Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

I’m always trying to teach the boys that procrastination doesn’t pay, but today proved me wrong. Our back yard is surrounded on two sides by a 4-foot chain link fence and on the third side by a 6-foot wooden privacy fence. The privacy fence, I’m loathe to admit, is in disrepair. It’s never really recovered from that storm in 1995 when a tree fell on it. I prop it up and it falls over. The wood is dry and splitting. It barely supports the assault of the neighbor’s ivy, which is the only thing it has going for it.
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What kid can resist the lure of water? When my son was a child, we lived on the banks of Blunn Creek. Only three years had passed since Austin had raised the money to create a nature preserve from the Storm tract, forty acre. between St. Edward’s University and Travis High School. Since we had no yard of our own, we used to take walks there in what seemed like our own private wilderness. We saw rabbits! I bought my first Texas wildflower identification book because the wealth of flowers I saw made me aware that there was a lot more to outdoors than a clipped lawn. Not that we even had that. Blunn Creek Preserve and the two Stacy Parks (Big and Little) were the only places for us condo dwellers to play outside.
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He may be a bush, but he doesn’t belong in a garden. I wouldn’t have let him in my garden, with or without helicopters.

Well, we’ve always known he wasn’t the environment president.

Related
* Wild Species Flourish in Buckingham Palace Garden
* Mulberry Tree Collection at Buckingham Palace given provisional National Plant Collection Status by the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens.
* Perhaps Bush should have read The Queen’s Hidden Garden: Buckingham Palace’s Treasury of Wild Plants.

Update: Bush and the Environment
* 2003-12-24. Administration Opens Alaska’s Tongass Forest to Loggers.

In The Rose Bible, Rayford Clayton Reddell names the English Rose ‘Heritage’ in his list of fifty immortal roses. Delicately colored and intensely scented, the cupped flowers have all the charm of old-fashioned roses. Reddell says that ‘Heritage’ is “reasonably disease-resistant”. However, it is the only rose bush in my garden that has repeated problems with black spot.

The only other complaint I have about ‘Heritage’ is that each flower loses its petal very quicky, before they fade or brown, when they are still glossy and fresh.

However, it is a very beautiful rose and one of the most strongly scented roses I have.

Dateline: 2003-10-24

Planted some smokey bronze fennel from Renee’s Garden (500mg for $2.49) in the vegetable garden, which I use for starting seeds over the winter because it is the sunniest and warmest part of the garden by January, after all the leaves have fallen.

Notes from the seed packet.

“Striking bronze fennel has 4 to 5 plumes of filigreed coppery leaves and lacy golden flower umbels that ripen mellow anise-flavored seeds.
“These plants are stunning additions to flower or herb beds and are major nectar hosts for many butterfly species. Season seafood, salads or cooked vegetables with sprigs of the feathery copper-bronze leaves. Tea made from the aromatic leaves or sweet seeds soothes upset stomachs and calms the nerves.”

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The yard was already 40 years old when I move here and filled with an established lawn, a dozen large cedar elms and many overgrown shrubs. Since there was no immediate need to do anything with it, I simply watched it over a couple of years, learning the names of the plants and thinking about what could be added and where.

In the spring, the ‘Ice Follies’ daffodils and summer snowflakes bloomed. In the early summer, a pale yellow iris. In the worst of summer, white rainlilies bloomed five days after any thunderstorm. And then in the fall, oxblood lilies and red spider lilies appeared overnight. So my first interest was in bulbs. Scott Ogden’. Garden Bulbs for the South was my bible.

After ten years I’m finding that I can’t put my spade to earth without uncovering, and sometimes slicing into, some bulbs. Grape hyacinths, Spanish bluebells, and various alliums produce offsets by the hundreds. They compensate for the tulips, certain daffodils, and true lilies that can’t stand the heat and mucky soils of central Texas.

So I’ve been dividing bulbs the last few weeks, work that is a satisfying as digging up a pot of gold. Like coins in a magic purse, the more I divide the more I have.

The advice I’ve read elsewhere says to divide Lycoris radiata in the spring, after their leaves die down and cautions that they probably won’t bloom the following fall. I find, however, that the best time to divide them is right after they bloom. Their roots are small and the ground is soft, so it’s easy to dig them up without damaging the bulbs, especially since you can see where they are. I soak them in a pail of water and with a little seaweed mix for a few hours. Dividing them in the fall allows them to do all of their growth in a new spot, amended with compost and bulb food and bloom better the following year than those left growing crowded all season.

Ditto Rhodophiala bifida. Whereas Lycoris radiata stops blooming when it gets overcrowded, Rhodophiala bifida doesn’t seem to mind. I divide mine because I can’t get enough of them. Although oxblood lilies bloom tolerably well when left to on their own, they perform outstandingly with a little loving care.

The pink rainlilies are the same. I had been afraid to disturb them. But after digging up one bunch, I discovered that although they continued to bloom like champs, they were really overcrowded. So I’ve dug them all up and now have three times as many as I did at the beginning of summer.

