Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Those opportunistic plants, the weeds, have responded quickly to Sunday’s rain. The henbit was the first to flower. A winter annual considered by many to be a weed of turfgrass, henbit thrives in the damp and so is at home in our clay soil during the winter. AJM likes the little pink flowers, and so do the butterflies. So I always leave them a little bit of it in the meadow–until some other flowers are blooming.

2006-01-24. Henbit. Austin, TX

Henbit does get straggly fast as it sprawls over the bluebonnets. Then it’s definitely weedy and I swear that next year I’ll nip it in the bud. As soon as it gets hot, though, it disappears on its own, so it’s never any real problem in our central Texas climate.

In Japan, henbit is one of the seven herbs of spring and is eaten as a tonic on January the 7th. This tradition goes back to those days before frozen foods and refrigerated trucks, when people suffered vitamin and mineral deficiencies without fresh greens in the winter.

Perhaps like other oft-maligned plants (I’m thinking of dandelion and nettles, Margaret), we will soon be paying top dollar for henbit in Central Market’s “spring mix” salads.

Fellow Austinite and gardener, Annie, wrote to me about a wonderful idea that she and some like-minded gardening friends have carried out. These Divas of the Dirt get together once a month to do a big garden project in one of their gardens. With eight women working together, a daunting project can be tackled in a day with time for a nice breakfast together first.

As someone who has spent a lot of time struggling through garden projects on my own, often feeling discouraged and overwhelmed, I admire the Diva’s clever approach. I just wish I were as organized and as energetic.

Dateline: 2006
The year continues to be remarkable for what’s not happening in the garden. No rain, of course, and that’s the cause of the rest of it. Despite the full sun (last week the last of the leaves fell) and English summer temperatures, no roses are blooming. The bluebonnets are only about 4 inches across. A few larkspur seedlings are up, but no cilantro and no nigella. The few tufts of false dayflower are dry and the tradescantia is up but feeble and withered.

On the upside, there are no weeds either. Usually goosegrass, henbit, and chickweed are choking every bed this time of year.

The dryness has taken on a quality quite unlike Central Texas. It’s not just the lack of rain, it’s the very low relative humidity. The air feels more like Santa Fe, or Las Vegas. Skies are desert blue and the visibility is so good that driving in from Houston Saturday, we could see Austin’s skyline almost from Bastrop.

First Flowers: Narcissus italicus (1/8).
Blooming: Unidentified paperwhites. Chinese sacred lily. Rosemary.
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Motivated by the nice weather that we get three weeks out of the year and inspired by my success with the bathroom project, I tackled another long unfinished project.

Years ago, we made two large planters in the front and I put in decomposed granite sand paths between them. But when the path reached the front entry, where there is a sharp drop, I didn’t know what to do and gave up. In the interim, I’ve made half-hearted attempts to move the uneven stones that made up the old path. St. Augustine grass overgrew its boundary covering the holes and creating the potential for a lawsuit by all of those people who can’t read the “No Trespassing No Soliciting” sign and insist on stuffing flyers into our front door jamb. The addition of a wooden sawhorse across the path did not discourage them. And so the situation remained.

A couple of Sundays ago, I cleared out the grass enough for AJM to see the stones. He moved them to the back yard. All of them. Yikes! Now the ball was back in my court. I began by cutting stakes and marking a path with twine. The project was really underway. Next I cut out roots and dug out stones and raked flat a good foundation for a path.

I checked Peter Jeswald’s How to Build Paths, Steps, and Footbridges out of the library and read for inspiration and instruction.

The next Sunday we went to Home Depot and bought metal edging for the paths. I also got some horticultural cloth. I had used some on the sand paths and discovered that it doesn’t do as much to keep the weeds down as I’d hoped (they sprout in the sand above the cloth), but it does keep the path medium separate from the clay beneath which prevents the paths from washing away.

2006-04-09. Texas bluebonnets and cleome demonstrate that gravel is an excellent medium for sprouting seeds. However, they are very easy to pull.

On Thursday I ordered 3 tons of Fairland Pink gravel. Before Custom Stone Supply could deliver it, I had to cut back all the Turk’s cap lining the driveway and move the mailbox.

Ever since I’ve been carting one wheelbarrow load after another to fill the paths. We had a nice rain on Monday, and the paths did very well. They didn’t flood and they didn’t wash away. I’m almost done. I’ll update with photos eventually.

Update

2003-01-08. The front gravel paths. From the date, this must just be the granite sand.

Dateline: 2006
I haven’t spent any time in the garden since I returned from Las Vegas (10/10). It’s been raining so I’m not needed in the watering for watering and I’ve been focusing all my attention on the kitchen remodel.

