Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

“Turn on the hot water, ” the plumber shouted from the roof as he began snaking out the half-century old sewer lines which have a history of backing up in the kitchen sink whenever the washing machine drains. Leaks in that same section of plumbing necessitated rebuilding the outside wall on that side of the house and gave us the opportunity to move both the electrical and plumbing inside. Now the plumber was almost finished with that day-long job. Problem. The new connection wasn’t draining.

I couldn’t hide my pained expression as thousands of gallons of water poured into the waste water lines. Wasted water. I– the same I who dread walking through the garden this time of year as the plants cry out for some relief and I skulk past them making Sophie’s Choice over which I choose to live–I stood there with the hose for 45 minutes pouring water down the drain.

Dateline: 2010

First flower: Datura inoxia (7/10); Rivina humilis (7/10); Zephyranthes ‘Labuffarosea’ (7/12).

The Crinum bulbispermum and both ‘New Dawn’ roses have begun reblooming after the heavy rains last week.

Dateline: 2006

When I walk outside to the wilted garden in the morning after a low of 76, I feel certain that had Shakespeare been a Texan he would have written, “Now is the summer of our discontent. Of course, Shakespeare meant something a bit different; that discontent was drawing to an end as does winter. I mean when summer hits Austin, when the grass crunches under foot, when one can feel the sun burning into your skin after 30 seconds, what’s there for a gardener to be content about? I balance my thankfulness that we’ve survived the first week of the dead of summer with my dread of wondering how many more there are to come.

As much as I can’t imagine Cold Climate Gardening, I think gardeners in colder climes have one advantage. In their winter off season, the plants go dormant and the gardeners can curl up with gardening books and plan and dream. In Austin’s summer off season, the plants need extra coddling. Most stop producing fruit and flowers but they still want attention. If I make the mistake of forgetting that summer, too, will pass, then I’m apt to close the door on the garden and give up.

The only star in the garden this week is plumbago. Even the crape myrtles and oleander look pinched and wan. The rose ‘Blush Noisette’ put out a couple of flowers. ‘Madame Joseph Schwartz’ looks like the next victim of rose dieback. I cut half of her all the way down to the rootstock, but it might be too late.
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Dateline: 2010

A week of rain. We hire R. to replace the fence on the south side. I remove all the ivy. They remove the scrub trees growing in the fence line. The pond and the rain barrels are overflowing. Temperatures in the low 90s while the East Coast hits the 100s.
Dateline: 2006
Cloud cover most of the week kept highs in the tolerable low 90s and provided occasional scattered showers. The result was very muggy. However, I’m thankful that it wasn’t as hot as last year given that on Thursday (7/6) we were without electricity the entire day while our service box and meter were being changed over to a new system.

An electrical storm competed with fireworks but didn’t rain them out. We had light rain for a few minutes almost every day this week. It wasn’t the drenching we needed but it was refreshing and it filled up my rain barrels. I didn’t resort to the hosepipe once.

Almost nothing is flowering–only the plumbago, the cleome, the wild ruellia, and the Turk’s cap. None of them make much of a floral impact. At least the garden looks green for the moment. I know that won’t last long.

First flower: Malva sylvestris ‘Zebrina’ (7/2).
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I’ve been mulling over a question posed by Stuart Robinson at Gardening For Dummies: what are my gardening goals?

I let the question simmer in my mind while I mowed the grass, pulled weeds, and dead-headed the flowers. Although I am a very goal-oriented person in most aspects of my life, when it comes to my garden, this question had me stymied.

I realized that I don’t have any goals for the garden, except the short term goal of surviving another summer in Austin. In fact, survival seems to be foremost in my mind whenever I do anything in the garden. It colors my plant choices, the times of year I buy and plant, and my decisions about having a vegetable garden this year, letting parts of the lawn die, or putting in new beds. The development of my garden is ruled by this one constraint: will it survive? If not, why bother?

A goal implies a finished product, an end-result. It’s probably obvious to anyone visiting my garden that I have no real plan. Conventional wisdom is that you can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going. In the garden, I’m going nowhere; I’m just meandering down the garden path. That’s fine by me. I’m more interested in process than end-results. Gardening is about the journey, not the destination.

For me garden is a verb rather than a noun. I garden to give myself space to think and because I enjoy observing the rhythm of the seasons. Gardening is a form of meditation. Few people visit my garden; it’s not a showplace or a place for entertaining or even a place to sit back and relax in. I find it impossible to si. a moment in the garden. In fact, the one place I have to sit is so little used that it has disintegrated and been overgrown with flowers.

