Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

There are two gardens here. The garden that is and the garden I envision. I rarely look at the garden with my eyes firmly rooted in the present. I see the garden of intentions. The paths completed and free from chinaberry seedlings. The nandina and bindweed hacked back and replaced with roses. The lawn level and green. The trees trimmed and the clippings hauled away. The endless pile of mulch tucked into beds. The tools and laundry put away. The plants waiting in the nursery finally transplanted.

So having guests come to the garden always shocks me into the present and what is real. When I look at the garden as I imagine a visitor might see it, I panic. Then I’m tempted into that great sin, to say, “If you could only have seen it last week when…”

I can’t remember where I read this was the great sin of having people in the garden but I remember hanging my head with the guilt of it. For a garden exist. in time as well as space. A plant in full glory one day has gone to seed the next–how can you really know a place until you watch it unfold day by day, hour by hour? Come to my house today and you will not see the iris ‘Raspberry Wine’ which was in perfect bloom yesterday, or the spiderwort which filled the southwest corner of the yard with purple last week, or the Tulipa clusiana which I spent hours lying on my stomach admiring last month.

However, today was THE day. The visitors were not just any visitors. They were gardeners, too. And bloggers. Today was the day we Austin garden bloggers (Annie, Dawn, Julie, Pam, R. Sorrell, Susan, Vivé) got together and visited each other gardens. In the real world.

All last week I eyed the skies. We had relatively cool weather so my fears that all the flowers would have shriveled by today were unfounded. Three roses, which have been putting on a show all week, decided they could be showy one more day for me. I watered and cut the sweet peas two days ago and they rewarded me by opening more flowers today than I’ve seen all spring. And the batchelor buttons (which had looked droopy and sad) decided to straighten up and bloom all at once.

In my relief I did not mind too much that the bluebonnets had mostly gone to seed, that the bluebells and Naples onions had died down, that the yellow heirloom irises had all but disappeared, that scarcely one spiderwort or false dayflower was left blooming, that the larkspur had not really gotten going yet.

As it turns out, I did not spend much time thinking about my garden at all. My senses were overloaded with the sights of the other gardens and the buzz of garden (and blogging) talk.

I’m amazed at how different our gardens are, we who all garden within a 15 mile radius of each other: different plants, different colors, different amounts of sunlight, and different personalities of the gardeners cultivated into each garden. Is there such a thing as a common Austin thread that runs through them all? Certainly none of our gardens would be mistaken for an English garden, a Connecticut garden, or a Seattle garden. And yet there are enough differences that we spent all afternoon asking each other, “What’s the name of this plant? How long have you had it. Can it stand some shade?”

After six hours, I arrive home too buzzed to sleep, filled with ideas, new plants to try, conversations to continue, promises of future lunch dates, and a resolve to finish moving that stupid pile of mulch out of my driveway.

In 2007, ‘Raspberry Wine’ has been the only named bearded iris that I still own that bloomed. Over the years since I first fell in love with bearded iris, my yard has gotten shadier and shadier. Bearded iris are definitely sun-loving plants.

I’d give up on fancy bearded irises except every time one opens, I fall in love all over again. ‘Raspberry Wine’ is no exception. I really like the color and the proportions of this flower. It just needs more sunlight than I can offer it here. Given the poor conditions for irises in my garden the last couple of years, I’m delighted that it flowered at all.

I received ‘Raspberry Wine’ as a bonus iris with my order from Schreiner’s.

Schreiner 2001 M 37″ Claret self. “This vigorous wonder has inherited superb growth habits from its parent Madeira. Seedling BB 326-1”
Parentage:
Madeira X Y682-2: (T453-B, Thriller sib x T449-A: (R183-A, sib to Stardus Memories pod parent, x R208-A: ((Sailor’s Dance x unknown) x Yaquina Blue pollen parent)))

In 2005 ‘Raspberry Wine” won an Honorable Mention award from the American Iris Society. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find ‘Raspberry Wine’ in Schreiner’s Iris Gardens online catalog just now, even though they developed this iris. It is available from Rainbow Iris Farm in Iowa.
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Kathy Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening reviewed Graham Rice’s The Sweet Pea Book which told her everything anyone would want to know about sweet peas. I get the impression from her post and comments left by others that sweet peas are difficult to grow, especially in the US, especially in the hot dry south.

