Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

I like that the Texas Aggies classify red yucca as an “evergreen shrub”. Unless you garden in the American southwest, you probably think of shrubs as multi-stemmed woody perennials, such as roses, azaleas, yew, box, and lilacs. But down here in Texas, we have to use a bit of imagination. Truth be told, red yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) isn’t a yucca either.

The last few years red yucca has become very popular in commercial landscapes and median plantings around Austin. They really strut their stuff in a mass planting where the pale red flowers seem to float like a cloud of butterflies above the green spikey base.

I don’t have room for a mass planting in my garden, so I found it a bit of a challenge to site a single plant among the cottage garden plants. I stuck it in a sunny spot between the ‘Penelope’ and ‘Prosperity’ roses and I don’t think it quite works. However, I’m happy that after four years, it has finally decided to bloom.

A single red yucca almost disappears into the foliage of more traditional shrubbery. It works better in a starker landscape or when planted en masse.

Red yucca is reputed to attract both butterflies and hummingbirds, but I haven’t noticed either around my plants. [2008-06-13. Saw a hummingbird on the red yucca this morning.]

I think red yucca is better described as heat-tolerant, than drought-tolerant. High temperatures don’t seem to bother it, but in Austin it requires some supplemental water during the worst of summer to thrive. Just be sure that it has good drainage. (One thing to remember about so-called drought-tolerant plants…just because a plant can tolerate drought conditions doesn’t mean they perform their best. It’s more of a comparitive term. A red yucca can get buy with a lot less water than a hosta. But it doesn’t mean you can just plant a red yucca and forget about it.)

Red yucca forms clumps and you can divide them in the winter. I found it easy to start red yucca from seed, too. However, it grows very slowly. The seedlings I started two years ago are only six inches tall.
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My “Scott’s Ruston” rose is a bit of a mystery. I bought it from Barton Springs Nursery in 2001, but I’ve never been able to find a reference to it in any book or online. Something about the label made me think it is a found rose.

In Australia, the David Ruston Rose Centre is home to the National Rose Collection of Australia. (I suspect from all those capital letters, it’s an official collection.) Apparently they have 4000 varieties of roses, but they don’t provide a list, so I can’t find out if one of them is named “Scott”.

“Scott’s Ruston” is very similar to ‘New Dawn’ which makes me wonder if it is a sport. The flowers are the same shape and color, but the petals on “Scott’s Ruston” seem to have a more rounded edge. They both open flat and fade to the palest pink. I can’t rule out the possibilty that both these roses are ‘Ne. Dawn’ roses and that “Scott’s Ruston” was mislabled at the nursery.

2006-04-23. The same instance of “Scott’s Ruston” rose after it opened. Cooler weather after the rain this week meant the roses looked nice for a couple of days each.

“Scott’s Ruston” is less vigorous than ‘New Dawn’, but that might just be because I planted it in an unfortunately shady spot under a cedar elm tree. In the same amount of time, ‘New Dawn’ has clambered all over the fence and is broaching a Texas mountain laurel, while “Scott’s Ruston” is just starting to arch over the fence.

After more than four years, “Scott’s Ruston” might finally have settled in. This year half a dozen roses opened at once.

Does anyone else grow this rose?

We had wild storms last night and good soaking rain. Today I spent all afternoon enjoying weeding in the garden. It’s not a chore when the ground is so moist and giving. All sorts of butterflies were out, too.

I’m ashamed to say that I know almost no butterflies by name. Nor do I find the internet a good tool for learning about them because the sites I visited assume that you’re starting with a name.

So I can’t pay homage to butterflies as I should. To know something’s name is to distinguish it from all else. Butterflies remain to me more of a general idea than groups of specific instances. The only way I can “see” what I’m looking at is to take a photo.

Maybe one of you can tell me this ones name, so that when next I see it, I’ll smile in recognition.

