Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

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.

That last cool and rainy week in May I popped in at Barton Springs Nursery as a reward for my taking my car in for it’s yearly inspection before the sticker expired. My wandering into a nursery is as wise as an alcoholic browsing at a liquor store. The last two years I’ve put myself under a strict plant-purchasing moratorium, taking advantage of these drought years to focus on the hardscaping of the garden in hopes of adding some structure and manageability.

Like everything marketable, plants are subject to human whims in taste, to horticultural fashion. Before me lay all sorts of plants I didn’t know, but the first to catch my eye was a tropical looking plant with lime-green leaves and delicate panicles of violet blue flowers, Duranta erecta. It’s common names are golden dewdrop, or pigeonberry, for its golden fruit which is poisonous to humans but beloved by birds. It is an attractive nectar plant for butterflies and hummingbird. Golden dewdrop is very trendy in Austin this year because it’s been named a Texas Superstar plant.

Disregarding my own advice about buying plants in the summer, seduced by the cool light drizzle stirring up memories of my recent week in England, I bought three of them. After all, they were on sale. [They’re on sale because it’s summer. They’re doomed. Don’t do it! — Your Rational Mind]

Everything about golden dewdrop reminds me of plumbago: its multiple, arching stems form a small fountain of a bush; its five-petaled flowers hang in loose racemes at the tip of each branch; its glossy, green leaves withstand heat and sun. Also like plumbago, golden dewdrop will die back to the ground in a freeze. So, although it is naturally a large bush or small tree, in Austin it will remain a mid-sized shrub. In colder climes than Austin, golden dewdrop is often grown as a potted plant and brought indoors to overwinter.

In its native South America golden dewdrop grows on limestone which means it should be happy in Austin soils as long as it is planted in a well-drained spot and not in heavy clay. (The requisite caveat in all garden writing.) It is reputed to tolerate drought (What do gardeners in Puerto Rico consider a drought?), poor soils, and some shade but it grows and flowers best if planted in a nice garden bed and watered.

In order to get them through the summer, I put the golden dewdrops in the front planter as potted plants. Recently, in order to clear the driveway of the gravel pile, AJM moved the stone into the reconstructed planter until I can use it elsewhere in the garden. Then I thought, hmmm, this looks like a design.
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Dateline: 2006
Austin’s heat wave continues, but it could be worse. It has been worse. In 1998, we hit a record high of 108 degrees on June 14. Today it was a mere 95–a breath of fresh air after yesterday’s 101.

We typically get an average of 4 inches of rain in June, making it one of our rainiest months. So if we Austin gardeners are grumbling and shaking our fists at the sky, we feel completely justified. Looking back over the last eleven years I see I note every shower and thunderstorm, wondering if it will be the last before the heat of real summer sets in. Not to worry. This year misery has already arrived. You northern gardeners can imagine it as the equivalent of an early frost which cuts down your plants in their glory and then is followed by a balmy Indian summer.

When June is a wet and mild month, I find it easy to succumb to the tempations of the nursery and plan and plant. Over the years, I’ve become suspicious of June’s charms and learned to put off any planting until fall. As heat wave 2006 continues, I am only in the garden between 7 and 9 in the morning. Almost all my time is spent watering with little time left for cleaning up seedy plants and dead-heading.
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Garden blogs have been all abuzz this week over lawns. In Austin we’re encouraged to replace our lawns with beds of native or xeriscape plants in order to cut down on our water usage especially if we want to enjoy our yards without being enslaved to a high-maintenance landscape. I don’t think the issue is so cut and dry. Typical homeowners, at least in South “Keep Austin Weird” Austin, don’t spend a lot of time watering or mowing their grass. Replace what passes for lawns in a lot of Austin with other plants and I think a lot more people will be spending a lot more time using a lot more water.

Those people unfortunate enough to live in places like Circle C where they’re required by neighborhood covenant to keep the grass greener on their side of the fence, even in periods of extended drought when we are under rationing, I’m guessing are rich enough to pay other people to do the maintenance. (How will this dynamic change with the current crackdown on illegal immigration?) Are they even allowed to replace their lawns? Ah, I digress.