I do go out from time to time to check on my wards. The rain has brought up the paperwhite narcissus already! And here’s the Muscari six inches tall. And there’s the Narcissus simplex (given to me by kind reader, Shelly B, and obviously planted too late last year). The four o’clocks are in full flower and the oleander is looking better than its looked all summer but the plumbago has suddenly stopped flowering (too cold?)

The weeds are taking over. I prefer this problem to having to water.
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Dateline: 2006
I return to Austin late Tuesday (10/10) night behind a line of thunderstorms. DFW was a mess after 5 inches of rain and flooding and flights were delayed an hour at minimum. However, I managed to fly standby on an earlier flight into Austin and my baggage made it on the plane to my utter amazement. I was hoping that the rain had also made it to Austin and it had.

By Friday (10/13) the meadow was aflower with rainlilies. And a late flush of oxblood lilies surprised me. The Nerium oleander is blooming again. Bluebonnets. cilantro, and daisies are popping up everywhere.
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Dateline: 2005-10-09
After flowering for two summers, the mother plant died. Slowly its stalk rotted away and the pups (some of which were full-grown plants by this time) began to fall away from the center.

2005-07-28. Even in late July, the blue-green banana leaves looked crisp and fresh. They never turned brown or wilted like the brighter green canna. However the number of pups was getting out of hand.

As today was the second of two perfect fall days, I decided it was time to dig up and replant the pups. I soaked the ground thoroughly to make it easier to get through the hardened clay. Then AJM and I began digging around the perimeter and trying to prize up the mass by getting the fork under the roots. The whole mass is fleshy and breaks easily. All we succeeded in doing is snapping the top of the banana plants off the roots.

In the end it was a banana tree massacre. A score of large banana trees lay rootless on the ground. Half a dozen smaller ones came away with a little bit of root. And what about the roots? If I replant them, will new pups spring up? Are banana trees like Tradescantia in this respect. I’ll try it and see and report back.

I was very depressed after destroying my banana plants. I had to keep telling myself that they were all going to fall over and die anyway and they had outgrown the space and were crushing the plants near them. Still, there’s a big empty spot in the garden where once was the most beautiful green.

I started with one and I have more than one now. If even one pulls through the winter, all will have worked out in the end.
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Returning to the garden after time away results in feelings tinged with expectation tempered with fear. After more than two weeks in England we arrived home at 1 in the morning. I was too tired to wander around the garden in the moonlight. I peeked through the window, though, and thought the grass looked unusually perky for this time of year.

When I woke and saw the lawn in the sunlight, the grass looked green and vigorous. Odd for August. The crape myrtles were finally blooming. And the other small flowering trees, Tecoma stans and Rose of Sharon also had flowers.

Apparently it had been unusually cool and rainy while we were gone. Good thing, too. Now we’re back to 100 degree days and I’m out watering, weeding, and mulching the first two hours of every day until the sun starts shining.

The roses are struggling. “Caldwell Pink” was suffering die-back even before we left. I’ve now pruned away two-thirds of it and the rest of it has lost its leaves. ‘Gruss an Aachen’ and ‘Souvenir de St. Anne’s’ are similarly stressed.

Overall the garden seems in not too bad a shape. I feel like tackling it again. If you’ve read The Secret Garden then you know some people’s delight in pulling away the weeds and restoring order to a garden. I’ve not quite reached that point of delight, but I’m over my reluctance. I suppose I could be coaxed into gardening again, especially after this hot spell breaks and we get some rain.

While the rest of the nation is sweltering under a massive heat wave (pity my parents in Las Vegas which reached its all time record high of 117 yesterday), here in Austin we’ve had a break from the heat. The first two weeks of July felt like August; now it feels like September. Day after day of thunderstorms brought some real rain. We had almost an inch on Friday and another inch on Sunday. Valerie report three inches at her house.

We had friends over on Saturday. You never realize how neglected the garden has become until you see it through someone else’s eyes. I was appalled. So Monday, a relatively cool 90 degree day, I was out weeding and mulching. This was the first time I’ve enjoyed being in the garden in months. The ground was pliable and all the plants, that are still alive, perked up admirably. It almost looks like a garden again.

We got only a trace of rain out of Hurricane Emily, but we did have nice shady day.

I don’t know why I haven’t been a big fan of gladiolus before, unless maybe it’s their movie association with mobsters’ funerals. Last year, the photos in the Dutch Garden catalog seduced me into buying some Flevo gladiolus, which are smaller and more compact than normal. And now I’m hooked. They bloom along with the cannas and other heat and water-loving tropicals. Now that I’ve devoted a special plot to all my high-consumption plants, I don’t mind doting on them.

I was surprised how pretty they are. Has anyone every described a gladiolus as “delicate”?

Nursery Description. “Creamy, pale yellow blooms deocrated with soft rose. Plant 4 to 5 inches deep and 5 to 6 inches apart. Full sun. Height 22-28 inches.” Souce: Dutch Gardens.

Tags: gladiolus, flower, bulb, garden.
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