1999
2013. Planting succulents on that front slope was the best dumb luck ever. When the pair of 'Dynamite' Crepe Myrtles mature, their height will draw the eye upwards to the top of the house. That trio of 'Bright Star' Yucca is so good--in looking at the photo, I should repeat them to the left of the big Agave clump, and do the same with the Calothamnus trio, though it would be difficult to give up the well-established-and-blooms-like-crazy roses on the left.
1999
2013. The Doomed Oak's replacement--that standard rose--had a poor year. I'm going to give it a hard prune in January--its first ever--to see if that revivifies it. I have an Aloe 'Hercules' waiting if the rose doesn't come back strong. The Dymondia has been wonderful--on one third the water lawn got, it looks twice as good.
1999. The homeowner in the back had planted four or six Erythrinas and there were a bunch of volunteer Eucalyptus and several palm trees all crammed in there, each tree about 3' apart, on our property. I remember digging out two of the stumps; it took me a month.
2013. That piece of wrought iron fencing leaning against the wall is to prevent the puppies from eating the Maireana sedifolia. The green fence and the neighbor's roof in the back will be screened by the Ligustrum hedge soon; the hedge is growing rapidly. The Landscape Architect had put a hedge of Carolina Laurel Cherry, which was okay for about five years, but then got too big. I'm glad they are gone. Never choose a tree to do a shrub's job. Ligustrum will be plenty big and a lot more dense.
1999
2013. The wrought iron is an improvement over the original wooden pseudo-shutters. but I must paint that iron before spring, I must, I must.
1999. Soooo glad those Eucs are gone. When the Santa Anas would blow, a couple of the Eucs would slam against the house.
2013. This isn't the most interesting angle of the garden, but I had to do a comparison shot. Unfortunately the garden is also not at its best in December. That large rose, my wonderful 'Firefighter', looks dreadful because it spent the entire year completely engulfed by a now-gone 'Laguna' climber. However it's recovering rapidly, and will be beautiful again next spring.
1999 The balcony construction started right after we moved in. My lasting memory of the balcony was the night, a short time before it was completed, when Beloved went out on the balcony to look around at it. Hoover followed him. Unfortunately, the contractor had that day waterproofed the floor of the balcony with tar. Beloved noticed that both his shoes and Hoover's paws were sticking to the tar, and yelled. Hoover, startled by the yell, ran back into the house and down the stairs; Beloved following him.
The contractor's carpet cleaner got most of the tarry shoe and paw prints out of the carpet, but traces of them remained until we finally replaced the carpet. I can laugh about it--now!
2013 We do enjoy that balcony and covered patio.
1999
2013. The balcony/patio addition made quite a change. I expect that potted 'Hercules' Aloe will eventually take the Doomed Oak's place, and will likely be better than the Oak would have been--less litter on the driveway. That's our entire remaining lawn, there on the right.
I wish I'd taken many more photos back in '99, but they would have been film then, and likely out of focus, over exposed, and so on. It's fascinating to see how a property changes over the years.
My thoughts also go to a different aspect of 1999, to much-loved dogs, much missed now.
1999: Teddy and Hoover. I didn't have to photoshop Santa hats on those two. They'd do anything for food, including laying down next to each other wearing hats.
2013. I need to get out the Santa Hats and get the same shot of Boris and Natasha. They'll do anything for food. Many things change, but not the Samoyed appetite.
'Blue Glow', blue sky.
For some reason I thought the pods had to start drying to ensure the seeds were ripe; apparently that's not true. Anyway, I pulled off the top two dry pods from the side flower stem this morning:
The side stem was the one short enough (in other words, reachable) to try cross-pollinating with Manfreda 'Spot'. The two pods yielded three possibly viable seeds (the black ones) and a lot of empties:
I then picked a couple of the non-dried pods. Those two yielded seven seeds. I planted all 10 seeds outdoors in the sunny raised beds I use for summer tomatoes. This winter they are home to sweet peas. I read Agave seeds don't take long to germinate, but our nights are relatively cold now, so I'm not sure if they will live or not. I may have to try some in the house as well. Since there are a a dozen pods left on the side stem and a couple of hundred seed pods on the main stem, I have some margin of error.
Speaking of seeds and Agaves, the lettuce seeds I planted on November 24th are up:
Metal fencing over the raised bed prevents any feral or domestic cat in the area using the bed as a litter box.
