STOP ME BEFORE I TRANSPLANT AGAIN!

Oleanders
Growing outside her door
Soon they’re gonna be in bloom up in Annandale
I can’t stand her
Doing what she did before
Living like a gypsy queen in a fairy tale

My Old School
Steely Dan

Well, at my back door, the oleander has yet to bloom. It’s only a foot tall, propagated 2 years ago from a cutting taken near my house. On my way to San Antonio yesterday, I saw that despite the disease that ravaged so many oleanders over the past few years, there are still lots of O’s on the highway that have endured, robust and blooming. This time of year, the crepe myrtles and oleanders really deserve our respect.


In my garden now, the invincible soldiers include the indefatigable crossvine, the deep-green and visually cooling liriopes, dwarf palmetto, upright rosemary, cenizo, powis artemisia, and all the blue-green agaves, yucca, and cacti. Not a long list, and short on flowers. If I could tell the the iceberg roses to not bother blooming, I would. They continue to valiantly produce buds that open into strangled and stunted things that can hardly be called flowers.
The worst thing about the heat is that I tend to get cabin fever and commit gardening atrocities. This morning I stepped out just to get the paper and ended up doing two hours of crazed labor. One of which was TRANSPLANTING. I have a long sad history of transplanting things during intense summer heat. To make matters worse (because it only encourages me), quite a few of these crimes have resulted in success. Today I dug up chunks of palm grass from the backyard and put them in the front bed and moved a rooted bunch of Port St. Creeper to the back fence wall. Fortunately by that time, it was around 10:30 and I had the sense to withdraw back into my air-conditioned cave before heat prostration ensued.

Palm grass, an invasive pest in Asia, goes mano a mano with Austin clay.

The variegated ginger is blooming a lot, but you have to get close to see the orchid-like flower.

The Pindo palm loves the heat and is throwing off new fronds happily. It gets fed frequently and is mulched heavily with leaf rot. At right are fencerow of crinums that have yet to bloom at this house.

¡Hola, jardineros!

Daughter Rachel and I returned from our week in Los Cabos and I think we both agree it has been a hard landing. After seven days of sun, the glittering Pacific, nonstop whale watching, and doting waitstaff (otro pina colada, senora?), we are both less than charmed to be returning to day labor.














I took a bazillion garden photos to inspire. Since Baja California is a desert, there is lots to take away from their plantings. I wish I knew what kind of baobab-like tree this was. There was no on-site landscape person to question.






























I thought the raked sand was interesting. One could do this with crushed granite or gravel.



















Rachel and I call this the EatPrayLove shot. Many women at this resort were reading the book. This was a sister hotel to the one we were visiting and it was billed as a holistic spa (if by holistic you mean over the top luxury in a minimalist contemporary sculptural architectural fabuloso kind of way).















The dark planting between the cactus is our good friend, purple fountain grass. And check out the artisan trimming of the agaves--this makes such a graphic statement (and somehow also evokes pineapples). Also possibly a safety precaution considering margarita-soused gringos stumbling about the paths?














A wall of alternating tiers of oleander and bougainvillea. ¡Que bonita! Okay, back to the real world: massive aphid infestation and 343 emails at work.

The house is finally painted. It turned out well. It’s going to be a great background for the deep evergreens and subtropicals that I’ve put in.
Saturday I went to downtown farmer’s market and got a really beautiful and beautiful-smelling ginger which I put on the north corner. The grower said it will get 6 – 8’. The dwarf palmettos are slow-going but a really wonderful blue-gray green and eventually will anoint the walls with their tropical fans.
I still have a windmill palm that I haven’t planted. I think I’ll hold off and eventually put it on one side of the front path with the oleanders, rose, cactus and yucca that I have planned for the big street-side front bed. I propagated a super-white oleander from a cutting over on Arroyo Seco, but I think it will be a year or two before it’s large enough to put in ground. The shrub on Arroyo Seco is very dark blue-green foliage and milk-white blooms. I could buy another oleander but the nurseries don’t have this variety and you never know what you are getting. Most of the white oleanders in the stores have yellow-green foliage and white flowers with yellow centers.
Another 1-1/2 inches of rain!

The Key West Cottage Garden

Several years ago my ex and I went to Key West. It was the fall after that terrible summer when our skies were occluded for three months with smoke from agricultural fires in Central America. We had cancelled our family trip to Port Aransas since it was so depressing to be outside; it felt like the world was coming to an end. Anyway it was my ex's wonderful idea to surprise me with this trip for our anniversary.

Ever since then I had the notion of doing a Key West garden. And now with my new house, this idea seems ideal. What I took away from Key West was: small frame cottages with simple paint colors, lots of white trim, white railings, and gardens that were foliage-intense rather than flower-focussed. Which is totally my cup of tea for front garden--I love greens, grays and year-round evergreens. Once the construction is done next door I will be painting the exterior of the house; the main siding will be a manila folder color and the trim will all be white; the shutters black. Very Key West and all about setting off the dark green of the evergreen tropical foliage plantings.

So here’s the plan:

Palm fronds are the key (no pun intended).
There is nothing that says tropical Key West shanty like rustling palm fronds. But I don’t want or need a palm tree. My tiny front yard already is dwarfed on the south side by a #@!!$% liveoak tree (I know they are majestic, but they belong in a field; their twice-a-year leaf-drop-pollen-spewing-fuzzy-caterpillar-flowering output is a massive annoyance to a residential yard—and what’s with the non-biodegradable leaves? Do they EVER decay? I think not.).

So after researching palms, I have concluded that the best solution is the Dwarf Palmetto, which is a southern U.S. native and can endure some freezing temps as well. Plus it doesn’t get very big; but it also has a reputation for slow growth. Everything’s a trade-off. I looked at the sago palms, but something about them seems almost plastic. Plus after reading Oliver Sacks’ treatise on cycads, I wonder if they aren’t alien beings.


So I have planted a Dwarf Palmetto (sabal minor) on either side of the front windows. You can see in this picture the tiny size of this palm to the right of the window in the sunny patch. Let's hope that their slow growth doesn't spell garden dissappointment for me.
I’m leaving the boxwoods in between them; assuming they come back from my merciless pruning. In March right after I moved in, I put plugs of small liriope (that I brought from R-wood house) along the front and side beds. I love liriope and it can’t be beat as an edging medium; it’s dark green, cold hardy, evergreen, appears lush in the worst conditions, and it even has purple flower spikes.

In between the foundation planting of boxwoods and the liriope is a big whole at the moment. So I’m mulling what would be good here. I want something low and evergreen but with a tropical bent, possibly 2 or 3 dwarf oleanders with some rambling verbena filling in the spaces.


Meanwhile the shade garden in front is doing well. From my Rollingwood house I brought and planted these shade lovers:

Inland sea oats
Physostegia (purple fall bloomer)
Brazilian pavonia (pale pink flower with wine throat)
Turk’s cap


This bed is under a copse of mountain laurel and the tallest pittosporum I've ever seen and unfortunately some rather pervasive poison ivy. Apparently even John Dromgoole endorse Roundup for this scourge.