Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Returning to the garden after time away results in feelings tinged with expectation tempered with fear. After more than two weeks in England we arrived home at 1 in the morning. I was too tired to wander around the garden in the moonlight. I peeked through the window, though, and thought the grass looked unusually perky for this time of year.

When I woke and saw the lawn in the sunlight, the grass looked green and vigorous. Odd for August. The crape myrtles were finally blooming. And the other small flowering trees, Tecoma stans and Rose of Sharon also had flowers.

Apparently it had been unusually cool and rainy while we were gone. Good thing, too. Now we’re back to 100 degree days and I’m out watering, weeding, and mulching the first two hours of every day until the sun starts shining.

The roses are struggling. “Caldwell Pink” was suffering die-back even before we left. I’ve now pruned away two-thirds of it and the rest of it has lost its leaves. ‘Gruss an Aachen’ and ‘Souvenir de St. Anne’s’ are similarly stressed.

Overall the garden seems in not too bad a shape. I feel like tackling it again. If you’ve read The Secret Garden then you know some people’s delight in pulling away the weeds and restoring order to a garden. I’ve not quite reached that point of delight, but I’m over my reluctance. I suppose I could be coaxed into gardening again, especially after this hot spell breaks and we get some rain.

While the rest of the nation is sweltering under a massive heat wave (pity my parents in Las Vegas which reached its all time record high of 117 yesterday), here in Austin we’ve had a break from the heat. The first two weeks of July felt like August; now it feels like September. Day after day of thunderstorms brought some real rain. We had almost an inch on Friday and another inch on Sunday. Valerie report three inches at her house.

We had friends over on Saturday. You never realize how neglected the garden has become until you see it through someone else’s eyes. I was appalled. So Monday, a relatively cool 90 degree day, I was out weeding and mulching. This was the first time I’ve enjoyed being in the garden in months. The ground was pliable and all the plants, that are still alive, perked up admirably. It almost looks like a garden again.

We got only a trace of rain out of Hurricane Emily, but we did have nice shady day.

I don’t know why I haven’t been a big fan of gladiolus before, unless maybe it’s their movie association with mobsters’ funerals. Last year, the photos in the Dutch Garden catalog seduced me into buying some Flevo gladiolus, which are smaller and more compact than normal. And now I’m hooked. They bloom along with the cannas and other heat and water-loving tropicals. Now that I’ve devoted a special plot to all my high-consumption plants, I don’t mind doting on them.

I was surprised how pretty they are. Has anyone every described a gladiolus as “delicate”?

Nursery Description. “Creamy, pale yellow blooms deocrated with soft rose. Plant 4 to 5 inches deep and 5 to 6 inches apart. Full sun. Height 22-28 inches.” Souce: Dutch Gardens.

Tags: gladiolus, flower, bulb, garden.
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In 2000, I bought three similar tall bearded irises: ‘Alizes’, ‘Strictly Ballroom‘, and ‘Altruist‘. The ‘Alizes’ were $6.00 each (actually $3.00 with Schreiner’s discount factored in). One characteristic that distinguishes ‘Alizes’ is the full, cupped shape of its brilliant white standards. (Warning: the Schreiner’s photo shows an unreal shade of bright blue, which it isn’t. ‘Alizes’ is a deep blue tending toward violet.)

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Dateline: 2005
I received ‘Mystic’s Muse’ as a bonus iris with my Schreiner’s order in 2000. It produced one perfect scape of flowers in 2001, was set upon by spring cankerworms in 2002, then fell victim to rot. I transplanted 1 small rhizome, which tried hard to flower on multiple scapes in 2003. No bloom from the offsets in 2004. And this year, one rhizome sent up two short (20″ and 11″) stalks which produced four smaller (4″) than average flowers which I cut and brought inside right after taking this photo.

Now there are three rhizomes left that might produce flowers next year. Or rot. I just can’t predict what will happen with irises in my shady, humid garden. They are irresistibly beautiful and so fleeting. That’s why I love them, I suppose.
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Forget what I said yesterday about giving up on named bearded irises. Today, two stalks of ‘Cloud Ballet’ began blooming and they are everything bearded irises should be. Each thick stalk is tall and straight and bears half a dozen substantial flowers. The falls don’t…well, not much. They’re fairly horizontal.

At least I think this is ‘Cloud Ballet’. I bought one from Schreiner’s in 2001. It is a pale blue, which leans toward lavender, self. The center is pale, almost white, which reflects the light in such a way that makes it look more contrasty in the photo than in real life. From a distance it appears to be the same shade as the bluebonnets beneath it. The beards are white with yellow tips.

There is a chance that it might be ‘Altruist‘.

Whatever it is, it’s bloomed three years in a row: 2003, 2004, and 2005, but it didn’t bloom it’s first spring, 2002.
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My yard came with a tall, bearded iris. The pale, golden-yellow flowers are old-fashioned in form and usually bloom in April. I think of them as my tax-time irises. They aren’t as fully-ruffled and showy as modern irises. They can’t even stand up straight, but have very wavy stems. But they multiply faster than I can give them away and bloom reliably every year.
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I popped over to Garden Spot which hadn’t been updated in almost a year to find a new post on St. Joseph’s lily. And there was the answer to the mystery bulb which is blooming in my garden these last two weeks. I figured it was some kind of amaryllis. I’d found two very small bulbs when rescuing oxblood lilies from a construction site on South 1st street several years ago. They began blooming for the first time this year on March 31st.
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Valerie shared some seeds for baby blue eyes and now in their second spring in my garden they have really spread themselves around. Like the bluebonnets, larkspur, and Love-in-a-Mist, in central Texas they grow over the winter and flower in the spring.

2005-03-25. Nemophila phacelioides. Austin, TX

I’ve learned recently that there are various species of baby blues eyes. My plants are descended from seeds gathered, I believe, along the roadways of south Austin. Given that information, I realize it is probably our Texas native Nemophila phacelioides. The N. insignis (aka N. menziesii) sold by some seed companies is native to California and Oregon. This is one time that the Latin names prove more confusing than the common ones.

2005-03-30. Baby blue eyes in front of a mass of spiderwort. Another week or so and this section of the yard will look very weedy.

Update: 2018-03-12

I notice that the self-sown baby blue eyes in the pond path garden are large, bushy, and covered with large flowers. They look stunning this year. In sharp contrast, the ones by the back fence, which had looked nice in years before, are stunted, yellowed and not started to flower.

Is it the acidic sifted pine bark mulch from the paths. I covered this area with it in the fall when I was moving path. It was too much for the bluebonnets causing them to get moldy (or something) and wither. So maybe baby blue eyes like a rich humusy mulch.

Although I tend to disregard them, they can be very beautiful in a well-mulched drift.

The yard is a mass of flowers and bright green foliage which makes it looks like spring outside. But it feels like winter. The heater, which is set at 60F degrees, came on last night. So this morning, I built a fire to get rid of some of the wood from last weekend’s deconstruction project.
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