planning

Winter is planning season in the garden

We’ve had such a mild winter here in Central Texas – we haven’t even had an official freeze yet at our house.  A few plants have been affected by close-to-freezing temps.  (Though some other gardnerers in cooler spots around the city have had one or two brief dips to or just below 32.)

It even hit 88 degrees last weekend, and I welcomed it complete with shorts, sunscreen, big hat and a few much-needed breaks inside to avoid what truly felt like heat stroke.  It was January, for goodness sake!

I’d been sketching out a few ideas for changing beds — vowing to treat my own garden with the same care that I give to design clients.  Than means  I need to tame some overgrown plants, move some others to better locations and add in some more evergreen color to create a cohesive design.

The bed in front of the garage did well last year, but I’d neglected to prune back the pale pavonia right in front of the window.  Last fall I moved the purple-blooming salvia ‘Amistad’ in front of the pavonia – they were small and leggy in their previous spot.  Well, they REALLY liked this bed – so much that they grew even bigger than the pavonias behind them.  Gorgeous, but unruly and completely out of scale.  Pavonias: chop.  Salvia ‘Amistad:’ move.  Dianella: add.

They looked beautiful against the Senorita Rosalita cleome I planted in front of them, but they soon grew OVER the cleomes and the yarrow and tried to accost guest walking down the sidewalk!  They will now look beautiful in the bed at the corner of the house now — I hope!

 

After a trip to the candy store — well, really, Vivero Growers — I found some beautiful new plants to complete my design.  I added in a third variegated dianella and put in several Loropetalum ‘cabernet’  to provide more evergreen color in the bed.  I left one ‘Amistad’ in between the pavonias and I promise I will keep it pruned down just a bit.

A stunning Japanese maple, Acer palatum var. dissectum ‘Tamukeyama,’ went in toward the house, where an ‘Edward Goucher’ abelia came out.  To echo the burgundy colors, I added a few more Ajuga ‘black scallop’ around the dianella.  The maple has deep red bark and delicate weeping branches.  The leaves are very fine.  I can’t wait to see it bud out.  It will only get early morning sun in this spot and will be protected by the house.

 

The deciduous tree in front of the new maple came out – it’s a Caesalpinia gillesii, or often called by one of its common names, Yellow Bird of Paradise.  It needed a drier bed – so I relocated it across the driveway to a sunnier spot with tougher conditions.

And here you see my favorite shovel — I bought it at Red Barn and it has a nice foothold for pushing down on and the handle makes it easier to get some oomph into your motion!

I haven’t re-mulched after adding in some Geo Growers thunder dirt to the bed — I’m still debating whether or not I want to plant some seeds in here in a few carefully selected spots.

Because I’m a plant collector, I don’t always follow my own design rules (or even loose guidelines) if I’ve found some wonderful new plant that HAS to get squeezed in somewhere.  I also suffer from the guilt of getting rid of plants that aren’t working.  Thank goodness I know so many other gardeners and garden bloggers who might have the perfect spot for things.  BTW – Austin garden bloggers, I still have that nice 5 gallon-sized rock rose that came out of this been and needs a home – it’s about 2-1/2 – feet tall, but the deer keep eating it outside of the fence and I don’t have a place for it inside of the fence…first comment, first come and get it!

What are you sketching for your spring garden?

Garden resolutions 2013

I’ve long given up New Year’s Resolutions — but I do make some to-do lists.  If I call them to-do lists, I seem to get around to them better!

This year I have a long garden to-do list.  Perhaps committing it to eternal, world-wide view on my blog will help me check things off my list!

So, here goes:

 1.  Plant more trees outside the back fence in front of scrubby cedars.  I love this smoke tree and planted one for a client this fall, wishing all the while that I had one to enjoy. 

 2.  Have an a corner arbor build to showcase my tangerine cross vine and my wisteria.  The cross vine winds along the fence and then climbs  20 feet up into a tree where I can’t see it.  The wisteria spends most of its time hanging out on the opposite side of the fence — hiding from me — to be closer to the morning sun.  A tall arbor would give them both plenty of room to keep growing — growing where I can enjoy them!