When I acquired this house in April 1993, the entire front and back yards were covered in St Augustine grass. I was happy to have inherited an automatic sprinkling system until we got our first water bill. After I recovered from the shock and swore never to use the system again, I bought a sprinkler to fit on the end of the hose and watered only the healthiest parts of the lawn. In June of 1993, one of the cedar elms snapped in half during a storm. Suddenly the north quadrant of the backyard was baking in full sun. I let the marginal grass die, covered it with mulch, and began planning a wildflower meadow.

Over the next few years, I planted buffalograss, bluebonnets, larkspur and various small bulbs like rainlilies, species tulips, and fall crocuses. The meadow looked great in the spring, but very patchy and weedy the other 9 months of the year. Although buffalograss spreads by runners, it forms clumps rather than a smooth lawn. Therefore I don’t think it looks particularly nice mown. And the same characteristics that make it a haven for small bulbs and flowers, provide the same haven for weeds. I’m constantly battling horse herb (which grows up over buffalograss, shading and killing it) and other undersirables.

The blades of buffalograss are narrow and sharp. It is not a grass to wiggle your toes in or lie back in and watch the clouds. Over the years, various trees on the border have made the once sunny meadow area quite shady. Buffalograss does not like the shade at all. I like its color of dry hay (of green tatami), but in the worst heat of summer, it is not a color which is restful to our parched eyes.

In contrast, the deep green coarse blades of the St Augustine grass makes me want to fling off my shoes and throw myself back on it in delight. I do not spend a great of water on the St Augustine lawn. Unlike some other grasses, St Augustine likes mulch. I learned this from watching how it took over any path I made around the yard. So every time I see a bare spot or thin grass, I mulch it with a combination of Dillo Dirt and Texas native bark mulch. I don’t feed it any lawn food and it rewards me by not growing too fast.

I think of St Augustine as a southern grass. It evokes summer days under shady live oak tree with the whine of cicadas filling the air. Buffalograss creates a praire mood with its tall, wispy blades and loosely filled clumps undulating in billowing waves under a withering wind. Austin sits on Balcones Fault and shares characteristics of both the old South and the desert West. I pleased to have a little of both in my backyard.

I’ve gotten rid of all the lawn I’m getting rid of. Compared to the rest of the yard, it is low maintenace especially in ratio to the pleasure it provides.

Last week May ended on a cool and rainy note. This week we’ve skipped straight to July. The sun is shining as soon as it’s risen; no cloud cover to burn off, nor any of the towering cumulus clouds that seem to me so much like summer in Austin. Just stark blue skies and the kind of sunshine that you can feel burning your flesh the second you’ve stepped into the sunlight. However, desert-like, this is a dry heat. As long as you stay in the shade, it’s more pleasant than a typical humid June day, even if the temperatures are reaching for record highs. Margaritas, anyone?

I’ve always thought that one weakness of a lot of science fiction is that the imagination of writers and movie makers just can’t compete with the variety of plants and landscapes we encounter right here on planet Earth.

A May day in England left me literally speechless; I didn’t have the words to describe what I saw all around me. I pressed the natives to translate.

“What’s that bush we saw on the way in from the airport–covered with golden yellow flowers?”
“What? The gorse bush?” (Update: considered an invasive weed in North America, gorse is dangerously inflammable. Planting gorse in drought-stricken Texas would be a bad idea.)

“Wow! Those azaleas look like they’re on steroids.”
“Oh. You mean the rhododendron?”

Even my transplanted husband, who swears he can’t remember the crape myrtle in our own backyard, seemed to be an expert on his native flora. As we drove from Cheshire to Gloucestershire the untrimmed hedgerows were covered in white flowers, looking like monster sprays of spiraea. Remembering my own sad spiraea, I was impressed. “No.” AJM corrected. “That’s hawthorn.” (Update: Both are members of the rose family, so perhaps my confusion isn’t completely laughable.) He also knew cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) which looks like a giant cousin of our hedge parsley (Torilis arvensis) I wondered if it shares the same nasty seeds that stick to your socks when you walk through it. Although we Texans consider hedge parsley to be a rank week, in the UK it has its own Biodiversity Action Plan. Take mine! Please.

I was amazed by the huge broad-leafed trees we saw in flower everywhere–panicles of white flowers with red spots. “Horse chestnuts.” Then I remembered that I had seen the tree before in New York, after the chestnuts had fallen and AJM and SAM gathered them to make conkers.

