Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

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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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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