Tag Archives: perennials

Garden flowers for Valentine’s Day

Forget roses. This is what blooms naturally around Valentine’s day. Manzanita feeds the hummingbirds, daffodils brighten up the garden, and oxalis throws a splash of yellow green over verdant green leaves. A Winter Bouquet Daffodils Just plant the bulbs in fall and you’ll have daffodils for years to come. These are way overdue for division:Continue reading “Garden flowers for Valentine’s Day”

French cottage garden

Sometime around 2005, we installed this garden in France. We used the stones we found on site, and antique looking pot and whatever we could find to build a dry stacked wall. A mason built the path, although with smooth edges instead of irregular to catch and play with the gravel on both sides. CeContinue reading “French cottage garden”

A garden refresh near Lake Tahoe

Here are the steps needed if you want to undertake a garden refresh but need to complete it quickly. Briefly, there are three initial steps: gather data, create a planting plan, pick up and install the plants. This is provided that the preliminaries are in place: a working irrigation system (or person) that will provideContinue reading “A garden refresh near Lake Tahoe”

Renewing the meadow

Timing is critical: renew too early and there might be some leftover seeds that the birds would have loved to eat. Too late, and you’ll be removing new growth as it starts at the end of winter. Then there’s rain: this meadow doubles as a rain garden, so if you cut too soon after aContinue reading “Renewing the meadow”

Time to cut back the California asters

After months of steady growth, the asters were reaching for the sky, with an average height of about 54 inches. Time to act. Last year, some of the asters were trimmed too late, almost completely eliminating their flowers. Others were done earlier, resulting at a solid floral display held below eye height. Untrimmed, the plantsContinue reading “Time to cut back the California asters”

Digilexis? No, Digiplexis!

Some plants are refinements of existing species. Others are things discovered in the wild by plant hunters, Indiana Jones style. Then there are some created by crazy plantsmen by crossing species nobody imagined were compatible. The resulting plant in this case has dark green basal leaves and unique flowers that look like they walked offContinue reading “Digilexis? No, Digiplexis!”

Aster chilensis trimming results

Last year, our California asters grew. And grew. And grew. By flowering time, the plants were about six feet tall. Too hard to appreciate the flowers at that height without a ladder, but the plants had a solution: as the season progressed, they drooped. We couldn’t cut them because we wanted the seeds as aContinue reading “Aster chilensis trimming results”