Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Dateline: 2007-05-25
I had to pull up ‘Penelope’ today and put it a plastic bag in the trash. I never put my rose cuttings on the compost because it is too easy to spread diseases and ‘Penelope’ succumbed to rose dieback.

I’m really surprised because last fall when ‘Madame Joseph Schwartz’ struggled and died and ‘Prosperity’ held on by one cane (and has now sprouted a second), ‘Penelope’ was growing strong. She had gotten huge and her leaves were large and a deep healthy green. This spring she bloomed more profusely than ever before.

2007-04-23.

Then as soon as the flowers faded she showed the tell-tale signs. All the leaves on a cane turned yellow overnight.

2007-05-12.

I tried stripping the leaves and cutting back the canes to green wood. But it didn’t help. In three weeks she went from looking gorgeous to dead.

2007-05-16.

In A Year of Roses Stephen Scanniello says that dieback is a fungal disease and can be spread by allowing water to splash on the leaves when watering or a stressful situation (like last year!) when the roses don’t get enough water. Insects can also spread dieback as the gardener by pruning one rose and then another without sterilyzing (dipping in bleach) the pruning shears.

2007-05-25. Tell-tale signs of cane dieback.
Read the rest of this entry »

At 6:45 we were awakened by a screeching truck. I thought we’d missed the garbage collectors again but it turned out to be the pump truck for the concrete pourers. The cement mixer arrived shortly afterward. Then Ivan and crew came rushing on the scene.

Concrete begins pouring into the forms.

By 8:35 the concrete was pouring out into the mold, all wet and sloshy. The noise was extraordinary but it was all over in about an hour and a half.

Then Ivan and crew had the task of meticulously tamping and smoothing the cement flat. This took them the rest of the day.

Ivan doesn’t just sit at his design table and leave the hard work to others. He’s, obviously a kindred spirit, one of those people who isn’t afraid to jump right in and get his hands dirty.

Monday and Tuesday of this week are dedicated to hauling off all the caliche and rocks that the trenching unearthed. Ivan has to bring in his Bobcat and it requires two loads to the dump. (I put a call out to the neighborhood to see if anyone wanted free fill dirt but didn’t have any takers.)

Rain falls hard after midnight and continues until about 4AM. So Wednesday it is too muddy to work in the trenches. (Great weather for clearing out the spring flowers in the meadow which I did all day.)

Thursday and Friday are dedicated to bending the rebar. Ivan modifies the shape of the pond (so that it no longer runs completely under the deck). This is more what I had in mind anyway; however, I’m concerned that it is too shallow. So we dig it out a bit more…we dump the extra dirt in the now available spot that will be under the deck and the rocks in what is now a non-supporting footing.

I’m surprised that the guys show up Saturday morning. (We aren’t up and dressed.) They have to finish because the concrete pourers are scheduled for Tuesday. I detect a note of urgency whenever I speak to Ivan. I sense that making an effort to preserve the garden by doing all the digging and hauling by hand took much longer than he anticipated in his scheduling. I do appreciate it and am trying to stay out of the way. (Although eyebrows were raised when I suggested that the pond should be deeper. I worked alongside them digging out rocks and raking dirt as fast as we could to get it the way I wanted it.)

2007-05-20. The deeper pond and the pile of dirt we dug out of it. The pond slopes at the far end to make it easier to drain and clean.

The guys on his crew are incredible; I can’t remember when I met such cheerful and hard-working guys. They don’t seem fazed by any change and go after their work with gusto. It’s catching!

I don’t know for sure whether the crinums growing in the meadow are Crinum bulbispermum or not because I rescued them from a construction site several years ago. They have glaucous (grey-green) leaves and the flowers are not as showy as the other crinum I have (which I think is Crinum gowenii). C. bulbispermum is said to bloom earlier than other crinums and these began blooming on April 16th after a wet spring. (Last year, one bloomed in late June–so go figure.)