 3.  Replace the pride of Barbados that I lost over the last two winters.  I love the explosion of color these trees bring in the late summer and I’ve missed mine.  I vow to find some great hot spots for them to thrive.

4.  I will buy more bigger starter plants this year.  I’ve bemoaned the fact that my newer plants struggled to come back from harsh winters and scalding summers.  Some years they even came back smaller than when I planted them!  When I can, I want to invest in more established plants.

 5.  With too much on my plate, blogging and scrapbooking have waited in the wings too much this year.  I love those creative outlets and want to give myself more opportunities for gathering inspiration from them.

 6.  Divide, divide, divide.  I have irises, bi-color irises and lilies that really need dividing.  In fact, they needed dividing this fall.  This will be the year of dividing, replanting and sharing.

 7.  Prune, prune, prune.  My cottage garden, cutting garden and hot southwest garden all suffered from overgrown-itis this year.  Yes, the plants were all beautiful, but I know that pruned properly they would have complemented each other and showcased their individual characteristics better.

 8.  This year I will plant my bulbs before January … oh, wait … that means today!  Yikes – better go find them and get to planting!

 9.  I WILL make homemade pesto from my basil “trees” this year.  I say that every year when my basil gets out of hand — I mean stunning — but this year I really mean it.

10.  And last, well, there never is a last, but I plan to dig up most of this and rebuild the dry creek with moss rock and other, larger stones.  The recycled glass will come out and I will raise up the bed to help plants thrive there.  With very little soil and a berm to avoid soil on the fence, the plants don’t get enough water and the soil just isn’t deep enough.  The solution — protect the fence from rotting by putting hardy board against it and rock in the front to add good soil.

That’s the list — for now.  As with everything in gardening – it’s organic and will change a thousand times over the next year.  But it’s a good start and I feel good about making decisions to tackle some of my current and perpetual problems.

Guess we’ll see where I end up this time next year.

What’s on your garden resolution list for 2013?

Spring garden projects…

It’s spring. Well, okay, it’s not quite spring yet, but it’s spring here in Central Texas for all intents and purposes.

It’s time to start the vegetable garden, to amend the soil, to pull lots and lots of weeds. And, it’s time to start planning those garden projects that have been nagging at me all winter.

Let’s be clear, every single bed has a project of some sort. There are holes to fill where the drought decimated plants we thought were indestructible. There are holes to fill where the 3-day below freezing cold snap the winter before killed things or stunted them so much they were never the same last summer.

There are a lot of holes to fill.

But this is an entire area that need revisiting. In the bed above, I actually started out with a plan and a vision of a tall, beautiful bottle brush tree with it’s deep red, wispy blooms set against the strong, structural contrast of a smooth blue agave with deep purple ‘May Night’ salvia scattered all around.

The best laid plans…

Three winters ago, I lost the first bottle brush tree and agave to an abnormally cold freeze. I’d planted the tree in the fall and wondered if it hadn’t had enough time to get established before the cold. So I replanted — another agave and a bigger tree — and I planted them in late spring.

Then we had another unusual cold snap and I lost the second tree. And the deer messed with many of my little salvias.

Early last summer, the bottle brush began to come back from the roots. After a few months I had a nice shrub…the same size as the agave. Not exactly the contrast I’d envisioned. In the meantime, a few irises I’d plopped in there began to grow and spread. And I hated the bottle brush shrub, but I didn’t want to kill it – it offends my gardening sensibilities to kill a plant with that much will to live.

A few weeks ago I pruned the bottle brush back into tree form. Multi-trunked, but still pretty and growing like crazy. The agave looks bad after one or two light freezes this winter, and it needs pruning. It’s also been taken over by the irises. (They are stunning right now) But they don’t go next to the agave – the form is too similar, their colors don’t work together…I could go on and on.