April, 1998. Bush-type ‘Explorer‘ sweet peas in a wild mix of ruby red, hot pink, and lavender climb over Texas bluebonnets and heirloom yellow irises.

I don’t remember what made me pick up my first packet of sweet peas. I never saw sweet peas growing or as cut flowers before I grew my own. Nor do I think I would have recognize the scent had I smelled some artificial form of it. (Although I’ve read it smells like the cologne “White Shoulders”, my mother’s scent, I don’t make that connection.) Being annual vines, they’re not something you see in the bedding out section of the big box stores. They are not easy to market to the masses these days as sweet peas are neither compact nor can be already flowering when you sell them. You can’t buy a flat of them to pop in for instant color.

Sweet peas were not only popular in another place than I garden but in another time. In Victorian times, British hybridizer Henry Eckford developed the Grandiflora strain, new colors with larger flowers and stronger stems. Then in the early 1900s, Silas Cole, the Spencer family gardener who had been making sweet pea crosses noticed one seedling with large frilly flowers. The Spencer sweet pea set off another hybridizing craze. By 1911 there were over 300 varieties of sweet pea. Only a handful of which survived to the 1980s.

Everyone I read from Celia Thaxter to Tasha Tudor to Steve Bender waxed poetic on lovely old-fashioned sweet peas. And the catalog descriptions from Select Seeds were enticing. I knew I had to try them.

I have always loved scented flowers best. Whether it’s roses, or herbs, or annuals, I’m drawn by the promise of scent. And both its English and botanical names conjure visions of a garden where sweet odors waft in summer breezes. (Visions of a summer obviously not in Texas. How difficult it is to garden where you are when you’re reading sumptious descriptions in garden catalogs.)

They are incredibly easy to sprout from seed…if you start them in the right season. In Austin that’s fall. The first few times I tried to grow sweet peas, I followed the instructions to plant them early in spring as the ground could be worked. That’s too late. Sweet peas seem very unhappy whenever the temperatures hit the 80s…and we can have days in the 80s even in January.

In A Woman’s Hardy Garden, Helena Rutherfurd Ely devotes two lengthy paragraphs to sweet pea culture, including (as Annie mentioned) digging a trench a foot wide and a foot deep, putting a manure at the bottom of the trench, and filling it partially with rich earth and wood ashes. The idea is to hill them up as they grow, so that the roots will remain moist and cool.

Celia Thaxter gives almost the same prescription in An Island Garden

I find Sweet Peas can hardly have too rich a soil, provided always that they are kept sufficiently wet. They must have moisture, their roots must be kept cool and damp,–a mulch of leaves or straw is a very good thing to keep the roots from drying,–and they must always be planted as deep as possible. Wood ashes give them a stronger growth.

Given these demands, I’m surprised I’ve ever managed to grow a sweet pea at all. Generally, it’s too hot, too dry, and Austin’s soil too thin and shallow. Our one advantage in Austin is that we’re over limestone. Sweet peas prefer limey soils (thus the love of wood ashes).

Once you manage to get them flowering, you have to deadhead spent flowers vigorously or they will give up and go to seed. This isn’t hard if you have time to cut bouquets each morning. And that’s one of the pleasures of growing sweet peas.

Heirloom sweet pea ‘Cupani’ is scented and less bothered by the heat than some newer varieties.

I’ve had the most success with ‘Cupani’ an old sweet pea that people have been growing since the late 1600s. Unlike newer varieties that were bred for showy flowers rather than scent, ‘Cupani’ remains sweetly scented. It also blooms longer and has even self-sown in my garden.

In 2001, I planted ‘April in Paris‘ and the Spencer type ‘North Shore’ in September but had very poor luck with them.

This year I started ‘Velvet Elegance’ on November 24th, planting them into the vegetable garden. They are supposed to be day-length neutral so they start blooming earlier than standard sweet peas. Most were up by December 15th and I transplanted them. They began flowering on March 10th and are still flowering but I didn’t keep them moist enough during some of our 80 degree days and about a third of them have died. Some of the flowers are a beautiful lavender/periwinkle (the seed-packet says “deep violet-blue”). Others are a maroon that I’m less fond of.

‘Regal Robe’ produced a mix of colors, some dark burgundy, others rich cream.