No, we didn’t get a perfect score. That’s today’s high. No, that’s not normal. It broke the record for April 17th. It is also the first time we’ve ever broken 100 in April. Or in March. However, it’s not the earliest in the year we hit 100. That was in February, 1996. Should cool down to the 80s by Wednesday the forecasters promise.

We had power outages this afternoon in South Austin. Rumor has it that everyone got home and turned on their air conditioners at the same time. We lost power here twice but only for a couple of minutes each time–just long enough to bring the server down. AJM just got it working again.

I was going to grumble about June weather in April, but now I can moan about August weather in April. I think it’s time to visit Kathy up in her colder climate.

An Ohio family was denied a permit request to build a privacy fence around their backyard because one neighbor felt a fence didn’t fit in with the “open look and feel” of the neighborhood. So the family decided to add their own flavor to the neighborhood’s look and feel by decorating their yard with toilets filled with plastic flowers and toilet bowl brushes painted to resemble swathes of flowers.

Funny because in my South Austin neighborhood a yard full of decorated toilets would fit right in. In fact, I’m surprised no one’s done it yet. (Once this story gets out, I’m looking forward to some fine examples.) I do think the toilet idea is clever and hope the Ohio family wins their battle to build their fence, but…

Hubcap and CD decorated privacy fence

My own neighborhood of small bungalows is also in a fight over look and feel. Our concerns are the opposite. We don’t want people to build soulless McMansions with huge garages dominating the streets.

So I find myself on the opposite side of the fence from the toilet yard people. Although, I think that in their case their permit should have been granted, I don’t believe that owning a piece of property gives you the right to disregard one’s neighbors. In our case, I don’t think out-of-state land speculators should be able to pave over my neighborhood and make a quick buck at the expense of the people who have lived here and made it a community. Rights must be balanced with civic responsiblity. I think a lot of problems would solve themselves if we thought in terms of stewardship rather than ownership.

Our bungalows have character!

If I wanted to live in the soulless suburb I would have bought a house in Circle C where green lawns are mandated despite watering restrictions and clotheslines are forbidden.

Giant fiberglass chicken. Some people keep real chickens, too. And the mayor pardoned our neighborhood goat so that he could be kept as a pet and rather than be deported as livestock.

April 4, 2006
A couple of people have reported problems accessing my RSS feed. I tried subscribing to this site via Bloglines and it seems to be working now. (Although I might have broken the subscriptions you’ve already set up.)

If you have tried to subscribe to Zanthan Gardens, can you let me know whether or not it worked for you?
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What do the following things have in common?
1. Famous venue for redneck rock (progressive country) music.
2. Texas state mammal (small).
3. Free bus system in downtown Austin.
4. Mascot for the Statesman Capitol 10,000.

The last nine months or so, I’ve neglected the garden. Some plants, like the roses and irises, really show it. Other really tough plants have surprised and encouraged me. This spring I’ve been very thankful for Acanthus mollis. Auralea japonica, Rhaphiolepis indica, Tacoma stans, and Salvia farinacea. Without them, I’d have no garden at all this year.

Yesterday I noticed a the first flower of the season on Salvia farinacea ‘Indigo Spires’. Thanks to the water that sprays over the fence when my neighbors water their lawn, my salvias have formed nice mounds of green this spring. I decided I should finally cut off the long arching stems from last year. I should have cut them way back last fall.

One advantage of my lazy housekeeping is that salvias self-layer and root wherever the joints touch soil. In my garden, plants die every year and new ones replace them. I let them grow where they’re happiest and they’ve arranged themselves around the cedar elm in the back of the stump garden. I do absolutely nothing for these plants except mulch them with leaves in the fall and prune them back once a year.

Gardeners in Austin are typically crazy for salvias. They come in many varieties, sizes, and colors. In addition to being heat-loving, salvias have the reputation of being deer-resistant. (I can’t say since there are no deer downtown). One drawback I’ve heard, however, is that some salvias dislike Austin’s alkaline soil. I haven’t noticed that problem either in my garden or around town. I’ve tried a couple of other salvias, but Salvia farinacea has proven the most carefree in my central Texas garden. One plant, eleven years. That’s got to be a record in my garden. Only the plumbago, which I bought and planted on the same day, has done as well.

