Experimental Gardening
I have pretty much worn my shorts every day this week, which means that summer is finally upon us. Technically its still spring, both by the calendar and the temperature, but after a long cool (I can’t bring myself to say cold) and wet few months, I am ready to shift back into warm weather gear. During the past week and a bit, I have been in the garden every day for some amount of time ranging from a few hours to all day. My gardening desires seem to have some seasonality just like the plants do and with the springtime, I have 1,001 ideas of things I want to do in the garden. I even have taken to making an iPhone notepad list of the things I want to do since these thoughts come to me as I wander through my 2.5 acre spread, going from bench to bench to ponder the various views. This makes sense since the garden is more or less organized into areas that all have at least one bench. While I technically have 14 benches, 4 Adirondack chairs, and 3 tables with a total of 8 patio dining chairs, I think of there as being nine sections of the garden.
Two of those sections are for adults and they consist of the patio with its spa and water feature, the bottle tree, a bonsai and cactus knoll and a Southwestern rock garden on the northern side of the house, and what we call the Cecil Garden with its basalt column fountain, citrus trees, bonsai rock garden and bird houses. Those are both easily accessible to the house for guests. There are two specific areas dedicated to children, the first being the play area with its Moonstruck Madness array of throwing, pitching and putting games, surrounded by palms, Pride of Madeira plants, Butterfly Lillies and accessed over an arched wooden Japanese bridge that crosses a dry creek bed and wanders through lavender and elephant bush. The play area that the kids tend to like the best is the more remote Hobbit House and Climbing Wall, where they can feed the birds, put their hands in La Boca de Verita, and ring a brass climbing wall bell.
The rest of the garden sections are sections only because of topography. I have tried to keep the plantings to a combination of succulents (including cacti) and indigenous California plants that need less water. The exception are two California Wildflower beds that need more water, but bloom beautifully all year long in one way or another. I have doubled the irrigation system zones since I have been here doing my garden expansion, but that does not seem unreasonable since I have about doubled the usable and walkable garden area. I know I should be more judicious with water, but I do love the flowers and the color that come with the added water. One could say that everything on this property is a rock garden of some sort since this high chaparral terrain is littered with large boulders everywhere you look. I have used those boulder placements to define the sections by putting in paths of decomposed granite embedded with some wooden steps where needed. That sectioning has created several well-defined rock gardens of a more traditional type that either run adjacent to stone steps or create a splayed canvas of color below a ridge line.
I think my manifest destiny in terms of acreage is near its end. There is perhaps 10% of the property westward and below one last row of boulders and that is where the coyotes like to roam. I prefer to leave that to them. I could expand a bit northward but that would get me into my spa mechanical area and there seems little benefit. That means that I am now into improving on my earlier efforts to manipulate the garden. My replacement of the ill-fated and under-performing areas near the patio and cactus knoll that I’ve done over the last week are far more than maintenance. They are fundamental redesigns of the garden that come from understanding what works best out here. That means staying with succulents as much as possible, avoiding low-lying plants that rabbits like to eat (an expensive mistake I have made far too many times), and being very attentive to the sun and how much of it is needed or too much. I have always known and read the labeling of those needs on the plant pots at the nursery, but I guess I haven’t really understood their impact at a practical level. Live and learn.
One of the things I have not done much of to date is replanting from cuttings or propagation planting. I know that succulents are supposed to be super easy to propagate, but I guess I have needed to see plants at the nursery looking like they will eventually look in my garden and have been willing to buy them to get that ability to set them out where I want them in their pots. The Garden Club we have joined and that Kim now leads with Melisa, offers lots of opportunity to exchange cuttings. But that is largely unnecessary for me since I have just about every variety of succulent already right here on my property in one place or another. Now, as I have walked around and found areas for minor improvement like spots that look like they need something, I have begun to think about using cuttings to transplant rather than buying nursery plants. This weekend, while I had the day laborers hauling rock for me, I spent my time taking cuttings of my favorite succulents, letting them dry out a bit, and the transplanting them with the help of a little bit of succulent potting soil. I planted about a hundred cuttings and that alone is an experiment for me, as ordinary as it may be to other local gardeners. I planted about a dozen large fan aloes, one of the most in-demand cuttings from my collection that other people seem to covet. In the parlance or succulent designers, fan aloes are a “Thrill” variety since they go vertical quite nicely. I noticed at one of the better local nurseries that cuttings that were half the size of the ones I transplanted were selling for $34. That makes me think that I’ve started by saving some $500+. I have planted them in areas that aren’t particularly covered by irrigation, so that is experiment #1.
I also took multiple cuttings of a number of “Fill” varieties like Agave Attenuatas from the patio, Aloe Rubroviolacea from an overgrown planter, Haworth’s Aeonium (a Houseleek often called a Hen and Chicks) from the upper driveway, and Tree Aeoniums from several areas around the house. I took two types, those blooms with normal stems, which I am fairly certain will do well, and those which are the seed stems that grow from the main blooms. I have planted both types to see if the stems will propagate. I have used them to fill in gaps among the blue chalk stick ground-cover I have in large quantities and along the base of my largest rock garden that gets no supplemental irrigation. That is experiment #2 with a touch of #1 thrown in for good measure.
My third and last experiment is with a non-succulent. For some reason, I planted a Madagascar Periwinkle near my Bison Boulder and it has prospered. It is a very nice evergreen plant that has violet flowers pretty much year-round, and it grows very invasively and quickly. It was starting to overwhelm the Buffalo head, so I decided to prune it. On a whim, I Googled the plant’s propagation protocol and learned that it will propagate from a stem cutting if kept moist, so what the hell. I planted what I pruned and have started experiment #3. Who knows, depending on what happens with all this experimental gardening, I may have to write my own gardening book…something like How to Pretend You Know How to Garden by Using Fancy Plant Names.