As to Agaves, while collecting the 'Blue Glow' pods, I was struck by the smaller of my two Agave marmoratas. It has been a slow grower, and has lost the excellent banding it had when purchased, but the beauty it has now is most elegant:
Nearby, Agave guingola has also been a slow grower. It gets very little water. The teeth on the newest leaf unfurling from the core look like a zipper:
Lastly, this tiny Agave I thought had died over the summer because of excessive heat and lack of water. (Note the fried leaf on the left.)
Our two recent modest rainfalls revived it. It is A. havardiana, as I remember. A. havardiana is possibly the most cold-hardy Agave, to -20F (-28 C). The tiny thing was planted in a tiny pot, which fell and smashed--I thought, "Heck with this." and stuck the little plant in the ground, to live or die. Live it did. I hope the 'Blue Glow' seeds do the same.
Their sunset moment:
I'm not sure when I planted the Dodoneas. We'd asked the landscape architect for screening plants to hide the downhill neighbor's roof when the landscaping went in back in 2000. She made the poor choice of the native White Alder, Alnus rhombifolia.
"It is not drought tolerant, but very fast, to 30 feet in 5-6 years.
Its shade is rather dense(cool) to garden under unless you work at
opening up the limb structure and even then it is very competitive. In
the wild places we have seen there are almost no understory plants
growing near white alder."
-- Las Pilitas comments on Alnus rhombifolia.
Dear Landscape Architects, don't plant a thirsty riverbed tree on a dry slope six inches from a masonry wall. Thanks!
Note to self: there are licensed professional Landscape Architects out there who know zippo about plants.
The Alders quickly became a huge problem. Roots, height, vigor, reseeding, trunks pressing up against a masonry wall. The LA had chosen an elephant to do a poodle's job. The Alders were cut down about 2003, and thus began a search for an appropriate and less problematic replacement. Plain old Ligustrum japonicum, the plant we here call Privet, would have made a screen, and fast, too, but... I finally decided on Dodonea as a temporary screen while I thought through a better solution.
A wind storm uprooted this one in 2011. (Note That Roof behind the fallen.)
Our Santa Ana winds took out two of the six planted from 15 gallon containers. When young the Dodonea viscosa root system is small and weak. This is a problem but also a virtue--they reseed a lot, but are easy to pull out. Even 40" (1 M) seedlings come out with a one-finger-and-thumb light tug.
For a while, not bad:
The four survivors grew to a manageable size (about 18') and did a fair job of screening the neighbor's roof. They are not particularly dense growers, and as they matured, entire branches simply died. Scale and borers were a problem. After about three years of grudging, marginally acceptable performance as a roof screen, the Dodoneas went into a steep decline. Now it is time to try again for a better solution.
Sort of better. A 'Wrinkled Blue' Pittosporum tenuifolium on the left, 'Tasman Ruffles' on the right.
The two different Pittosporum tenuifolium selections that replaced the wind-toppled Dodoneas have been--promising. They have displayed several virtues. First, when they reach full size, they will be just about the exact right size to hide the neighbor's roof without getting too tall; this without trimming or pruning. Second, they've done fine on modest water--two one-gallon-per-hour irrigation drippers, run for ten minutes three times per week. Third, their glossy foliage looks beautiful in morning light. The leaves sparkle when the morning sun shines through, a beauty that far exceeds the dour Dodoneas. So far the sole drawback is that the foliage is not yet dense enough to completely vanquish the offending roof.
This saga I have blogged about before, several times. Screening that roof is a problem I have a continuing mad passion to solve in precisely the right way. The solution is not Ligustrum. The hedge of Ligustrum planted in the back last year to screen out another neighbor's property is growing rapidly and will be a substantial 2 meter privacy screen within another year, but for hiding that roof, it's not, it's not, it's not the solution. Yet.
So funny and ironic that the trio of Calothamnus villosus in the front, which have formed a perfectly wonderful privacy screen of the house across the street, was a pure impulse purchase for a problem I didn't even know I had. That bit of the garden is so much better now with the Calothamnus screen.
There's a house behind that plant, but wouldn't you rather look at that plant? No thought involved whatsoever:
Years of agonized effort put into solving That Roof problem, and elsewhere, thoughtless impulse produces an ideal effect. Ain't that gardening? And life?
