Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

“I was hired to create a quality, well built product that was my original design and my original build, not yours. You are not a builder nor are you an architect. I was not hired to build a design you concocted, I do not work that way, nor did I ever agree. You had some suggestions that we granted, but for you to claim ‘that you would not have done it that way’ or ‘why did you do it that way’ is preposterous.” — Ivan Spaller, Floribunda August 3, 2007

2007-08-14. Building Inspection Correction Notice

The framing of the garden house failed on four counts; the most disturbing news is that the back roof is not attached to the concrete wall. I can lift the roof off the wall with one hand. The inspector said that in the next big storm (and this is hurricane season) it could blow off like a giant kite. Not only could this destroy the garden house but it has the potential to cause harm to the lives or property of our neighbors.

The roof must come off. Whenever I tried to come up with solutions to the screen framing problem, I always came to the conclusion that the roof was on wrong and caused other problems. But I couldn’t begin to consider the time and expense of taking it off and solving the problems at the cause. Like everyone else, I wanted to see what we could do to band-aid the problem. Now that the building inspector has made the decision for me, my initial response is relief. There isn’t a choice now. No more torturing myself with what should be done. The roof must come off and the garden house can be fixed the right way, not just patched up.

The effect of opening up the garden to the sky is a bit disconcerting (in a good way). Have you ever watched a cat enter a room where you’ve rearranged the furniture or put up a Christmas tree. They saunter in, notice the change, and then jump in alertness. “Hmmm. Something’s different.” That’s how I felt every time I wandered into the back yard today or looked out the kitchen window. The change is like a physical blow. Look at all that sky!

When I had trees trimmed last March, I saved some of the work for fall because the meadow was in full bloom and I couldn’t stand the thought of it being trampled on the one time of the year it looks really nice. (No matter how careful the workers, trying to maneuver huge tree limbs to the ground requires a bit of tramping through the flower beds.)

I created the first problem. Over 11 years ago, a cedar elm tree in the middle of our lawn fell in a storm. After the stump was cut down to the ground, it resprouted and I let the sprouts grow. First it was my bonzai project. Then it was a way of creating some privacy for the back porch. Several excuses and 11 years later it was a nuisance, shading the meadow and the iris bed, dropping leaves and seeds into the pond. In order to connect the back patio to the new garden house, I intend to make an entirely new garden. Now was the time to get rid of it.

The before shot…my bonzai project got out of hand. Lots of good firewood though.

Ever since last year when our neighbor to the north erected a privacy fence, effectively giving us a New Back Yard, I’ve had plans to transform the north border. The biggest problem is the amount of shade. Looking at all the lovely flowers in England this summer, I resolved that I was going to get rid of the weedy hackberry and chinaberry trees.

I’ve hated this messy chinaberry for years. It drops zillions of seeds, all of which sprout. And it arches over the meadow shading out all the flowers.

Now the ‘Heritage’ rose (that spindly bush on the right) should get enough light to thrive. And I can get ready for fall planting. Is it time to fall in love with roses again?

In one of Pam’s recent Tales from the Microbial Laboratory she posted some gorgeous photos of the bug life on her garlic chives (Allium tuberosum). I’ve noticed that mine have been buzzing with bees for a couple of weeks. (What a nasty honey that must make!) But it wasn’t until I saw her photographs that I was inspired to take camera in hand.

The bees were plentiful but camera shy. In all my shots all I got was a blur. Still, as Pam showed me, there is an amazing diversity in the creatures attracted to garlic chives. I’ll add more photos as I take them.

One of the things I love about garden blogging is comparing notes with other gardeners near and far. I had all this beauty in my garden but wouldn’t have given it a careful look if Pam hadn’t shown me what she saw in her garden.

Despite no appreciable drop in temperature, fall has come to Austin and the plants know it. New flowers are starting to open, first the oxblood lilies, then the coral bean, and now the Lindheimer senna (aka velvetleaf cassia) which goes by a couple of botanic names, Cassia lindheimeri or Senna lindheimeriana.