Dateline 2003

Curious and curiouser. Last year one clump of my oxblood lilies set seed. I have managed to keep alive four little seedlings. Because I’ve obtained my bulbs from various sources over the years, I wondered if a different kind of Rhodophiala got mixed in with the normally sterile oxblood lilies. However, this year many clumps set seed. From a single bulb, usually only one stem would set, sometimes only one flower.

The Pacific Bulb Society has one of the best resources on Rhodophiala. They say that the Rhodophiala bifida of Central Texas is known for its abiity to reproduce rapidly by offsetting and it does not set seed. Other Rhodophiala bifida strains set seed, but don’t offset.

Well, whatever is in my garden does both. The bulbs that formed seeds are also forming offsets. But I do seem to have two different types. One has an elongated rather gourd-shaped bulb. I thought the bulbs were misshapen because they were growing in poor conditions originally. But after a year in the seedling bed, they are the same shape and produced many offsets also the same shape. They also have thick fleshy roots and look somewhat like this photo of Rhodophiala granatiflora. However, on my plants the flowers and leaves look just like the other oxblood lilies and the stems are an inch or two shorter…but that might just be because of their age or location.

Dateline 2002

Oxblood lilies (Rhodophiala bifida) are very easy to propagate by offsets. They multiply quickly, especially when fed and watered. They are one of those marvelous plants which can thrive on complete neglect but do even better when fed, watered, and planted in good garden soil.

About a dozen of my oxblood lilies set seed this year. Every year, after the stalks flower, little seed heads form. But most simply wither away. This year, one group brought seeds to maturity. They look exactly like rainlily seeds and so I sowed them the same way. I soaked them overnight after gathering them and then sprouted them between sheets of paper towel. To my complete amazement, most of the seeds sprouted. I have now planted them in little flats.

Scott Ogden reports that in their native Peru pink and orange Rhodophiala are grown that can only be reproduced from seed. These strains are reputedly less hardy than the oxblood lilies naturalized in Austin. Mine which set seed look just the same as the others, but produced more flowers per bulb. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this is an improved form?

Tags: Rhodophiala bifida, oxblood lily, bulb, flower, garden.

After a few days of scattered thunderstorms and a 20 degree drop in temperature (from 110 to 90), the St. Augustine greened up again. So I decided it was time to cut it. I forego cutting during the hottest days of summer. I believe that cutting the lawn, stresses it. And when it’s 100 degrees and hasn’t rained in a month, the lawn is stressed out enough. The longer grass shades its own roots, so it doesn’t need as much water as shorter grass.

Also, (while I’m rationalizing), I feel that not cutting the grass in the heat of summer is my civic duty. A lot of summer days are “ozone action days” and you’re not supposed to use gas-powered lawnmowers on “ozone action days” because it just makes the pollution problem worse.

You’ve probably read that waiting too long between cuttings also stresses out grass (because you end up cutting off more than 1/3 of the leaf) and causes thatch to build up. But I don’t have that problem and here’s why. I don’t use chemical lawn fertilizer on my lawn. So it grows at a natural rate rather than like a high school jock pumped up on steroids. And that natural rate slows down a lot when it gets too hot and dry…like the six weeks from the beginning of July to the middle of August.

I do fertilize the grass with Dillo Dirt in the spring (March/April) and early fall September. I also make a mulch of Dillo Dirt wherever the grass has thinned. But most of the fertilizer comes from the grass itself. I have a mulching mower. In the fall I mow all the leaves into the lawn. And in the winter, one of the best tricks I’ve discovered for improving the lawn is to rake and mow. If there is any thatch buildup, this gets rid of it and mulches the soil at the same time. Grass loves mulch. Haven’t you noticed how it makes straight for those lovely mulched flower beds?

Sometimes it just takes a visit to someone else’s garden to recharge one’s gardening batteries. Of course, a bit rain and cooler temperatures help, too.
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Well, it’s that time of year again: day after day of triple-digit highs. Yesterday it reached 108 degrees at Camp Mabry. That broke the 50-year record for the day. Yesterday was the hottest day this year–until today, that is.

Today, at 2:12PM, the temperature reached 110 degrees at Camp Mabry. That’s a record high for August, and it tied with for second-hottest day ever recorded in Austin, 110 degrees on September 4, 2000. Austin’s all time high was 112 on September 5, 2000.

A freakish thunderstorm brought 2 minutes of rain to my garden, but at least the rain is supposed to break the streak of triple-digit highs.

So what do I do in the garden this time of year? I hole up inside, making plans for the fall garden, updating this garden website, and reading garden books and catalogs for consolation and inspiration–same as northern gardeners do when their snowed in for the winter.

I do a bit of hand-watering each day between 7AM and 9AM, weeding and straightening up as I go. I have to aerate the mulch as I go or it forms a hard crust that doesn’t let the water soak in under it. But the yard definitely has a weedy, seedy, neglected look which defies you to find a garden in it.