Is the Bloom Off the Rose?
I am sitting on our patio this sunny late July morning and there is a slight breeze from the east. I am doing what I always do in the morning if I am not rushing off to do something or go somewhere, I am trying hard to be in the moment and feel what I feel around me. I like the patio in the morning and in the late part of the day because it feels so snug and comfortable without feeling confining. There are distant views to the north must beyond the cactus knoll and there are distant views to the east over my shoulder where I can see at least three layers of faded hills in the distance. But the beauty of the patio is near at hand. There is the multi-colored iridescent tiled spa with its river rock cascading spillway (sometimes turned on and moving and sometimes still as a mountain lake. There is the bonsai array to my right the adorns the small boulder hillock that culminates in a spreading and artistic-looking scrub oak tree. The imbedded bonsai are obvious in their placement but the subtlety of the ground-cover in between is a personal victory of patience as it has taken three seasons to fill in properly and is now perfect in its cover and density, all edged with Core-10 rusted steel barriers that bend with the natural shape of the foundational boulder that anchors the small hillside. The shape and contours of that hillock are a delight of randomness and combination of stone, succulent, ceramics, metal-art and Asian feel. I am very proud of it because it was so loosely planned and turned out so very perfect in its imperfection. That perfect imperfection is the theme of the patio.
As the underlying stone base falls away on the left side in the direction of the driveway, I have a lovely stone (actually cast concrete stone) lantern that is wired for subtle evening light and is surrounded by a combination of purple lantana except where the sun is the harshest. There, I have allowed granular pebbles to highlight three or four unique small cacti that blend into the landscape with the help of a few ceramic toadstools for color accent. Set into the natural cleft in the big defining boulder that gives entry to the spa spillway, I have a ponytail palm that began life at two feet in height and is now all of seven feet as it starts to poke up above the height of the bolder itself. It looks as if nature gave it a nook in which to exist and it has taken full advantage. It pleases me that I chose well on its placement those several years ago. From here I can also see my “Paint-By-Numbers” garden with its teal and turquoise highlights. It has worn well this first season with many of the cacti and succulents growing as much or more than were expected and the ceramics and metal-art randomly placed around and in it feeling as much at home as one can hope for a project that came together so quickly in order to prove that I could do it economically myself without spending the $43,000 that was bid to me by the best local succulent artist.
But there is something not entirely right here on the patio this morning. My award-winning, Big-Tree-Project-certified Queensland Bottle Tree (Brachychiton Rupestris), being a creature of the Southern Hemisphere is as seasonally-confused as any pre-pubescent youth is gender-confused. It knows it must shed its leaves annually, but when? It has done it in March and April in the past, but this year it has chosen to do it in July. When this happened the first time in my presence a few years ago, I was worried that I had killed this wonderful specimen tree. Now I know that it is just cycling through and that the long, slender leaves drop off quickly and are even more quickly replaced by budding new growth a the tips of 90% of the branches. The other 10% of the small branches leave the mother tree with their leaves attached and in the oddest manner. They do not break off per se, they separate quite naturally at the joint with the larger branch. Examining that endpoint shows a conical and smooth break that looks almost manufactured the way a Barbie doll arm might look if you pulled it from its socket. How the tree decides which 10% should be shed and which survive to flourish with sub-branches all their own for the following seasons is hard to imagine. This almost marsupial tree of Australia branches almost as strangely as it trunks, with the bulbous water-storing system making it a not-so-distant cousin to the ponytail palm where water storage is key to survival and makes its shape so very interesting for the garden.
But the strangeness of the light on the patio while the Bottle Tree sheds and rejuvenates is less constrained and therefore seems oddly unfiltered. I will appreciate its regrowth and the shade it brings to my eyes as I sit on the patio and see less sky and more vegetation as I glance skyward. Meanwhile, past the spa boulders I have four layers of bloom to contemplate. In the distance and to the south across the road are a gaggle of six Mexican Palms. Out here those are considered trash weed trees when they are young, but if they survive and gain thirty or forty feet of stature, it is hard to say that they are not regal in their presence. Some people do a good job of keeping the trees well-trimmed of their dead leaves that otherwise form a large fur-ball below their healthy green crown. A totally neglected palm has a tall trunk’s worth of old and combustible growth that makes the tree look very wild and carefree. Ones that get trimmed only every few years look top-heavy, but not so very unkempt except to the trained arborists eyes. And if the owners are diligent and send their gardeners up the trunks on their pole-climbing spikes to trim regularly, the trees look very vibrant and vigorous. These six are in the middle category and I know those seed pods have thousands of pea-sized black seeds that will each and every sprout to try to create the next wild Mexican Palm wherever they land. Nature is nothing if not a game of numbers.
The next layer is on my own hillside where a Century Plant (one of several hundred I have on my property) has shot up its death-spire about twenty feet and that has begun to branch with its characteristic array of seed pods. I am not botanist enough to know the percentages of seeded agave regeneration versus pupped regeneration, but in this case nature’s oddsmaker has clearly hedged her bets skyward and on the ground. That spire will stand for perhaps four more months before I will have to have it felled and removed.
Close by the far spa boulder is a fire-stick succulent (Euphorbia Tirucali) that resembles sea coral with its green turning to red pencil fingers pointing upward. It is perhaps fifteen feet high with a ten foot spread and is pretty to look at and hell to touch (hence the fire-stick name). And then spreading well beyond the boulders are my two spreading Palo Verde trees (Parkinsonia Florida) which are native to the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts. These dessert trees are extremely hearty and drought-tolerant and grow at a quick clip. They are just starting to flower this month and will bear lovely yellow petals for a few months while the tree itself continues to shoot upward vertical new growth branches to give it the airy, lace-like look that is mostly devoid of leaves and must use its green branches for photosynthesis. It’s carefree manner has made it my most often planted tree with me adding four to a property that already had six spaced here and there.
The beauty of this semi-arid chaparral and this sub-tropical success-heavy coastal area that meet somewhere in the middle is that the bloom is proverbially never off the rose for very long. What doesn’t bloom today, blooms tomorrow and what blooms today might well bloom again in another three months. The gardens on this hillside are full of surprises and that alone makes it a wonderful place.