A horse chestnut tree on Wardens Way between Upper and Lower Slaughter. Watch out for the nettles!

At Hidcote Manor Garden, I suddenly caught a whiff of Texas. I stood still a moment, sniffing. Skunk? We looked around. I brushed against some large leafed plants growing in water. So this is skunk cabbage.

I recognized some things from books and movies: lilacs (Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn), English bluebells (Howards End), and laburnum (any book on Rosemary Verey’s garden at Barnsley House in the Cotswolds). And now I know the shade of blue named for forget-me-nots.

I fell in love with the laburnum which, to my mind, look like yellow wisteria trees. I succumbed to the temptation that every garden explorer feels; I wanted to bring it home with me. No matter how sensible we know it is to plant native plants in our gardens, who can resist the lure of all these unusual beauties? I rationalize: the laburnum is growing in the same gardens as wisteria; I grow wisteria; shouldn’t I be able to grow laburnum?

English bluebells in a field of bracken.

I was inspired by the specimens of old wisteria, carefully trained to frame the front doors of many a Cotswold cottage. Many of these houses have tiny front gardens, yet the owners managed stunning abundance of flowers by thinking vertically. My own house is sheathed in limestone which is very close in color to the creamy oolitic limestone characteristic of the Cotwolds. Now that we’ve trimmed back the cedar elms in the front, the area by the door gets full sun most of the year. Hmmm. A perfect spot for another wisteria.

Inspiring wisteria growing in Broadway.

I was thrilled to see some old friends. I don’t think there’s a tree I love more than copper beech. I might try planting some purple-leafed ornamental plum trees just to remind me of my true love.

I’m always delighted by the chrome yellow fields of rape blossom.

Stunning fields of rape blossom on the rode from Moreton-in-Marsh to Oxford.

And I remembered the nettles from our previous visit. You have to meet a nettle only once and it will sear itself into memory.

Rain was falling on and off as we snaked along winding back roads through picturesque Cotswolds villages on our way to Hidcote Manor Garden. A covey of Japanese tourists flitting across the street in Chipping Campden was the first hint of the international popularity of Hidcote, which has been called one of the most influential gardens of the 20th century. Why? Despite its 10 acres, Hidcote is an extremely intimate garden. Lawrence Johnston created a series of small garden rooms, each with a unique character which comes into full bloom at varying times of the season. This garden room approach to design was adopted by Sissinghurst and Tintinhull.

As you step into the garden, the view of the whole is cut off by tall hedges. The first room we entered was the White Garden. The layout is small enough to fit in my back yard. Of course, I could never grow hedges like these in Texas and, if I could, I’d need an army of garden helpers with clippers to keep them looking this neat. I’ve seen many photographs of the White Garden and have to say that during our visit the flowers looked sadly beaten down by the rain. Even the best gardens have less than perfect days. The tulips and daffodils were mostly finished, anyway, and the roses (“Gruss an Aachen” which I had before the drought killed it) hadn’t begun blooming yet.

In the White Garden AJM examines the map of the garden and is surprised to discover that it just “goes on and on”.

The White Garden has an exit through the hedges on each side of the square which gave me the feeling of playing a video game as we tried to decide which way to go. We circled around several times trying to take it all in before heading through the Old Garden (which had an exuberant cottage garden feel), through the Circle (a restful circle of perfect lawn), and then down through the Fuchsia Garden (formal maze).

The Fuchsia Garden manages to look nice even when the Spanish bluebell (?) bulbs have died down. Knot gardens (aka parterres) became fashionable when people realized that the hedges used to line their borders could be just as interesting as flowers and a more reliable element in the design.

From the Fuchsia Garden, topiary birds guard the entrance to the Bathing Pool Garden (classically formal and elegant) which in turn leads to the Upper Stream Garden (semi-wild). What a place to play hide-and-seek!

The Upper Stream Garden.

We walked up to one of my favorite views, the Winter Garden. I think I liked it because it felt so open after the smaller garden rooms. This contrast between open and intimate, formal and informal, and of colors and textures is the genius of Hidcote.

The Winter Garden.

Running parallel to the Winter Garden is the Red Border. I really liked the color choices in this garden…all the maroon-toned leaves were a relief after the intense English greens.