I also started ‘Regal Robe’ on December 22nd, transplanted them on January 12th and 31st. They began flowering on March 25th. So far I like ‘Regal Robe’ better than ‘Velvet Elegance’ because the flowers are larger, more frilly, and have more scent.

Overall, my success with sweet peas has been marginal. Mine don’t look anything like the show flowers I see in garden magazines. I manage to get a few flowers in April and May each year. Perhaps one of these years I will get serious and dig a trench. Maybe put up a sturdy trellis. After all, there are so many varieties to try with new ones coming along every year. I think I’ll always leave some space somewhere to grow sweet peas.
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.

My desire to compare and contrast made me want to keep a running entry. But how to organize it? Have all the months of one year so that I could track progression of blooms. Or organize the entries into months, so that I could see how April differs from year to year? I decided on the latter.

The garden is at its height right now. In fact, many plants (bluebonnets, coriander, spiderwort) are beginning to fade and I’m pulling them out. But April is my month for irises and roses.

April 15, 2007

• Allium neapolitanum
• Centaurea cyanus ‘Black Magic’
• Commelinantia anomala (false day flower)
• Consolida ambigua (larkspur)
• Coriandrum sativum (cilantro/coriander)
• Iris flavescens ?
• crinum
• Diospyros kaki ‘Eureka’ (Japanese persimmon)
• Duranta erecta
• Engelmann daisy
• Hippeastrum x johnsonii (St. Joseph’s lily)
• Lathyrus odoratus ‘Regal Robe’ (sweet pea)
• Lavandula heterophyla ‘Goodwin Creek Grey‘
• Lupinus texensis (Texas bluebonnet)
• N. jonquilla ‘Quail’
• Nemophila insignis
• Oenothera speciosa (evening primrose)
• Oxalis crassipes
• Oxalis triangularis
• Phlomis lanata (Jerusalem sage)
• Polanisia dodecandra
• Rhaphiolepis indica (Indian hawthorn)
• rose ‘Blush Noisette‘
• rose ‘Ducher’
• rose ‘Heritage‘
• rose ‘French Lace
• rose ‘New Dawn’
• rose ‘Madame Alfred Carriere‘
• rose ‘Penelope‘
• rose ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison
• Salvia farinacea ‘Indigo spires’
• Salvia greggii ‘Raspberry’
• Solanum jasminoides (potato vine)
• Spiraea bridal wreath
• tomato
• Trachelospermum jasminoides (Confederate jasmine)
• tradescantia (spiderwort)
• Tradescantia pallida (purple heart)
• Verbena canadensis
• viola
• yaupon holly

From the Cumbrian Tourist board, Wordsworth for the YouTube generation. Yep. Wordsworth’s “I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud” has been turned into into a rap in order to make it appeal to a new, younger audience.

“A spokesman for Cumbria Tourism, which was behind the innovative approach to th. poem, said: ‘Wordsworth’s Daffodils poem has remained unchanged for 200 years and to keep it alive for another two centuries, we wanted to engage the You Tube generation who want modern music and amusing video footage on the web’.”

I don’t mind the rap nearly as much as I mind the guy dressed up as a squirrel in the video…er, that’s MC Nuts…actually Sam the mascot for the Ullswater Steamers. shudder

There were no daffodils in bloom the last time I was in the Lake District and, I’m happy to report. no rapping squirrels either!

Note: This review is for the Garden Blogger Book Club over at Carol’s May Dreams Gardens. The Gardener’s Year is one of my favorite books and I’m glad Carol pushed me to finally review it.

In this small book, with chapters not much longer than the average blog post, Karel Capek speaks the universal language of gardeners, a language that connects us across the decades and continents. What does it matter that he wrote 80 years ago and tended his plot in Prague, or that he introduced the word “robot” into our vocabularies? If you are a gardener, you will see yourself on every page, nod your head in agreement, and spend a lot of time laughing.

Your relation toward things has changed. If it rains you say it rains on the garden; if the sun shines, it does not shine just anyhow, but it shines on the garden… p 10

The chapters for each month are intertwined with essays on what it means to be a gardener, how one becomes a gardener, the gardener’s complaints on the weather, searching for signs of spring (crocuses and seed catalogs), the trials of gardeners on vacation, how a gardener’s physiology should have evolved, the envy and lust of gardeners, the importance of soil, the gardener’s prayer for rain (gently every day from midnight until 3AM but not on the drought-loving plants), the pain of choosing among the offerings in seed catalogs, the restlessness to be doing something in the garden in winter, and the miracles of seeds.