The first had medium-sized flowers with a pale pink stripe.

The second one to flower was pure white. The third one had a shorter stalk and smaller flowers. But the stripes were dark pink.

As the seeds form, the stalk becomes top heavy causing it to fall over a distance away from the mother plant. The seed pods are larger than a golf ball but not quite as large as a tennis ball.

When the seed pods burst open, the seeds (called stones) fall to the ground, and if it is damp begin sprouting. This huge collection of seeds was obtained from just two stalks. Notice the ones sprouting?

Crinums take up a lot of space so I don’t know what I’m going to do with all these seeds.

Several people have asked me how to propagate bluebonnets…how to tell if the seeds are ready. It’s easy. Don’t cut back the bluebonnets or mow until the seed cases are brown and you can hear the seeds ratttling inside. If you tap the seed case and it pops open, you know they’re ready.

To release their seeds, bluebonnets pop open with a little twist.

You can let the seeds reseed on their own (a bunch will anyway, as long as you don’t mow). With this method, some will be lost to birds, fire ants, and hot weather. Or you can collect the seeds, store them in a cool dry place, and sow them where you want them in August before the fall rains. If we have a rainy early summer, some bluebonnets will sprout now but, unless you baby them through the long, hot summer, they probably won’t survive until fall.

Bluebonnets naturally sprout in the fall, grow all winter, and flower the following spring.

You’ll find all sorts of advice for nicking the hard seed coats or rubbing them with sandpaper. This might be necessary with old dry seeds that you buy. I never do it because my own seed is fresh. Sometimes I soak them overnight or until they plump up. I did this the first couple of years to get started but now I have more sprouts than I can deal with an so I don’t need to go to any extra trouble. I let them sprout and transplant them where I want them.

Bluebonnets have hard coats so that they don’t sprout all at once if it rains. In Texas, it might rain and some sprout, and then die off in a long dry spell. But since they don’t all sprout at the same time, some are kept in reserve until more favorable conditions present themselves.

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

Despite the list of flowers, the garden is mostly green this time of year. A lot less is flowering than in April. The only flowers in any number today are the rose ‘Red Cascade’, two different four o’clocks, batchelor buttons, clammy weed and some larkspur. Everything else has just a flower or two, fading under the last few day’s 90 degree temperatures. All I’m doing in the garden now is pulling out spent flowers and digging up bulbs.

May 15, 2007

This is the fourth day of temperatures hitting 90 degrees–and the spring flowers are drying up and falling over.

• Asclepias curassavica
• Centaurea cyanus ‘Black Magic‘
• chili pequin
• Commelinantia anomala (false day flower)
• Consolida ambigua (larkspur)
• Coriandrum sativum (cilantro/coriander)
• crinum
• Engelmann daisy
• Hibiscus syriacus
• Lathyrus odoratus ‘Regal Robe’ (sweet pea)
• Lathyrus odoratus ‘Velvet Elegance’ (sweet pea)
• Lavandula heterophyla ‘Goodwin Creek Grey‘
• Lilium LA Hybrid ‘Spirit’ (one flower)
• Lupinus texensis (a couple of faded flowers)
• Meyer lemon (rebloom)
• Mirabilis jalapa pink
• Mirabilis jalapa RHS red
• nandina
• Nemophila insignis (mostly gone to seed)
• Nigella damascena (one flower)
• Oenothera speciosa (evening primrose)
• Oxalis crassipes
• Oxalis triangularis
• Polanisia dodecandra (full bloom)
• Pyrrhopappus multicaulis Texas dandelion
• rose ‘Blush Noisette‘
• rose ‘Red Cascade’
• rose ‘Scott’s Ruston’
• rose ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison”
• rose ‘Mermaid’
• Salvia farinacea ‘Indigo spires’
• Salvia greggii ‘Raspberry’ (one flower)
• Sedum album (white stonecrop)
• tomato
• Trachelospermum jasminoides (Confederate jasmine)
• Tradescantia pallida (purple heart)
• Verbena canadensis
• viola

I’ve been keeping (rather erratic) records on what blooms in Zanthan Gardens since 1995 in the In Bloom Calendar.

