Wabi Sabi, Maybe Baby

Laguna Gloria in winter

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day has come and gone at Aurora with little to report beyond stunted roses. Austin’s protracted drought dovetails unavoidably with the economic meltdown in fostering doomy regret about the orgiastic spending on plants I’ve undertaken in my two years here at this garden. And even xeriscape plants seem a little like Marie Antoinette’s cake at this point. What, after all, can this environment sustain beyond prickly pear and yucca?

So: new plan. Shabby-genteel ruin. The swept yard of the Mexican cottage. Ramshackle debris of leaf-mold and bare branches. One or two ancient and bearded palms rustling in the apocalyptic wind. Embracing the flawed in the natural world and finding beauty in the tarnished, the tattered, and the burnished with age.

Well, kinda anyway. As soon as I get some clumping bamboo and a Reve d’Or rose, I’ll be set.

Recycling Rant

Is anyone else living in City of Austin as dissappointed as I am about the single-stream recycling monstrosity? This thing must weigh 25lbs EMPTY. I know for a fact my 91-year old neighbor Bertha is not going to be dragging this to the curb anytime soon (despite her impressive exploits with the concrete birdbath). Once the dumpster is full of its every-other-week pile of stuff, who knows what the gross tonnage could be.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine ever filling this trash bin up, short of hosting a beer bash every week. I have barely approached one-sixth of its capacity since I've had it. Admittedly I'm a single person, but I don't remember filling up the old blue bin very often even when I was running a 4-person household. And the City, in its infinite wisdom, will not provide a smaller single-stream bin--one size must fit all.
Plus, there's something intuitively harebrained about the single-stream concept. I was perfectly content with and capable of separating my paper, glass, and plastic. It seems like this division of labor made perfect sense: it forced us to reckon with our own recycling destinies, consider the volume of our personal output, and take some responsibility for its disposal. With this new process the City has robbed us of a noble feel-good pastime and passed the sorting onto machines or people which must incur costs we taxpayers will have to pay for. How can this be good?
One final carp: the color of the bin. Who chose this toilet-bowl blue? Is there anyone who yearns to see this color EVER? Not found in nature, this blue is a visually demoralizing eyesore. At least the regular trash bins are a neutral gray, beige, or army green. One can hide them discreetly behind a/c units, bushes, garage walls, etc. Not so the screaming blue of the single-stream bin. And being so large, the bin is more of a challenge to store in an out of the way spot and so more likely to be visible in side yards and utility areas. The bins are an unsightly blight in our neighborhoods, yards, and streets.

You are a fountain of wisdom

I need your help, garden bloggers. I would like to put in a pond/water feature/fountain, and I can't wait for my usual 10 years of mulling. Here's my current backyard plan. I spend a lot of time on my deck and would like to be able to see/hear the trickle from the deck. I've thought about a pre-fab Italianate lion head mounted on the wall above the rosebed or a stock tank pond along the hardscape path that runs by the deck.
So if you are still sitting around in your pajamas on xmas vacay and have nothing better to do, please send any ideas my way. Let's pretend money is no object for the sake of totally unleashing your creativity.

Who’s walking down the streets of the city, smiling at everybody she sees?

Yeah, that would be Windy. And frankly, I always thought that Windy, as commemorated in song by The Association, had a dark side to her apparent nonstop ecstasy. There were definite implications of a Crazy Lady thing going on. A little too frenetic and happy, know what I mean? This infernal wind has the same general tone of borderline personality disorder. Oh, it seems benign, but it gets a little whipped up and just never stops. And it just seems ODD.

Safely protected from this wind, the Rainbow Knockouts are thriving. They were massively verklempt after the summer heat, but now they've regained their composure and their true sunlit pink.

I planted a holiday poinsettia in the ground after Christmas last year and now it appears to be fixing to bloom. It's a white flowered variety.

The Icebergs are also blooming prolifically; but since they are exposed to the street frontage, suffer from the wind. Tonight on my walk in the 'hood, the wind was out of the south at a steady 15 knots by the look of the windsock at Dept. of Health. Weather.com says gusting to 28mph. Maybe we should install windmills on our houses instead of solar panels. If you're thinking, why doesn't she shut up about the wind, go read someone else's blog. I'm telling you right now: this wind ain't natural.
Charles survived the so-called freeze. He was bundled in his makeshift tent but I don't think it froze here as some of my unprotected plants in front also seem unfazed. He is busy producing another flush of buds, so in about 3 weeks, if I can keep them safe, there will be another performance of the yellow bells. Helping this brug winter over has now become my raison d'etre. Yes, I know, get a life. But really, it helps to focus on trivial matters when the world is spinning around, doesn't it?


Somewhere between the trivial and very important is the save-the-date postcard I'm working on for Grace's wedding. It's a take-off on old timey postcards; I plan to have the printer leave the job untrimmed and then cut them myself with deckle-edge scissors. Among the Narrangansett motifs, I included the heavenly Rosa Rugosa on the lower left-hand side of the image. This seashore-loving rose grows in dense thickets along the coastline and its scent is an intense mix of rose, lemon and seaspray. And, with red roses being the symbol of love, this bit of Rhode Island botany seemed just right.

Sketchbook

Having a little beach withdrawal, aggravated by having to actually dress "professionally" for a client meeting today. Rough after three days of basically living in pajamas. A little gouache from this weekend at Port Aransas that conveys the late November mix of ocean, dunes, and wild brush. And a Toyota Camry.

Much to be thankful for

We made our annual pilgrimage to Port Aransas to celebrate Thanksgiving. Lots of food, pies, wine, scrabble, long walks, and shelling. We had a bonfire/hootenanny on one of the cool nights.

The dunes at Port Aransas are looking taller and healthier than I've ever seen them. The vegetation is something to behold especially in the fall. The grass seedtops turn silver, red, and chestnut.



Mimosa Strigillosa or powderpuff plant. It looks more like a fiber optic pompon than a powderpuff. It was growing along the path from our condo. It's about the size of a large gumball and only an inch off the ground. Sweet.



Beach Evening Primrose (Oenothera Drummondii)
These seem to bloom year-round at Port A. These were wide open at 8 a.m. in the morning.


Common Broomweed?
Hard to tell, there are so many yellow aster-like daisy varieties.



On the way home, we stopped at Goose Island State Park to see the Big Tree. This coastal liveoak is supposedly more than 1000 years old. To be honest, it didn't strike me as that big. The copse of oaks nearby were more striking. And for some insane reason the TPWD has put up a hideous chain link fence around the Big Tree. The fence is only about 4ft tall, so anyone could hop over it, so it's not doing any good as protection.




Two views of the nearby motte of oaks. All of the oaks along this stretch of coast have this drastically tormented look from being subjected to prevailing offshore winds. We came back through Luling, where at my favorite plant stand last year I got the Knockout roses. Fortunately with Will and Rachel's gear on top of mine, there was no room to cram any plants in, so we kept on rolling. It didn't rain while we were in Port A and I arrived home to find nothing in the rain gauge either. The drought is now about a year on.

Worth the wait