I bought the senna (or is it a cassia?) back in May in a 4-inch pot from Barton Springs Nursery. When I planted it, I teased the three stems apart. One died but the other two thrived on all the rain we got this summer and are now about 3 feet tall and wide. The flowers are not very showy. I prefer the plant for its blue-green leaves which are very velvety to the touch. Lindheimer senna is reported to reseed freely and is a native Texan, at home on the shallow limestone of the Edwards plateau. I also read, though not a problem in my backyard, that it is considered toxic to cattle. Deer, too, are said to leave it alone. However, birds like the seeds.

Garden History

Planted: 2007-05-23.
First flower: 2007-08-28.

In fourth grade, Sister Florence introduced me to the wonders of multiplication and division–concepts that thrill any gardener when it comes to bulbs and perennials. Even as a child I found these concepts interesting in the abstract, despite being forced us to recite the times table up to 12 in front of the class. Arithmetic is pleasingly exact. And unlike Peggy Sue’s algebra, simple arithmetic is useful in all the practical sciences: cooking, sewing, building.

The man who came last month to measure the garden house for the screens was a confused when he looked at the framing. The strips for the rectangular wall screens are indented so that the screens will be flush in line with the columns. But the strips for the triangular gable screens are nailed to the outside of the beams. And so, they are not flush; they hang out over the edge.

After examining this anomaly, I decided that it must have been done because the rafters were also doubling as the top edge of the frame for the gables. Unfortunately, the rafters did not line up with the beams and supporting columns. So now the only way to screen the mosquitoes out was to nail wood on the outside of the wall, to line up with the rafters.

When I asked why the rafters hadn’t been spaced to line up with the walls, I received this reply:

I was going to run wood on top of the screen and the frame would not be showing. Otherwise the frame would stick out much further than the others. An error that was revealed after framing as 18″ on center did not work out all the way down the line, as we have an overhand [sic] of 2 ft, and so forth..small 1 inch fudge.

So here’s the story problem. The house is 20 feet wide. If you want the rafters to line up with the walls, is there any way that 18 inches on center will work? If not, how far apart should you space the rafters? What is the standard spacing for rafters anyway?

Read the rest of this entry »

Although the new pond attached to the garden house isn’t ready for fish or plants, wildlife has already discovered it. Feral cats and grackles both drink from it. Dragonflies or damselflies (I can’t tell them apart yet) hover over it, alighting on potted plants nearby. And the last two nights we’ve heard the deep croaking of some toad.

While skimming leaves from the surface, I discovered this stringy ick, which AJM (raised in far wetter clime than I) recognized immediately as toad spawn. This morning I saw a toad creep out of the pond and hop off to the back forty. It was barely dawn so I couldn’t get a very good photo. I think it is Bufo valliceps, the Gulf Coast Toad.

When I Googled “frog spawn” I got a lot of sites in the UK. Do Americans call it something else? The UK sites are aimed at helping children protect frogs and toads and raise them to release. One site said that toads only mate where they are spawned. But that can’t be true since this toad mated in a pond that didn’t exist a year ago.

This is my first WordPress post. We’ve been in the process of migrating the Zanthan Gardens site for some time now and I’m sure there will be some unexpected behavior and problems we need to work out.

If a link or photograph doesn’t work for you, or if you have trouble with comments, contact me via msinclairstevens at yahoo dot com and I’ll try to find a fix.

For those of you who subscribe to Zanthan Gardens via Bloglines, you might need to resubscribe. If you use another rss reader, would you let me know what happens.

Update: Sunday Evening

The blank individual entry pages (with comment form) and category pages should be working now even for those of you who use IE. I failed to close a tag in the html headers of those pages. I’ve run the W3C validator and discovered all sorts of little nasties I needed to fix. Thanks for all the feedback, from Pam/Digging and the rest of you listed below.

Update: Sunday Morning

Annie at The Transplantable Rose and Julie of the Human Flower Project both report a problem with getting a blank comment page. I don’t have a separate comment pop-up. The comment link should lead to the individual entry. After a little experimenting Annie discovered that this comment problem happens with Internet Explorer but not with Firefox. I don’t have IE–so I can’t test any fixes for it.