In the Red Border clumps of red-toned trees and shrubbery contrast against the angular green lawn and hedges.

Just as Hidcote’s maze of garden rooms starts to become a little claustrophobic, the Long Walk suddenly provides a vista.

The Long Walk and its hornbeam hedges.

And still the garden goes on. We cross over to the famous Theatre Lawn, which is supposed to highlight a single beech on its stage. We didn’t see it though. Has the beech died? Then we went on through the Pine Garden and Lily Pool, took shelter in the Plant House, and continued down the Rose Walk which didn’t have any roses. Instead large purple alliums were in bloom, and so many other purple flowers that I would have called it the Purple Border.

I’m sorry to say that our interest flagged in the rain. There is simply too much to absorb in one visit–29 different gardens. I think we focused mostly on the layout of each garden and how they were interconnected rather than the individual plants. This is a shame because Lawrence Johnston is remembered mostly as an avid plant collector. Apparently he did not have a master design for the whole, but created different spaces, such as the Maple Garden, to highlight different collections.

We did see the odd handkerchief tree (Davidia involocrata) in the courtyard whose white bracts make it look as if someone has tied a thousand large white handkerchiefs to its branches. I also saw a Mahonia, which grows in Texas, and a magnolia where the white flowers drooped down rather than up. Some of the collection is labeled, but many plants that I wanted to know more about weren’t.

By the end we were all flowered out. As we drove away, feeling tired but satisfied, the sun came out.

This morning’s Austin-American Statesman incites us with the headline Can trees and power lines be saved?, goading Austinites into another lose-lose either/or debate. The article (which I won’t bother to link to since the Statesman’s site is readable “by registration only”) outlines the recommendation from a City Council task force sent to review Austin Energy’s tree-trimming policy after public outcry at the complete removal of some lovely old trees in Hyde Park and other older Austin neighborhoods. The task force says quite plainly, “We need both.” The solution to saving the power lines is not to get rid of the trees.

After about 52,000 utility customers lost power during last Thursday’s storm, Austin Utility cited that the number one cause of downed power lines was trees. Some people were out of power for four days because of the difficulty in moving all the trees of the power lines.

Austin Energy goes on to pat themselves on the back. “Only the utility’s ambitious $10 million-a-year tree-trimming policy saved the city far worse outages–to as many as 150,000 homes.” said their spokesman, Ed Clark.

The task force report does a good job at exploring all the costs involved in keeping and removing trees. The current tree-trimming program costs Austinites $10 million a year. But both the number of times power is lost and the duration of that loss has decreased since 2000.

However the report also recognizes that without trees, temperatures in the city would be about 6 degrees warmer. That translates into expenses for both the customer and the utility which would have to up their ability to provide more energy just to maintain current levels of comfort.

While I agree that tree-trimming is sometimes necessary, I don’t think the people hired by Austin Energy know what they’re doing…at least not the ones that butchered the troublesome pecan tree in my front yard. They sheared off one branch at the top that arched toward the lines. Not only did this leave the tree unbalanced and much more likely to be uprooted in high winds after heavy rains, but it created a worse problem. The limb below the lines, now exposed to full sun, sprouted scores of thin branches which have begun growing straight up through the lines. This weak new growth has created a far more dangerous and difficult to deal with situation than existed before Austin Energy arrived with chainsaws. I’m now faced with the possibility of removing this tree completely.

After our neighborhood lost many trees in a bad storm of September 1996, I noticed that subsequent storms brought more limbs down than normal. My arborist said that when established trees lose major limbs from trimming or storms, the nearby trees and limbs become more exposed. Trees limbs grow in tandem with each other, building a support structure. Even dead branches help buffer the wind and keep branches from whipping around.

Too many trees in Austin, especially cedar elms, are trimmed leaving long bare limbs with heavy growth just at the end of the branches. Imagine tying a rock to the end of a rope and swinging it around. It’s that kind of force that enables a strong wind to snap huge limbs off these trees.

We need to make sure that trees are trimmed effectively and not in a way that causes bigger problems down the road. And, yes, we need more trees in the city. Whether you think of it as your patriotic duty as a citizen to reduce the nation’s energy consumption, a necessary action as a consumer to reduce your own energy bills, or just as a plain dirt gardener who loves trees…we need to grow trees.