I’m glad that our current nationalism has not become so fervent as to make us rename Malva sylvestris “freedom hollyhocks”. In the vernacular, they remain French hollyhocks though I wonder what the French call them. Thomas Jefferson grew French hollyhocks and that’s good enough for me.

French hollyhocks are shorter and stouter than other hollyhocks. Mine is only 18 inches tall and has just begun blooming. They are another old-fashioned cottage garden flower in familiar company with the larkspur, sweetpeas, and cleomes. I’m looking forward to seeing if it self-seeds as well as it reputation promises.

Thanks again to Annie in Austin at The Transplantable Rose for this passalong plant. Now that it’s survived our outrageously hot and dry spring enough to settle in and flower, I’m looking forward to seeing it in all its seasons.

Dateline: 2006
This week I was drawn into the garden still fresh from last week’s rain. The lawn was gloriously green (I had to mow it for the third time in 7 days) and an earthy dampness rose from the mulched beds–as did clouds of mosquitoes. I didn’t have to water, so I was able to spend my time weeding, raking, and pruning. I cleaned up the entire upper bed in the meadow. I scraped up the old semi-decomposed pine bark mulch from the paths to mulch the beds and then put new mulch down on the paths.

2006-06-26. I still call this the upper meadow even though the buffalograss was shaded out long ago and I turned it into a flower bed. During the summer a combination of shade, high temperatures and low rainfall means there aren’t many flowers either!

Some people might complain that the bed looks bare now that the spring wildflowers are gone. But when the heat and humidity return, I dislike the cottage garden style. In the heat of summer the plants and I need room to pant. I consider this my Big Bend style.

Monday (6/26) night the temperature dropped to 60! After this year’s early high temperatures in the 100s, dropping down to a low in the 60s felt like the life-giving breath of fall. Garden and gardener revived.

While temperatures remained cooler, I tried to finish up the path project so that the gravel pile would be out of the way of the construction workers this week. Yes, I know I’ve been working on this since last October but three tons of gravel is a lot of rock for one little girl to shovel.

Speaking of constuction workers, I have two distinct types. The electrician sees only his work. He tramps through flower beds, snaps branches of my roses, gets muck on the new gravel paths, and lets bits of wire and staples fall into the beds where I’ll be digging on my hands and knees. Before he arrived I tried to prepare a path for him. I moved the rain barrel out of his way, cleared out the leaf mulch, and dug a trench for the conduit. In fact, I’ve always designed my foundation plantings so that there is space to get between the plants and the house in order to paint and do other maintenance. I have tried to steel myself for a little destruction in the face of new construction; I remained calm even when he dropped a ladder on a large potted aloe and shattered the pot. Still…

In sharp contrast, my handyman notices everything. He ferreted out the coffee scent on my lawns. He was intrigued with my banana plantation (and was rewarded with a banana plant to take home). He sees how I recycle everything: old fencing to border paths, chippings from my own fallen trees for mulch, the cement chips from the kitchen counter for drainage, even old plumbing fixtures for garden ornaments. He is aware and considerate of his surroundings.
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Retama (Parkinsonia aculeata) forms a small, airy, lime green tree that appears as fresh as spring on even the most droughty summer days. You can use it as a specimen plant or to create a vicious hedge. The smooth green trunks and branches are covered with serious spiny thorns hinted at by one of its common names, Jerusalem thorn. Retama can photosynthesize through its green bark; its Spanish name is palo verde (green bark). From a distance retama looks like it’s covered in stringy green streamers which cast a filtered shade. Having such very small leaves it loses little moisture to transpiration making it extremly drought and heat tolerant. Overall, it has a delicate, feathery appearance. Flowers are bright yellow.

Latin names are a bit confusing as the Parkinsonia clan used to be called Cercidium. The common names are worse as nurseries in Austin usually sell this as retama but it’s not the same as weeping white broom, Retama raetam. The City of Austin Grow Green site hedges its bet and calls it Retama Jerusalem Thorn.

Perhaps, as one reader suggested, it is overused in Phoenix. I imagine that when people first brought it under cultivation in those desert towns they were thinking, “Green! Green! Green!” And it’s such a carefree plant that it’s perfect for those median plantings along highways and outside of subdivisions. However, in Australia it’s an introduced invasive weed.

In addition to being spiny, retama has a reputation for being a messy tree. Mine is too small to make much of a mess. If you have small children, or a small yard, you might prefer to admire retama from the comfortable distance of your car. I’ve neither, so I’ve taken a chance with it. Give me another five years or so and I’ll tell you whether I think it’s a curse or a blessing.
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Rose dieback is not a disease, I’ve read, but it sure acts like one. The canes begin turning brown and dying back. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the rose just needs a little more water and extra loving care. Then, more and more canes die back and the rose is dead.

