Plant Talk

Rain Garden Presentation at South Seattle Community College - Learn To Build Them Right

With all the problems going on in Ballard with the rain gardens installed last year, we're well cautioned to build them correctly the first time. This Friday evening, May 4th, SSCC's Landscape Horticulture and Continuing Education program is sponsoring a free presentation aimed at the do-it-yourselfer, called "Creating Rain Gardens: Capturing the Rain for Your Own Water-Efficient Garden."

The speaker, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, is the author of a Timber Press book on rain gardens, and an avid gardener himself.  He co-founded the Greywater Guerrillas, and has led dozens of community-based workshops on rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse across North America. His book (same title as the talk) covers everything from rain barrels to simple living roofs, permeable patios, and other low-tech affordable ways to save water in the garden.

Details: Friday, May 4, 7:00 p.m.
At the Chan Education Center, South Seattle Community College (located at the north end of campus between the Arboretum and the Garden Center), 6000 16th Avenue SW, Seattle. Free of charge. (http://www.southseattle.edu/campus/map.htm). For more information, contact: Van Bobbitt.

Warm Up Spring With Intense Flower Colors....in a Lizard Vase

I think this vase is a lizard...or maybe it's a frog...but I love how it's patterning plays off spring flowers, keeping down the sweetness factor inherent in a bunch of April flowers.

It's so easy to make a pastel bouquet this time of year - lavenders, baby pinks and blues combine with fresh greens and look, well, pretty...but also perhaps a little insipid next to spring's hotter colors. And on gray days we need the heat, don't we?

In this little bunch of flowers, picked this morning and plunked into a Mexican vase, intense purples and chrome yellows combine with orange to crank up the heat...(well, when doesn't orange look good in any bouquet?).

The lively yellow is kale gone to flower...the airy orange flowers are Epimedium x warleyense 'Orange Queen', and I wish I could remember which orange tulips these are, because they're proving to be perennial. Chartreuse euphorbia mediates between extremes of color. The deep purple of the pasqueflower (looks like an anemone with its yellow anthers) is echoed in the little purple flowers of Lunaria annua that I gathered in the alley.

Maybe I'd best not admit that, as I got a comment, no, a rant, on the amazon page for "Petal & Twig", accusing me of being a terrible person and anti-environmentalist for writing about the joys of picking a few flowers along the roadside or alley....well, that's where I found the lunaria, and believe me there's plenty of it spreading around out there....I haven't depleted the population.

The dark burgundy flowers are some kind of wallflower, and their sweet fragrance scents the room....

Here's a close up....

The Big Wave - The Fine Art of Gabion Walls

Whidbey Island artist Dan Freeman was asked to turn a length of concrete beach wall into a work of art....no small task. Home owners Wendy and Mike Waitt hated the expanse of plain concrete retaining wall with 13 ugly drain pipes sticking out of it, on the beach side of their waterfront home. The house faces southwest, and is right on the beach so waves, sun and wind are an issue. Any art piece would need to be tough, and effectively cover up the drain pipes while still letting them do their job.

What Freeman came up with is not only durable, but looks almost as if it washed up from the water in a storm, and settled in place along the wall. A rusty metal cage sculpture undulates the full hundred feet along the wall, and is thickly packed with rock, as if a gabion wall had simply been stretched out, turned on its side, and hung as an art piece.

"It was a challenge to line everything up from panel to panel in the shop, take them to the site and install," says Freeman. " I had to drill 215 holes into the concrete for the anchors to support it. The rock for the piece was craned in to the site and carried in buckets to the piece for filling," is how he describes the laborious process that resulted in a piece that looks perfectly at home with its colors of beach, sea, and sky. It's amazing how effective just two materials - metal and rock - can be, and how such industrial materials, in this configuration and location, can look so organic.

You can learn more about Freeman's wall-basket sculpture in this article in the South Whidbey Record, and see more of this talented artist's work at http://homing.elementalartwork.com

Here's the wide-angle lens view, to give you an idea of the massive scale of the piece....The cage is about 4" deep, runs along the entire hundred feet length of the wall, and holds at least six tons of rock....

A closer look to give you a feel of the curvaceousness of these hard materials...

Such an affinity between rusty metal grid and rounded, multi-colored rocks...

 

Congratulations to Poppy Barach - Winner of the Petal & Twig Bouquet Contest

What do flowering currant, hellebores, spirea and camellia have in common? They're all elements in the winning flower arrangement in the Everyday Bouquet contest here at Plant Talk.....Many thanks to the dozens of you who sent in beautiful bouquet photos and made our contest a big success. Your artistry brightened many chill and rainy days for me...