Angelina (of fab Dustpan Alley fame) asked me what caliche is. As it turns out, I’m not actually sure that I’m using the correct term but I refer to the yellow hardpan layer of clay that’s beneath our more benevolent blackland prairie clay as caliche. It’s common in all the places I’ve lived in the southwest US. My mother grew up in New Mexico and that’s what she called it. Maybe it’s just hardpan, which my online dictionary defines as “a hardened impervious layer, typically of clay, occurring in or below the soil and impairing drainage and plant growth.”

The University of Arizona has an informative article on conquering home yard caliche. In it they describe it as, “a layer of soil in which the soil particles have been cemented together by lime (calcium carbonate, CaCO3). Caliche is usually found as a light-colored layer in the soil or as white or cream-colored concretions (lumps) mixed with the soil.”

Yep. That sounds just like the awful stuff that I have been fighting all week to keep out of my garden.

When damp, the texture is like brown sugar.

When you walk on it, caliche flattens and hardens like cement. Can you make out the footprints?

When it dries out, caliche forms clods as hard as rocks.

I’m really too tired to write, so this may be incoherent. On Monday, digging the trenches for the concrete foundation beams commenced. You’d think we were building a skyscraper. The old shed/garage (which stood for almost 60 years) was built on a 4 to 12 inch slab, depending on the slope of the hill. The trenches along the edges of our new walls are 3 feet deep and the slab itself about a foot deep. I didn’t realize that the new concrete foundation would be so deep, so much more engineered than the old one. We’re nothing if not safe in the 21st century.

Now that I’ve seen the enormity of it all, I wonder, was pier-and-beam construction ever an option? I assumed not because of the existing slab. I didn’t understand that it probably could have been removed more easily than all this dirt.

Day 1. Monday.
We couldn’t get (by that I mean, I wouldn’t allow) any heavy equipment into my backyard and so all the digging has to be done by hand. As the dirt comes out, I get to direct where it goes. I marvel at having two men to move dirt around. Mounds of good black dirt begin filling various depressed areas of my yard. I rake and dig and take out rocks and throw them back on the fill pile.

2007-05-09. A 3×15 foot section is topped up with about 2 feet of good dirt from the original vegetable garden. I had just moved part of my mountain of mulch here and now the dirt is on top of it. Perhaps the worms will sort that out.

Then we hit caliche. And there’s no place for that anywhere in the garden. Wherever some drops it forms an instantly impervious layer. Yikes! We start to dump it on the west side of the little house, but that is uphill and will only compound the existing drainage issues.

Day 2. Tuesday.
A third man is added to the digging crew. Caliche is piled on the lawn and in the back where it will cause further drainage problem before we decide that this won’t do.

Ivan suggests building some sort of sculptural mound of dirt on the back lawn, like a big gum drop. . tentatively agree and then discover that it blocks the carefully made view of the south border from my bed. And it gets caliche all in the lawn.

We are running out of places to put dirt.

Day 3. Wednesday
We solve the caliche problem by deciding to haul it away. The men dump a mountain of it on the driveway. I spend most of the day dismantling the sculptural mound and trying to get caliche out of the lawn.

2007-05-09. More good dirt is piled on the low end of the lawn. I’ll probably take out that tree…where I let a fallen cedar elm sprout out of the old trunk.

A lovely rain about 10:30 pm–not enough to make things mucky or fill up the trenches.

Day 4. Thursday
A beautiful morning after last night’s rain. I take a break from moving dirt and rocks because the garden needs some work. I do manage to transplant a clump of society garlic (thanks, Pam) and dig up some bulbs that need dividing (or rather, need moving to a sunnier location).

Around 3:30, the digging is finished. On the northwest corner and the southeast corner the building is level with the ground.