Carol at May Dreams Gardens reports trouble accessing Zanthan Gardens from Google Reader. The permalinks have changed. And although we went through all sorts of hoops to redirect the links, you might need to change them on your side as well. Or force your browser to refresh the page (rather than read the cache. In Firefox, that’s shift-refresh).

Old MT URL: http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/index.html
New WP URL: http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/

Old MT URL: http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/xml.html
New WP URL: http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/?feed=rss2

OLD MT URL: http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/002282.html
New WP URL: http://www.zanthan.com/gardens/gardenlog/?p=2282

I can’t believe we have 5 more blogs to migrate…grrrr.

I enjoy weeding after a rain. The air is fresh and the plants perk up. Best of all our clay soil becomes soft enough to relinquish its hold on the weeds.

Today I decided to work on the southwest corner of my yard which I refer to as the back forty. It’s part of my mini-woodland and I leave it mostly in a natural state to provide habitat for birds and lizards, as well as a hiding place for possums and armadillos. I’m glad I have room in my yard to allow for a little wildness.

2007-08-17. Before. Strangled in bindweed.

With all the rain Austin’s received this summer, the back forty has become a spot where you can no longer see the garden for the growth. Most of it is bindweed, wild ruellia, and turk’s cap. Underneath there somewhere is my ‘Little Gem’ magnolia and two tiny Texas mountain laurels that I’ve grown from seed.
Read the rest of this entry »

Carol at May Dreams Gardens invites us to tell her what’s blooming in our gardens on the 15th of each month.

August 15, 2007

Now that Austin is finally reaching normal summer temperatures, many plants have decided it’s time to close up shop until fall. However, after receiving almost twice our annual rainfall, the garden looks better than usual for this time of year. Typically here, there are few new flowers in the garden in August. Most of what’s blooming is just hanging on for dear life.

• Abelia grandiflora
• Allium tuberosum
• Antigonon leptopus
• Asclepias curassavica
• Canna–unknown red from seed
• chili pequin–very few flowers but covered in fruit
• Coriandrum sativum–some cilantro sprouted with last month’s rains and quickly flowered on ragged 1 foot tall plants
• Cosmos sulphureus
• Duranta erecta
• Hibiscus syriacus
• Ipomoea quamoclit (cypress vine)
• Lagerstroemia indica
• Lantana ‘New Gold’
• Malvaviscus arboreus
• Mirabilis jalapa pink
• monkey grass
• Oenothera speciosa (pink evening primrose)
• Oxalis triangularis
• Nerium oleander ‘Turner’s Shari D.’ — full, gorgeous bloom
• Plumbago auriculata
• Polanisia dodecandra
• rose ‘Blush Noisette‘ — once again in full bloom
• rose ‘Red Cascade’
• rosemary (unusual for summer here)
• Rudbeckia hirta — fading
• Ruellia (Mexican petunia)–dependable this time of year
• Tulbaghia violacea (society garlic) Thanks, Pam!
• Verbena canadensis

With the garden house project at a standstill this week, I decided to clean up the meadow garden which, thanks to Austin’s unusually heavy rains this year, is mostly weeds and rotted bearded iris. Even the paths are overgrown and covered in cement dust and other construction detritus.

The area around the garden house is the most dispiriting.

This is where I laid down most of the Christmas tree mulch last January. And where I plan to put all my tropical plants. During excavation for the garden house foundation, mounds of caliche were piled up there and, with workmen walking over it constantly, has been packed down anywhere from six inches to a foot deep.

Caliche, as I’ve said, is almost as impervious as concrete. The rain runs right off it, exacerbating our drainage problems. (Since my return from England, our garage has flooded in every heavy rain.) Luckily it come up in big chunks.

As you might suspect, caliche is a poor planting medium. All of it will have to be removed before I can plant the terraced bog garden.

My day’s work.

If you are planning any project which requires excavation, be certain to specify who is responsible for hauling away the dirt!