Further up the bed toward the house I originally had a dwarf crape myrtle in deep burgundy. It was literally cut in half by my guys on a pruning #fail. Some transplanted loropetalums didn’t survive there and there is one pathetic knock-out rose left hiding there.

This will be my first spring project. The bottle brush? Gonna keep pruning – it stays. The agave? I’ll prune it and think about it. The irises? They will move when the time is right. May night? Nah – something tougher will take their place. Some grasses might find their way there. I’m still hooked on the burgundy, deep purple, silvery gray color combo. Indigo spires would be delightful, but that’s a very windy spot and at their height, I fear they’d be whipped around like crazy there. But I know what I want there, so it will come together if I take my time.

I might even treat myself like one of my clients and draw out a plan.

Or not…

Stay tuned.

Two more beds to go…but I’ll save them for another day.

What’s your first garden project for this spring?

Projects…


This is my newest project. Well, one of the two…or twenty! I’m still on the veggie fence and new bed but my workers have abandoned me for a few days. They’ll be back, but since I can’t plant my vegetable garden yet, I’ve turned my sights elsewhere.

These photos are at the end of the river rock path that runs along the side of the house. This whole area is at the end of our driveway and before our septic field, which is just a grassy area. This is a nice, sunny hole in the woods and I got a vision last summer to plant wildflowers and cutting flowers here. The statue I bought last week is the anchor for this area, and I’ve decided to name her, Artemis! Thanks to Annie, at The Transplantable Rose, for the idea. It was hard to pick – thanks to everyone for giving me lots of great suggestions — it was tough to decide. Flora ran a close second – thanks also to Kate at Kate Smudges in Earth, Paint and Life, for the suggestion.

So, yesterday I bought some larkspur and society garlic (to deter the deer) and some blackfoot daisies and some corralberry to frame the area and feed the birds. I bought those gigantic sunflowers at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center last summer and planted them here and they will be back. I’ve also sprinkled some seeds here from my other native plants over the last year. I’m going to leave these new plants sitting here and ponder them for a while. Isn’t that part of gardening, pondering? I tend to be impulsive in the garden (and in life, let’s be honest, here!) so I’m trying to think this through for a change.

For some strange reason, I don’t usually draw out landscape design plans for myself, I just start throwing stuff in the ground. Generally, that works for me. But I will also be pulling OUT 4-5 plants from the front bed for exactly that reason — I over planted the summer before last. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d drawn the design out formally because I would have seen clearly that there was too much material there. But there was a sale at the old Marbridge farms and I went nuts. So, now I get to dig it back up and guess where it’s going? The edges of this new bed! Irony. And, I’m kind of an old dog — hard to teach me new tricks.


These little fillers will look nice in front of the lantana and guara and ferns when they come back in.

It’s drizzling and overcast and we have a 30% chance of rain today, so I’m not sure I will get these plants in the ground. But, with the moisture, they’ll be happy outside anyway.

By |2017-11-29T23:27:56-06:00February 20th, 2008|Blog, new bed, planning, Sharing Nature's Garden, wildlflower|0 Comments

Check…

So, I can officially check “making a checklist” off of my checklist! (I’m such a German!) I’ve added my Fall To Do list onto the blog so now the world can hold me accountable.

Nothing to show for today — well, there is, if you count a trash can full of weeds and lantana branches that I pulled out of my vegetable garden. Guess it didn’t make for very attractive photography, so I didn’t think to snap a shot of it! I literally have a lantana TREE growing volunteer in my garden. I let it stay there in the Spring, because I just hate to kill anything that’s even remotely alive. I’ve regretted it ever since and now it’s taking twice as long to cut it back because it’s wildly out of control. It overtook the cucumber vines (early on they were hanging from it for support and I thought – “HA” – what a novel trellis!) I think Mother Nature got the last “HA” on this one.

I’m planning to harvest some of my leeks this week and make a lovely leek and potato soup ~ though it might have to be a chilled soup if the weather doesn’t cool down soon!

By |2017-11-29T23:28:02-06:00October 2nd, 2007|Blog, planning, Sharing Nature's Garden|0 Comments
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