Your supposed to be able to squelch the spread of the dieback by pruning the cane low where it is still green. If you look at the the place you cut, there should be no brown center. Howeever, with ‘Ducher’ and major cane had died and I couldn’t cut it out without cutting the bush in half. No matter. The whole thing is dead now, to my regret. I always thought of ‘Ducher as my New Year’s rose as, here in Austin, it seemed to bloom best in the winter. I don’t know if that’s because it preferred temperatures in the 50s, or it was just relieved to be out of the shade of the pecan. I loved its lemony scent, its very reddish new growth, and that it formed a neat, dense shrub.

I lost “Caldwell Pink” to dieback last year about this same time.

I’ve always thought I was good pruner, but the primary cause of rose dieback is poor pruning–pruning too far above a node. Given that ‘Ducher’ was very dense and twiggy, she was difficult to prune. So I guess it’s my fault. Darn!

For us Austin gardeners worried about the effects of drought, heat, overuse and abuse on Zilker Botanical Garden, the gardens at Japan’s Adachi Museum of Art demonstrate what is possible under very different circumstances. Tuesday (6/20) Waturu Takeda and John Powell provided a window into another world of gardening to a room packed with eager gardeners at the Austin Area Garden Center .

Imagine a garden where a staff of gardeners works often 14 hours a day, every day of the year…a garden where vast beds and paths of gravel are swept every morning using a special technique, where the zoysia grass is clipped with small, electric hand shears, where brown leaves and clippings are brushed off the bushes and mosses, where hundreds of pine trees are pruned several times a year. And if there has been no rain by the end of the day, the entire garden is carefully drenched by hand with huge hoses.

In Austin, we argue about charging an admission to Zilker Botanical Garden to help protect it from boneheads who treat the garden like another playscape and thieves who walk off with the plants. In stark contrast, no visitor is allowed to walk through the gardens at the Adachi Museum of Art. Rather, the gardens are viewed from inside the museum, through windows designed to look like hanging scrolls. Each view of the gardens appears to be a living picture. All the intensive work of the gardeners is to ensure that the gardens remain picture perfect. The garden becomes part of the museum collection, complementing the seasonal changes of the artwork. The garden surrounds the museum, but the museum encapsulates the garden.

I’m curious whether other people at the presentation found inspiration in the beautiful film shown, “The Garden in Fours Season”. (I thought this mistitled as it showed the garden in spring, May, rainy season, summer, fall, winter, and early spring.) Is such perfection even desirable in a garden outside of the museum concept? Or did it feel sterile? too manicured? Each view of the garden is beautifully composed. But the real interest was noticing how the garden changed in time, through the seasons and through varying degrees of sunlight, rain, mist, and snow. The one view that I wanted to see that wasn’t in the film was the garden in moonlight.

Although John Powell hinted that concepts and techniques of Japanese gardening are transferable to the heart of Texas, the presentation did not touch much on that. Certainly there’s a big part of the summer in Austin where our gardens are best viewed from indoors. Aside from the concepts of borrowed views, strolling and viewing gardens, what can we learn from Japanese gardens?

I’m a hands-on person and a garden that is experienced primarily through sight ignores the textures, scents, and sounds that I think are vital to a garden. Zenko Adachi’s accomplishment in creating this magnificient garden must be admired. I’d love to visit it in person but it is not a garden I would want to replicate even on a small scale. Lacking the same resources of helping hands and water, my tiny Zanthan Gardens will remain mostly a garden of the imagination, hardly recognizable as a garden what with the laundry on the line, the sawhorses in the driveway, and hoses and tools lying about.

When those enemies of biodiversity, the fire ants, came marching in they cleared Texas pastures of chiggers and ticks, our suburbs of fleas and cockroaches. However, fire ants like moisture and our recent years of drought have driven them underground resulting in a such a resurgence of ticks that some Texas ranchers are wondering how to bring back the fire ants.

Of course, fire ants don’t just ravage populations of insects that humans find pesky. They kill young bird and reptile hatchlings and eat up wildflower seeds. They aren’t too kind to electrical wiring either.

In defense of the fire ants is Messina Hof Winery owner, Paul Bonarrigo, who says that having fire ants in the vineyards means he doesn’t have to use as much pesticide to protect his vines as he once did.

Entomologist John Ruberson is studying how fire ants loosen the soil with their many tunnels. Compacted soils make it difficult for plants to get optimum water and oxygen to their roots, which is why gardeners have embraced our friends the earthworms. But, our friends the fire ants? As the Dixie Chicks would say, “I’m not ready to make nice.”

— Via incandragon. The original article appeared in the June 12, 2006 edition of The Wall Street Journal. A reprint is available here.