 I loved that you all picked up on the spirit of "Petal and Twig" and crafted bouquets that reflected your own unique gardens and sensibilities. It was very tough to choose, because each arrangment had its own  charms...every single one was special...

Drum roll here....and the winner is....the appropriately named Poppy Barach, who sent in this spring bouquet picked fresh from her garden on April 2:

I loved the faded, flowered pitcher, that looks well-loved, as if it might be a family heirloom but could just as easily have been picked up at a thrift store. I admire the unexpected combination of colors, and the delicate tracery of the spirea  branches with their newly emerging, copper-colored little leaves. Also Poppy's clever combining of dried sedum heads from last fall with just-opening, baby-pink camellias and then just that drip of pink-flowering currant. The bouquet looks both essence-of-spring, and timeless....

Here's Poppy's description and plant list:

"When I think of spring, my mind automatically goes to pastel pinks and yellows but in reality, my garden begins it's display with rusty oranges and deep purples. In this bouquet I've included voluptuous
hellebores, dried autumn joy sedums, tiny-leaved branches from goldflame spirea and golden barberry, an overactive akebia vine, soft pink camellias and a pink flowering currant. Full disclosure -some members of this group (helleborus foetidus) are best seen and not smelled. I place mine in a protected spot outside the front door.

Congratulations, Poppy. Thanks to the generosity of my publisher, Sasquatch Books, you've won a copy of "Petal and Twig" and a $100 gift certificate to Terrain.

It was so fun to get a glimpse of your gardens in your bouquet entries...I so appreciate your participation  and enthusiasm for flower arranging.. I'll post several more of my favorite entries in the next week or so - stay tuned....

 

Gardens That Knock You to Your Knees - and Swooping Owls - at Rancho La Puerta

Rancho La Puerta, the oldest health spa in North America, located in Tecate, and hour or so south and east of San Diego, is a such a sensory delight that the gardens capture the attention of even non-gardeners. It's so cleverly laid out that you're drawn in to look closely, smell, and revel in plants whether you care much about them or not.  The winding paths encourage everyone to walk miles everyday to get to classes, the dining hall, lectures, swim pools and treatment centers. Paths curve beneath arbors, beside fountains, across bridges, past sculptures....really, the place is paradise.

The organic gardens are so alive, rustling with birds, lizards, rabbits....the gardens appear artless for their casual combinations of shrubs, roses, perennials, vines and succulents...but great artistry has gone into creating incidents and experiences throughout the gardens. Around every corner there's something to see - a pond with turtles, undulating masses of ice plants in contrasting colors, banks of rosemary, arbors dripping roses, pots of scented-leafed geranium...the smells, textures and bloom are almost overwhelming. Literally, I have to sit down and drink it all in several times a day. That's part of the artistry - gardens that almost knock you to your knees, making you pause and soak it all in.

Everytime I go to the Ranch something especially wonderful happens. This time it was a visit at dusk to the oak grove to watch the barn owls swoop through. I tagged along with the birders, and twenty of us stood silently as darkness fell, along shores of the river, beneath the oaks, as the crows took to the trees and the ghostly white barn owls flew through. It was both Harry Potter-esque and deeply of its own time and place - a few moments of wild nature we were privileged enough to share with the birds, who thankfully totally ignored us.

Here are a few scenes from the Ranch - I'm sorry I forgot to take photos of the huge, gorgeously productive organic vegetable garden. I was so busy experienceing everything I rarely remembered my camera...which is, I think, the sign of a truly fine vacation...

One of the many pergolas, this one dripping with fragrant wistera - notice the benches beneath where people rest and breath in the scent. I was late to yoga class several times, as I couldn't make my way quickly along this path...

Valerian, cistus, rosemary and artemisia all planted in a cottage garden tumble outside the yoga gym...isn't that stone wall beautiful, its hard edge lending definition to the shape of the plantings....just to the left of this scene is a track surrounding a huge oval planting of grape vines, just leafing out.

This long colonnade leads to the dance gym, complete with fireplace...every bit of every building is uniquely beautiful at Rancho La Puerta - notice the door on the gym. This pergola is laced with wisteria and banksia roses.....don't you just want to walk beneath and open that door? The place is full of such enticements....

Fragrant Narcissus and Hyacinths Ease a Switch of Seasons

I was lucky enough to teach gardening and flower arranging last week at Rancho La Puerta in Mexico. A few storms blew through, but mostly it was sunny and warm - later in the week I'll post a few photos to show you what was in bloom in these gorgeous Baja gardens...The scent of wisteria and roses catapulted me a season forward.....even the jasmine was starting to open as we left.

