Gray Gardens

Are gray plants the bomb? Yes, they are and here’s why. They impart Visual Cool to our hot landscape and they totally rock the green-blues of agaves, opuntia ellisana, (thornless prickly pear), and yucca.
In this picture from left are powis artemisia, Russian sage (with purple blooms), culinary sage, and bottom left, salvia apiana or white sage, and almost hidden, a santolina, which really needs to be moved since the other guys are taking over. Other grays in this bed are silver leaf germander, cenizo (purple sage), lavender, and Elijah’s blue fescue.
Salvia apiana is new to my garden and it has really found a place for its striking rosettes of celadon leaves, robust mounding growth habit, and bulletproof heat shield.
Plus it has a great backstory. It grows wild in California but has been ruinously preyed upon by commercial herbalists and other immoral entrepreneurs who yank the whole plant out of the ground, tie it in bundles, and sell it as smudge sticks to hippies and crystal-gazers for use in their sweat lodges and home meditation shrines. Oddly, the scrunched up leaves smell like really bad B.O. Maybe the plant smells better when burned? Probably not. The path to enlightenment was not meant to be easy.

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.