The Gardener’s Year is a quick and easy read. You will breeze through it. Maybe you won’t think much of it…until you are attacked by your garden hose, or waiting for the grass to sprout, or sifting through conflicting advice in gardening books. Then you’ll realize that almost every sentence is a gem. So, although it is small, don’t rush through it. Or read it once and then go back and read it again, savoring it.

I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil…the gardener is not a man who smells a rose, but who is persecuted by the idea that “the soil would like some lime”…A rose in flower is, so to speak, only for dillittanti; the gardener’s pleasure is deeper rooted, right in the womb of the soil. After his death the gardener does not become a butterfly, intoxicated by perfumes of flowers, but a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous, and spicy delights of the soil.–p. 34-37

Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion… –p. 13

There are times when the gardener wishes to cultivate, turn over, and compound all the noble soils, ingredients, and dungs…Only cowardly shame prevents the gardener from going into the street to collect what horses have left behind; but whenever he sees on the roadway a nice heap of dung, he sighs at the waste of God’s gifts. –pp 31-33

This is one of Nature’s mysteries–how from the best grass seed most luxuriant and hairy weeds come up; perhaps weed seed ought to be sown and then a nice lawn would result. –p. 9

We gardeners live somehow for the future; if roses are in flower, we think that next year they will flower better…Each successive year will add growth and beauty. Thank God that again we shall be one year farther on! –p. 160

I never thought I’d say this about Austin but it’s so GREEN here! I’ve just returned to the garden after a week in New York City. This was my first trip to New York and we arrived the day after a massive storm shut down jetBlue. The streets wer. snowy and then slushy and then just a mess. But I loved the novelty of snow. We threw snowballs at each other and I built a snow sculpture. I thought snow enhanced the romance of the city and it was nice to walk around without immediately breaking into a sweat. (I was back in the Austin’s muggy 70 degrees only 20 minutes before I smelled like I hadn’t had a bath in a week.)

2007-03-23. The bluebells are blooming in the south border. They don’t mind the shade. All the work I did lugging the Christmas tree mulch paid off. The path looks neat and woodsy, doesn’t it?

Austin had heavy rain last week and which obviously continued in our absence. The garden is transformed into intense green. The cedar elms have completely leafed out and at this time of year their green is dark and deep. Sitting at my kitchen table you’d think we lived in a tree house. The weeds in the lawn are a foot high. The tradescantia has taken over the back. The bluebonnets, baby blue eyes, and cilantro are in full bloom. The ‘Quail’ daffodils provide a bit of yellow to brighten all my blues and purples.

2007-03-23. The meadow looks like a meadow now.

I knew I was going to miss a lot of first flowers. The Tulipa clusiana is in full bloom. The bluebells finally opened. The rose ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ is full of huge flowers. She has a tendency to ball when the weather is humid and the day before I left I had to strip the outer petals of three buds that looked like they were about to open. I come home and she is blooming her head off. Other roses with their first flowers: ‘Madame Alfred Carriere’, ‘New Dawn’, and ‘Blush Noisette’. The new ‘Ducher’ has been blooming for awhile and continues to look nice.

No sign of the spring cankerworms yet. Hmmm. They usually show up when the trees are leafing out. (One hour later: Ah ha! Found one.)

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

March 15, 2007

March is one of my bloomingest month. You can see all my bloom dates on my In Bloom calendar. (I notice that both Carol and I quoted Elizabeth Lawrence, who inspired me to keep track of when things bloomed–but we chose slightly different quotes). Usually I have more varieties of roses and daffodils blooming now. And where are those tulips and bluebells?