The northeast corner, where the pond is, juts 22 inches above ground level. This makes a convenient perch to sit and dangle one’s hand in the water. But on the southwest corner, we are 16 inches underground. Hmmm. Just like the main house. As the Japanese say, Komatta, desu ne.. (This could be a problem.)

Ivan delivered the plans this morning. The gray rectangles are new beds to plant. Hmmm. They get a fair amount of sunlight….

I’ll have to look at this pictures every day to keep me going. Right now there is a small mountain of dirt and nowhere to put it.

Dateline: 2008

The last reprieve before summer. When Vertie and I went to get the glass mulch on Friday (5/2), it was a hot 88F and muggy. Saturday was dry and cooler by 10 degrees. The lows over the weekend seemed comparatively chilly at 59F. Big storms for Monday and Tuesday didn’t pan out which means will be facing temperatures in the 90s next week without a reserve of rain.

This is confederate jasmine week. It has been in full bloom for the last couple of weeks everywhere…a really good year for confederate jasmine. My sweet peas are also finally blooming. Caterpillars ate all the buds right before they were going to flower and it’s taken them a couple of weeks to put out more.

The ‘Mermaid’, ‘Red Cascade’ and ‘New Dawn’ roses have all been blooming very well. ‘Blush Noisette’ is trying but is balling terribly this year. ‘Ducher’, ‘Prosperity’, and ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ are still putting out a flower or two. I did lose the ‘Penelope’ rose that had me worried this time last year.

The California poppies surprised me with a second flush of flowers. The others are finally blooming, a month behind everyone else’s in Austin. In a way it’s nice because they fill in the spots left empty by the larkspur and cilantro. Speaking of which, I decided to fill in empty spaces in the meadow with bought pepper and tomato plants. The problem is remembering to water them regularly when they’re scattered all over the yard. The pink evening primrose and Engelmann daisy are still flowering well.

Getting busy gathering seeds of larkspur, bluebonnets, and cilantro.

First flower: Nigella damascena ‘Mulberry Rose’ (4/30); bearded iris ‘Silverado’ (5/1); white mistflower (5/4); Dolichos lablab (5/5); summer squash (5/5).

Dateline: 2007

2007-05-06. 2007-05-06. Rather than a pretty flower photo I thought I’d focus on the most memorable sight in the garden at the moment: the old shed in rubble and larkspur blooming in the meadow to the north.

Spring Fling is over and, May, the month of green is upon us. That’s how I think of May. This is a transitional week, a transitional month. Most of my flower spectacle is over until fall. I put all my effort into early flowering plants because once my trees leaf out there isn’t enough sun for the warm weather flowers. I’ve had to learn to stop envying other Austinites’ vitex, lantana, butterfly bushes, and salvias. Besides when the weather turns muggy, I can’t stand the press of all those plants that make March and April shine. I just want to clear everything away.

May is typically one of Austin’s rainiest month. We’ve had almost two inches just this week as thunderstorms keep rolling through. On top of that, we’ve more than average rain this year since the middle of March. May is living up to its lush green promise. We expected the cloud cover to burn off this week and the temperatures to hit 90. Instead it remained drizzly and in the low 80s all week. And a bit muggy! The 90% humidity makes it as steamy as a jungle. A mustiness pervades my house and there are small snails on every plant. The mosquitoes and the cockroaches have decided summer is here. And I heard the toad last night. That makes it official.

The ‘New Dawn’ and ‘Blush Noisette’ roses have bowed out and now ‘Mermaid’ and ‘Red Cascade’ are in full bloom. I’m worried about ‘Penelope’. She was covered in flowers last month and suddenly all the leaves turned yellow. Is she going to succumb to dieback like ‘Buff Beauty’ and ‘Madame Joseph Schwartz’?

First flower: chili pequin (5/2); Hibiscus syriacus (5/3); Abelia grandiflora (5/4); Cosmos bipinnatus (5/5) one self-sown.

