Winter Garden

Our weather here on the central coast has been quite cool and rainy since the fall. This past week we warmed up considerably but not before a stretch of night-time temps dipping dangerously low. Luckily in my year old garden I have not amassed much of a tender plant collection (yet).

My self-sown seedlings from last years annuals are doing remarkably well.  In fact I have had blooms already!

Mentzelia lindleyi was grown from seed last year and planted out rather late.  They didn’t bloom until June. Left to their own devices their seedlings have grown to flowering size remarkably quickly.

California native annuals are pretty cool, huh?

Another neat California native is Coreopsis gigantea, native to the southern California coast  down into Baja and on the Channel Islands.  I’ve posted pics of them before, from my trips to see them in bloom along the coast north of Malibu, but now I have one of my own.

 

Can you believe this three-foot tall monster was a little plant in a 4″ pot last March.

I was pretty excited to see that it is starting to form its first buds.  The bright yellow flowers should start opening by March.

Maireana sedifolia is doing  well next to the Coreopsis. It is very important that both of these plants have excellent drainage. They are planted on a raised mound of soil which helps but it makes me a bit nervous that an Artemisia frigida planted right below them completely rotted out.

Salvia africana-lutea has been bulking up and I’m finally getting to see some blooms.  Whatever nasty little caterpillar was eating the flowers last summer doesn’t seem to be active in winter.

One plant that was very unhappy with our 30 degree weather is Trichodesma scottii.  It is a borage relative from the island of Socotra. All of its buds and the ends of its leaves turned to mush. I hope it will bounce back and bloom this summer. At least now I know it isn’t cold hardy and can throw a sheet over it on freezing nights. Other plants that suffered some damage were Lotus berthelotii, Iochroma cyanea, and Pycnostachys urticifolia but they should all bounce back.

I was just looking at pictures of this garden from last spring when all the plants were brand new and it is exciting to see how much everything has filled in.

I am still not sure exactly what is going to happen with the sewers. I know the original plan was for the pipes to go right down the center of the left hand bed in the photo above.  My landlady made an appointment with someone from the town and spoke to them about it and apparently she can fill out an amendment requesting that they go through the street instead.  Unfortunately I had an appointment on the day the guy came out so I couldn’t be there and I only got to speak to her about it briefly.  So for now I am cautiously optimistic and I have decided to do a bit of work on the garden.

The garden looked OK last summer but I was not completely happy with it.  I kept adding to it bit by bit as interesting plants became available and the overall plan was a bit off.  So I dug up all the Santolinas, Scabiosa, and some of the Festuca and rearranged them. I moved my Eryngiums to the other side of the bed and replaced them with some Phlomis leucophracta that I grew from seed. I’ll be adding some inexpensive plants to empty spaces and across the front of the garden I’ve moved around some of the seedlings that are coming up.

I’m just going to move forward hoping that this garden won’t be harmed and if worse comes to worse and I have to dig everything out again at least I got some exercise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other things I liked about SoCal

Things I liked about SoCal, a set on Flickr.

Here are a few more pictures that didn’t make the cut but were still pretty cool. Click the thumbnails to see a description.

Will you ever move back to Southern California?

I’ve been asked that a few times during the moving process and the answer is NO!  Not any time in the foreseeable future.  I didn’t really mean to move there in the first place.  And certainly not for four years.  When I first moved there I was going through a period of debilitating depression, social anxiety, and at times paralyzing agoraphobia.  I didn’t want to move back east and we have family and family friends in the Los Angeles area so it seemed like a good place to recover.  I just didn’t expect the recovery to take as long as it did and it did but with the help of a great therapist and a lot of online support I got better.  The only problem was I was living in a place I don’t particularly care for.

But there were some things I did love about my time there so I thought I would share them before I put that part of my life to rest and start making better memories. So here are a few of them.

For a while I didn't want to have anything to do with plants but the Los Angeles Arboretum was one of the place I went for some cognitive therapy to find my love for them again. Hopefully the cool Nuxia floribunda in the center of this photo survived the recent wind storm that destroyed or damaged many of the trees there.

The California Poppy Preserve at Antelope Valley is inane. Totally insane. Even if you are some sort of orange hating weirdo there are plenty of other wild flowers blooming there. But the orange sheets of flowers as far as the eyes can see were unreal.

Charmlee County Regional Park in Malibu is like a big secret native plant garden. I went with a friend and I think we saw one or two other people the entire time. Anyone who has lived in Los Angeles knows that makes it a pretty special place.

Runyon Canyon Park is the other extreme. You will see hundreds of people (including a few celebrities). But the views of Los Angeles on a clear winter day are breathtaking.

Every year I would drive up to Malibu in March to see the Coreopsis gigantea in bloom. Definitely one of the more unusual California natives but for some reason I never expected that there would be hills covered with hundreds of them. A drive up Route One in March from Santa Monica to Oxnard is well worth the trip.

It wasn't just wildflowers and gardens that I loved. Strangely enough I really enjoyed the building sized billboards along Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I lived right off the Sunset Strip so I even had a view of one of them from my kitchen window. Most of them are for the entertainment industry so while I normally hate billboards these seem somehow appropriate even if the scale is a bit silly. My favorite was when there would be two giant billboards for the same exact movie almost side by side.

So no I do not want to live in the Los Angeles area ever again. But rather than think of it as the place that I went when I was sick I would like to remember it as the place I got better.