The view from the front sidewalk, with yellow deerweed, violet gilia, pink arctotis, red aloe.
With several days above 80 degrees this week, it’s feeling like spring. And surveying the garden, it’s looking like spring too.
With rain come the weeds. Everywhere.Lest any of you in the lands of blizzards and crazy snowfall think I’m gloating, let me show you one of the many weed patches around the garden. Yes we have lots of spring flowers already. But we also have lots of zones around that look like this. But enough of this unpleasantness. On to some flowers!
Agave attenuata bloom spike that landed on the aloe
The first things anyone walking up to the house will notice are the two ginormous flowering spikes of the Agave attenuata. They’re a pretty common plant around town, but their seven or eight foot flowering spikes from November to February or March cannot fail to impress. If the blooms were coral pink or violet you almost might call the plant gaudy, but they’re a quiet icy greenish-white. Gaudy, but in a subtle way.Closer view of the end of one of the agave bloom spikes.
An apricot-gold selection of chuparosa, a plant that’s usually scarlet redThe number of California native plants in the garden keeps growing. Their two most common spring flower colors seem to be bright yellow and lavender, a combination that can stand my teeth on edge, so I tried to tone down the clashes with some plants with in-between shades of bloom. Apricot is a great peace-maker color, and I’ve used a golden chuparosa, Justicia californica ‘Tecate Gold’ and apricot mallow, Abutilon palmeri.Mellow apricot-yellow tones of desert mallow coexist with lavender-flowered plants, like Salvia ‘Bee’s Bliss’ here in the background
But still, there’s lots of yellow around: Bladderpod (Peritoma/Isomeris/Cleome arborea), our local coastal coreopsis (Leptosyne maritima), plus aeoniums from the Azores or Africa.Leptosyne (Coreopsis) maritimaPeritoma arboreaAeonium from the eastern Atlantic, also representing yellow
And there’s plenty in the lavender category: the very first (and really early) flower of Salvia ‘Winifred Gilman’, the prolific prostrate black sage (Salvia mellifera repens), “blue” dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) and blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) that reseeds itself at the edge of the veggie garden. First blooms on Salvia winifred GilmanThe rambunctious black sageBlue dicks, looking pretty lavender to meBlue-eyed grass, really more lavender than blue in this form, looking great next to chard
And a few others: Carpenteria californica The flowers of miner’s lettuce Ceanothus ‘South Coast Blue’ Baja fairy duster Hummingbird sageCrassula multicava, from somewhere other than California Galvezia juncea ‘Gran Canon’ from Baja Galvezia speciosa ‘Firecracker’, from California’s Channel Islands Monkey flower (mimulus) Flowering, but it’s a weed, buttonweed, Cotula australis–you can’t escape them this time of year!
This is my first contribution in many many months to the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day meme hosted by Carol of May Dreams Gardens. Thanks for hosting, Carol. Check out what’s flowering around the garden blog world [here] !