Dateline: 2006

Rain, rain, and more rain. I’m still looking for the official rainfall totals but it seems south Austin got about half an inch on Tuesday, 3 inches on Thursday, 2 inches Friday, 2 inches Saturday, and possible another inch Sunday. I wish I had about 50 more rainbarrels.

The spring flowers (bluebonnets, larkspur, evening primrose) are going to seed. The roses, except for a flower here and there, may be finished until fall. The irises were noticably absent this spring. Now the flowering perennials (esperanza, four-o’clocks, crape myrtle, oleander, rose of Sharon, red yucca, various salvias, and plumbago) are moving into the spotlight. Even so, with all this rain, the overwhelming impression of the garden this week is green.

There was a time when I first began gardening that I said all that these desert-bred eyes craved for in a garden was a green shade. Now I’m less easily satisfied.

First flower: Mirabilis jalapa, RHS red (5/1); plumbago (5/4); crape myrtle ‘Catawba’ (5/5).

Dateline: 2004

Following killer-flood rains last Saturday, the week opened with two perfect days. The nights were cool, the temperatures tying with record lows set 50 years ago. And the days were dry with brilliant blue skies usually seen only in the fall.

My neighbors behind me cut down a huge oak tree that had its top sheared of. in a storm seven years ago (but was still growing strong). They also removed a hackberry and other brush along our fence line. Now, what had been my shade garden, is in full afternoon sun. 2007-05-06. Note: They’ve planted a butterfly rose over the fence and some other plants. I think they have a landscaping service or something because it looks like a nursery back there.

2004-05-06. What remains of my neighbor’s tree. Bill might notice that the bindweed is quite rampant.

First flower: rose ‘Red Cascade’ (5/3); first cherry tomato (5/5); rose “Caldwell Pink” (5/5).

Rebloom: rose ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ (5/7); rose ‘Madame Alfred Carriere’ (5/8).

Dateline: 2002

In my garden, March is wildflower month, April is iris month, and May is the month of green. The spring flowers are cleared away and the trees and grass have deepened into a rich green. This is the one month where it summer looks pleasant, before the heat and drought of real summer turns everything brown and dusty.

We began this week with a momentary break in the heat. A front came in on the 3rd and cooled temperatures down by at least ten degrees. So I spent all Friday morning reading in the garden in my new Adirondack chair…a very Martha Stewart moment. It didn’t last long enough. Very quickly we returned to hot, humid weather.

The bad news this year is the lack of rain. May is supposed to be one of our rainiest months. We are already behind for the year and it doesn’t look like any relief is on the way. The worst part of this heat is the realization that although 90 feels hot now, sometime in August, 90 will feel cool. When it’s 90 in August, you know Fall is on the way.

On the plus side, the cannas and banana are taking off. And we ate the first cherry tomatoes this week. The black-eyed Susans are blooming. And there are still plenty of larkspur to attract the butterflies. A stray bluebonnet still blooms, where I’ve watered and dead-headed them. And the last iris, ‘Silverado’ bloomed. Clammy-weed is popping up everywhere, a nice bright green. It grows to almost two feet in the garden beds where it gets water. In the meadow, though, it is much shorter.

The confederate jasmine is in full bloom. I love its glossy, deep green leaves and thickly sweet scent. I rooted a runner last year and transplanted it this spring and it’s blooming, too. The lavender I rooted is also blooming. It’s a good thing I’m having some luck with rooting and divisions because my attempts to grow things from seed have not been very successful this year. Although a couple of things have popped up from seeds I planted last year. One is an Apple of Peru. I don’t know what the other one is. Maybe cuphea. Maybe some new weed.

The violas, sweet peas, and columbines have succumbed to the heat. The Dianthus chinensis is looking a little seedy, but what amazes me is that this is their second year. They are usually considered only winter annuals. [Note: These plants persisted in the garden until 2005 when they finally succumbed to the drought.]