As soon as I got back to Langley I went out into the garden to gather flowers, and felt like a time traveler - spring is just beginning to unfold in my garden here.The pasqueflowers are opening, the epimedium are in full bloom, the narcissus are holding their own, the lilacs are budded up... Fragrant hyacinths to cut, and lilies and hostas pushing their snouts up out of the ground helped to ground me back into the beauty of a Northwest spring.

I feel so lucky to have experienced two springs in a single week - a Mexican spring on the cusp of summer, and a Whidbey Island springtime just pushing up out of the ground...

Two bouquets, one for the house and one for Half Moon Yoga....the little yellow flowers on dark stems are kale gone to flower (sometimes it helps to be slow on garden clean-up), a selection of daffodils, purple hyacinth, blue pulmonaria, a lavender drumstick primrose. Can you see the little orange flowers toward the bottom of the right-hand bouquet? That's the darling little bloom on epimedium...love this orange-flowering variety. The flowers, on dark wiry stems, tend to disappear in the landscape, so they're perfect to cut and bring inside to enjoy close up...

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Everyday Bouquet Contest Wraps Up - Thanks for Your Fabulous, Beautiful Entries

Plant Talk readers are so good at flower arranging that my job as judge for the contest has been pretty darn difficult....a duty that's been well compensated by the joy it's been to open my email every morning and find a flowery entry or two to brighten my day (see the sumptuous spring bouquet at left, a good example of reader's artistry...).

I wish I could give prizes to everyone. I'm not, however, wimping out like the judges for the Pulitzer for fiction who decided not to award the prize this year....how could they do that when a book like Ann Patchett's engrossing and enchanting "State of Wonder" was one of the finalists? Anyway, stay tuned for beauty and inspiration when I post my favorite bouquets, along with the winner, early next week....I need some time to think about this...

Spikes, Soil, Sedum, and Patent Leather - Botanical Shoe Project

Inspired by the botanical shoes made by Portland gardener Nancy Goldman, I've been planting up the highest, most wicked looking heels I can find at the local Thrift shop here in Langley. The more pointed the toes, the higher the heel, the sleeker the shoe the better - but no slingbacks because they don't hold the soil...peep toes are okay, you can always stuff a little moss or sedum in to fluff out the open toe...

It's so fun to see how a juxtaposition of familiar items make both look so new and unusual...

Simply drill plenty of holes in the soles of the shoes for drainage, water sparingly, and botanical shoes will last outdoors for a couple of years...they hold up best if you overwinter them beneath the eaves so they don't get waterlogged.

The shoes below will be part of Museo Gallery in Langley's annual Garden Show during the month of April...

The "It" Plant for Summer 2012? A Truly Black Colacasia Is In The Running...

Will we ever get over our romance with black plants? Not if they keep producing glories like the new Colocasia 'Black Coral', with glossy black leaves veined in electric blue - really, this is such a jolt of a plant, it could carry a big pot or anchor a border all by itself.I think it must have the most truly black leaf I've ever seen - usually "black" plants are dark shades of burgundy, purple or brown....

Supposedly hardy to zone 7B, this colocasia should probably be treated like an annual if for no other reason it'd take so long to get going in our cool springs - it wants the days to be above 70 degrees and the nights at least 50 (hey, so do I!). This exotic looker wants as much sun as you can find for it, and moist, rich, well-drained soil; the same conditions as a hydrangea or a hosta, but with full-on sun.

You'll want to pair the deep, dark leaves of this showy elephant ear with hot or pale colors so it really shows up - the more sun resistant huecheras maybe, or there must be some blue-flowering annuals with fluffy yellow foliage, although I can't picture any at the moment... I can see pumpkin-colored calibroachoa foaming up around it, or the chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas 'Marguerite') tumbling down the side of the pot. Just keep it simple, because 'Black Coral' is a scene-stealer all by itself...

Photo courtesy of PlantHaven

     

Tulips May be Malingering In the Cold, But the Daffodils are Blazing...

I love narcissus, and not just because the rabbits and squirrels don't eat them. Animals know full well that these harbingers of spring are poisonous and leave them alone, as opposed to tulip bulbs that the squirrels dig up and feast upon...resulting in a sad display unless I plant tulips from the nursery in springtime, already budded up, which I've resorted to the last couple of years.

Here's my first picking of 'Falconet' daffodils, which are sweetly fragrant....I love the smaller narcissus with orange centers to warm up our all-too-chilly spring days....the vase is from Museo Gallery in Langley, made by Whidbey Island ceramicist Jodi Willenborg-Cable. I love the auburn-colored base which echoes the color of the daffs- and can you see the narrow turquoise stripe around the throat of the vase? I'm thinking this will be perfect vase for just about any kind of garden flowers, a theory I plan to test out over the coming season....