp and fresh. They never turned brown or wilted like the brighter green canna. However the number of pups was getting out of hand.

As today was the second of two perfect fall days, I decided it was time to dig up and replant the pups. I soaked the ground thoroughly to make it easier to get through the hardened clay. Then AJM and I began digging around the perimeter and trying to prize up the mass by getting the fork under the roots. The whole mass is fleshy and breaks easily. All we succeeded in doing is snapping the top of the banana plants off the roots.

In the end it was a banana tree massacre. A score of large banana trees lay rootless on the ground. Half a dozen smaller ones came away with a little bit of root. And what about the roots? If I replant them, will new pups spring up? Are banana trees like Tradescantia in this respect. I’ll try it and see and report back.

I was very depressed after destroying my banana plants. I had to keep telling myself that they were all going to fall over and die anyway and they had outgrown the space and were crushing the plants near them. Still, there’s a big empty spot in the garden where once was the most beautiful green.

I started with one and I have more than one now. If even one pulls through the winter, all will have worked out in the end.
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