• Cercis canadensis (redbud)
• Citrus x meyeri (potted)
• Commelinantia anomala (false day flower)
• Consolida ambigua (larkspur)
• Coriandrum sativum (cilantro/coriander)
• henbit
• Iris albicans
• Lantana montevidensis
• Lathyrus odoratus ‘Velvet Elegance’ (sweet pea)
• Leucojum aestivum (summer snowflakes)
• Lupinus texensis (Texas bluebonnet)
• Muscari racemosum (starch hyacinth)
• N. jonquilla ‘Quail’
• N. jonquilla ‘Trevithian’
• N. triandrus ‘Hawera’
• Oxalis crassipes
• Oxalis triangularis
• Prunus caroliniana (cherry laurel)
• Rhaphiolepis indica (Indian hawthorn)
• rose ‘Ducher’
• rose ‘Heritage‘
• rosemary
• Sedum palmeri
• Solanum jasminoides (potato vine)
• Sophora secundiflora (Texas mountain laurel)
• tradescantia
• Verbena canadensis
• vetch
• viola

Not very much ever seems to get done around here. I do almost everything myself and I’m not a very focused worker. However, there are times when I call in the pros, one of those being when I need to have trees trimmed.

I have ten trees over 30 feet tall in my yard. Most of them are 50 year old cedar elms which like to drop limbs on my roof or crush fences. I also have a difficult pecan tree which grows into the electric wires. The city came out about six years ago and hacked it back but in such a way as to make the problem worse–cutting it to encourage thin waterspouts to grow into the wires.

So I called Tree Masters because I was pleased with work they did for me before. Miraculously, the hour and a half that they were here this morning was the sunny period in this couple of days of torrential rain we’ve received. They dealt with the pecan tree in the electric wires and one large limb from a cedar elm with ease. I was making the bed when I saw the limb come down. They roped it first and it seemed to float down to the guys below who maneuvered it away from my flower beds without dropping it.

In the short term, Tree Masters is not as cheap as hiring two guys with a chainsaw off the corner but in the long term it is a much better deal. They are insured. They don’t free climb or balance on long ladders. Their people are experienced, efficient, and neat.

I wanted to keep the mulch but the arborist who’d come out to spec the job last week said that if they already had chips from a previous job that they’d have to dump them first because they wouldn’t want to infect my trees with oak wilt from another job. (One thing I like about professionals is the attitude that the customer is not always right; sometimes the customer needs to be educated so that she understands the ramifications of her choices.) As it turned out, the previous job was pecan, so I got to keep my wood chips plus what they had in the truck.

They warned me that there were some huge tree stumps in the back of the truck, but…greedy, greedy me! I just can’t turn down free mulch. I now have a pile of wood chips the size of a Hummer sitting in my driveway. What with the rain and all, I’m as happy as I can be.

Maybe I should have a mulch moving party. Everybody bring a wheelbarrow.

2007-03-14. The sight that greeted us as we walked out the door this morning. AJM dubbed it “Mulch Mountain”. Gee. Those stumps do look big.

Saturday morning the designer from Floribunda is coming over to assess whether we can afford his services to design and construct a screened-porch house to replace our falling down shed. After booking the appointment, I looked around my yard and panicked. I haven’t mown the lawn yet this year and the weeds are about a foot high. Garden tools and hoses are scattered about giving witness to my short attention span. Only the imaginative eye can discern the wildflower garden hidden in the among the dandelions, thistle and chickweed.

And inside the shed! Of course he’ll have to go in the shed to measure and check the foundation. Myself? I haven’t been in the shed in over a year. During our kitchen remodel we just kept stacking boxes and torn out pieces of house in there until it was impossible to get one more thing in. Last summer the paper wasps took over and we let them have their way with it.

So, I spent the day trying to make the place look less like we lived here and more like “important clients whom you might want to include in your portfolio” lived here.

I didn’t get much done though because I kept getting distracted by spring. I spent a lot of time taking photos of the Narcissus ‘Hawera’ in bloom. Then I had to lie down on my belly and admire the Muscari racemosum (or is it M. neglectum?)

Grape hyacinth aka starch hyacinth aka M. racemosum aka…

I found one bluebonnet bud that had finally blued up and opened. And lastly when I was watering the magnolia (which you might notice is not cleaning the shed) I saw another anole, the third this week, basking itself among the Mexican plum blossom. Trying to get a photo of the anole ate up a good portion of an hour. (Mostly I just sat and talked to it.)

I stopped and looked at everything so the garden doesn’t look like much of anything–I did manage to build a garden sculpture out of bricks I found in the shed. I’d been meaning to do that for several years now.