By the way, I’ve had a hard time trying to peg down exactly what type of salvia I’m growing. When I bought my one plant in 1995, I wrote down Salvia farinacea ‘Indigo Spires’. Apparently the salvias cross-pollinate easily and some sites list ‘Indigo Spires’ as a hybrid, not a cultivar. As for common names, I’ve found both mealy cup sage and mealy blue sage and even plain mealy sage.
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Ever since Sunday (3/12), half a dozen monarch butterflies have been hanging out in my yard. They like the Texas mountain laurel and Meyer lemon best. It was exciting to look out my kitchen window while washing dishes and see two or three of them flitting around the lemon tree. I don’t have Valerie’s patience or skill for insect photography and am not pleased with any of my shots. Unlike flowers, butterflies don’t hold still for the camera.

Monarch butterflies migrate through Austin in the fall on their way to their winter homes in Mexico. Several of my neighbors in north Austin see them regularly each fall, but I rarely do. Does the migrating horde avoid downtown? or is it just me?

Unfortunately I don’t have any milkweed planted.

Update: 2017-10-18

Getting a better camera helps. A tool might not make an artist but good tools certainly bring out the best in our efforts regardless of artistic talent. My latest camera is a Sony a6000. It has a high-speed capture feature and a real telephoto lens that helps a lot in photographing the movable garden.

Monarch butterfly on white boneset.

I’ll take up the challenge thrown down by Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening via Chan at Bookish Gardener.

1. Total Number of Gardening Books I Own:I count 96 that I can get to right now and probably another 20 or 30 in the back room that I can’t get to because of our kitchen deconstruction project.
2. Name five of your favorite gardening books:
• Passalong Plants.
• Collected essays by Henry Mitchell. Essential Earthman and On Gardening.
• A Woman’s Hardy Garden. Helena Rutherford Ely. This book and the catalog from Select Seeds helped me fall in love with old-fashioned flowers.
• The Rose Bible. Rayford C. Reddell.
• Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Michael Pollan.
3. What was the last gardening book you bought (or brought home from the library)? Garden Lunacy: A Growing Concern. When I saw it in the library, I thought the title sounded familiar. Then I remembered, Art Wolk asked if he could reprint one of my anecdotes. And yep, he included it in his book along with my name and this website. Cool!
4. What was the last gardening book you read? Texas Gardening the Natural Way: The Complete Handbook. Howard Garrett. I found the style to be a bit grating. I prefer his Texas Bug Book.
5. List five books that have been particularly meaningful to you:
   • The Rodale Herb Book. The very first gardening book I ever bought: 30 years ago.
   • Garden Bulbs for the South. Scott Ogden. Started me on my obsession fo. heirloom bulbs for the south like Tulipa clusiana and oxblood lilies.
   • Roses in the Southern Garden. G. Michael Shoup. Started me on my obsession for heirloom roses for the south.
   • A Southern Garden and Gardens in Winter. Elizabeth Lawrence.
   • We Made a Garden. Margery Fish.
6. Name three gardening books you’ve been dying to read but just haven’t gotten around to it: These are books I own that I’ve never gotten around to reading.
• Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers. Sharman Apt Russell.
• A Gardener Obsessed. Geoffrey B Charlesworth.
7. What gardening books would you most want to have on hand when shut up in the house by a blizzard? Kathy added this. My initial response was, “Blizzard? What’s a blizzard. These are all books that get me in the mood.
• The Gardener’s Year. Karel Capek.
• Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden.
• For Love of a Rose.
• Tottering in My Garden.
• Thomas Jefferson: The Garden and Farm Books.
• Tasha Tudor’s Garden. Tovah Martin. Made me fall in love with the idea of gardening.