“A study of urban forests in Modesto, CA shows that for each $1 invested in urban forest management, $1.89 in benefits is returned to residents. City trees actually remove 154 tons of air pollutants, increase property values by over $1.5 million, and provide shade that saves over $1 million. This information convinced city officials to increase the tree budget and an electric utility company to invest $20,000 in developing the Modesto Tree Foundation.” — USDA Forest Service

This year it looks like May is vying to take back its title of one of Austin’s rainiest months. After a disappointing showing in 2005, May 2006 has started out with a bang–the bang of thunder, the boom of transformers blowing out during a power surge, and the crash of trees felling power lines.

Tuesday (5/2) afternoon, I got caught in thunderstorm as I headed home from the gym in rush hour traffic. That was a comparitively pleasant prelude to Thursday (5/4) night. Around 10PM, 70mph winds begin whipping through the trees and almost immediately our power surge protectors squealed and we lost power. According to Austin Energy, Thursday’s storm resulted in the biggest power outage in Austin since 2000.

And then it poured–not just for 10 minutes or so as it often does, but for what seemed like more than an hour. I was glad to see my terraces keeping the water from running off into the street. My drainage area held four inches of standing water at one point. And for once the garage didn’t flood.

We were luckier than many. Our yard was littered in ball moss and dead branches, but only a few smaller, live limbs were torn off trees by the high winds. Just around the corner a live oak tree had split in half and fallen across power lines. Neighborly residents hung socks along the downed lines to alert motorists.

Friday night was a repeat performance, though less windy and with less rain over a longer time. Thursday night we got over three inches of rain; Friday, maybe 2 inches.

Does this mean that Austin’s drought is broken? Or is this the last rain we’ll see until September. Stay tuned.

This post focuses on the writing component o. “garden writing”. Many of you arrived at Zanthan Gardens because your search for information about gardening in Texas, native plants, or xeriscape led you here. Maybe you wanted to know more about Indian hawthorn, heirloom roses, bluebonnets, or oxblood lilies. Maybe you were curious about when specific plants bloom in central Texas or if 40 days of 100 degree heat was what we should expect in Austin every summer.

You could have checked out a book from the library or read the garden column in your local newspaper, but the internet makes possible for you to gather a lot of information quickly and compare facts easily, so that you can form your own opinions. And it’s easy to correspond with the author with followup questions or comments. On blogs, like Zanthan Gardens, you can participate in the discussion with other garden lovers.

The beauty of the internet model is that it provides access to unfiltered information. It is also a way for the smallest voice to participate in the global conversation. I have been a writer all my life, yet I doubt that people in New York, Rhode Island, Indiana, New Zealand, Japan and England would be reading my writing on a regular basis were it not for internet publishing. Even if I had become a traditionally published author, I would not have the sense of community I share now by receiving your comments and reading your blogs in turn.

If you live in the USA, your ability to access information freely, network neutrality is being threatened in Congress. Unlike China, it is not the government that wants to filter our access, but the telecom companies, such as AT&T and Verizon. They are lobbying Congress to pass legislation to make it possible for them to direct our searches to “preferred” sites…people who pay the telecoms a premium or their own commercial ventures.

Imagine doing a search on Google and only seeing the results under “Sponsored Links”. The reason I use Google (and the reason Google is fighting the telecoms on this) is because I want access to all the information that is available. I want to decide for myself what to read.

I buy books at Amazon.com, songs from the iTunes store, and plane tickets from Travelocity. I don’t want my internet provider to direct me to its “preferred” sites. I want to remain a loyal customer to those businesses who provide what I’m looking for. Companies that have well-designed, useful websites should not be crippled by my internet provider.

I spend more time on the internet than watching TV precisely because the internet enables me to choose my own content. The commercial nature of TV is self-filtering; only what is popular is aired because advertisers want to reach the largest audience possible. Independent, minority, out-of-the-mainstream, non-corporate content is filtered by its nature. If it doesn’t appeal to a large audience, then advertisers won’t pay to have it aired. I don’t want to be subject to the tyranny other people’s tastes and interests. I prefer to cultivate my own. Many of you are great reads, even if you aren’t on the bestseller’s list.

What Can You Do?
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