Category Archives: gardening

gardening

my new composter

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I often get the impression that to get your ticket punched as a real, serious gardener you have to take up composting. Still, I gave up on polishing my halo a dozen years ago. The old-fashioned compost pile I had took way more maintenance than I was interested in…all the hassles, especially keeping the beast stirred and watered.

Since those days tumbling composters have really come into their own as an alternative to the piles that just sit there like Uncle Ervin on his Barca-Lounger in front of the TV. The promise of a compost device that simplifies keeping the mix stirred and aerated sounded almost too god to be true, but I’ve been tempted to give them a twirl.

The opportunity came up as I headed to the back aisles at Costco to pick up some cheese and bread. On my way to the back of the store a big tumbling composter tried to reel me in with its dark tractor beam.

The thing with this store is that you usually have your choice of the one item they offer for sale, which in this case was the 80-gallon Lifetime model 60021 tumbling composter. (Costco offers several other models online.) Even with a price tag less than $100 I resisted at first. But I went home and did a little research online. Judging by the customer reviews people generally seemed to like this model, with the main complaint being being about an internal aerating tube that kept getting bent because it was made out of PVC. It seemed like a valid but relatively minor concern, so I decided to give the composter a try.

The composter in its box, as it looks when you bring it home.

When you buy this model, you’re really buying a composter kit, not an assembled composter. I documented the time I started, before I opened the box, before I assembled the necessary tools (which ended up requiring–among other things–an electric drill and socket wrenches), before I read the instructions that recommended that it would take two adults to assemble it. John is still hobbling around on crutches right now, so I decided to go it alone.

The time when I completed assembling it.
The time right before I began to open the box.

From the documented end time you can see that it took me about an hour and fifty minutes to put it together. That includes time spent taking a few pieces apart after I’d installed them incorrectly, as well as a few minutes when John came out to supervise my work and ogle the new toy. I’m generally pretty handy with mechanical things, if a little impatient to read all the way through instructions. I also did okay hefting the big 65 pound box the kit came in, and had the added benefit of a power screwdriver. Adjust your expectations for assembly time and effort accordingly.

The inaugural kitchen scraps.
The assembled composter.

Things fit together easily and made for a sturdy, double-walled, insulating composting chamber. Apparently the company read the customer complaints about the PVC aerating tube, because by the time they made my version of the model, the flimsy internal part had been replaced with a rigid piece of perforated metal pipe.

I couldn't resist doing a little trimming of plants around the garden. On even its first day, the composter is well on its way to being filled. The cuttings and kitchen scraps will cook down over time, making room for more waste.

The composter now lives outside the kitchen, alongside the trashcans and recycle barrels. It shouldn’t be hard to keep the compost barrel fed and tumbled. Once the barrel is filled it’ll need a few weeks for the compost to cook to perfection, a time when you shouldn’t be feeding it more clippings and scraps. To do things right, having a second barrel at the ready for those times would be the way to go. Within a few weeks I should have a better idea whether this model of composter lives up to my expectations and warrants my buying a second one.

So, will I become a real, serious, composting gardener? I’d say it’s off to a good start.

gardening, landscape design, places

well endowed landscaping

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Here’s a little weekend quiz: Any guesses as to where I took this picture?

Does this second photo help?

Clue #1: It’s in Los Angeles.

Clue #2: It’s a university campus.

Clue #3: The school colors are echoed in the flower colors of the landscaping.

If you’re not into universities and their colors the answer is USC, the University of Southern California, where the planting color scheme features the campus colors of cardinal and gold. If you were to ask me for my opinion I’d offer that they’re probably fine colors for football uniforms but a little strident for most garden situations if they were the only colors you used. But the entire campus was vibrating with new plantings of red salvias and yellow-orange marigolds, with a few leftover winter plantings of pansies in similar colors.

I mentioned the plantings to one of the campus regulars I was up there to meet with. Apparently USC has an endowment (by what was probably an enthusiastic alumnus) to supply bedding plants in the school colors.

From the themed seasonal color, to the lawns, to the hedges, to the fanatically clipped creeping fig around the Romanesque windows, to the trees planted in regimented rows, it’s so not my philosophy of gardening.


Trees (and campus buildings) providing cooling shade
A flowering canopy, dozens of feet overhead

But for an urban campus set where the warm season is just that, the tall trees provide welcome shade and the many benches set in the plantings make for opportunities to sit and hold conversations. And the style of the landscape seems to come straight out of a tradition of how a campus should look: neat, orderly, with a sense that many things of worth come from Europe.

My parents met on this campus way back when. Looking at the comfortable but formal plantings, I think I that can understand them a little better, the attitudes where they came from. Lifting my gaze to take in the tall sycamores, the mature magnolias, I know that many of these trees were here when my parents attended the campus.

But as far as the team-themed bedding plants–Were they here then? I’m not so sure. I’ll have to ask my father about them, though it’s not the sort of detail he’s likely to remember.

A few plantings flaunted colors other than the official school ones. The trees and lawns featured green, of course, and here and there you’d find a non-conforming cluster of plants. I end with a couple final shots of those.

Another renegade planting that didn't get the cardinal and gold memo...

Acanthus mollis, not a sign of cardinal or gold

gardening

earth day 2010

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Our sign at Earth Day

Happy Earth Day everyone!

Last weekend I helped out with the local native plant society’s information table at San Diego’s Earth Day celebrations, advertised as “the largest free annual environmental fair in the world.” Imagine that, in sleepy little conservative San Diego.

Our booth

Some of the plants we had for sale at the table. We ended up not pushing them too hard since a heavy gallon pot seemed to be more than most people wanted to carry around with them on a warm day with thousands of people crowded around. Seeds were and easier sell.

Some of the crowd at Earth Day

This exhibit was encouraging people to grow more of their own food. The cutouts for kids to poke their head through assured some attention from the younger crowd. Not all the kids looked at the exhibit, but a lot did.
There are always displays of electric car conversions...
...but with electric cars starting to come on line, they're less of a draw than before. But people seemed really interested in the electric scooters next door.

It’s always a wide mix of things that you’ll find in a large environmental-themed gathering, from conservation organizations to green-technology vendors to the ubiquitous booth selling kettle corn. What kettle corn has to do with sustainable living I have no idea, but it did keep some of the people fed and happy.

And it’s always a broad sampling of people who attend these fairs. Of the people who stopped by our table, there was the European family that was stranded due to Iceland’s Eyjafjallajoekull volcano, plenty of people interested in to work of the plant society, and even more people who were in the process of replacing their landscaping with less water-intensive plants.

I enjoy talking plants–any surprise since I do a garden blog? Helping to get the word out about the value of native plants, in the wilds or around the home, was extra-cool.

Some of the plantings at Balboa Park's Alcazar Garden

But it was nice to escape the crowds for a few minutes and just look at some plants. Our booth was adjacent to Balboa Park’s Alcazar Garden. The groundspeople are constantly changing the look of the garden. Today it featured flowering blocks of red snapdragons and lavender. It’s not a combination I’d have come up with, but I think I like it. Of course I’m way too curious about plants–and probably way too ADD–to limit myself to two garden plants.

A detail of the pairing of snapdragons and lavender.


Even with grand displays like this near the native plant society’s table, we had a nearly constant flow of people–a sure sign that people are thinking about different kinds of pleasures for their gardens. The times they are a-changin’.

gardening, my garden

leaves more amazing than flowers

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Sarracenia Leah Wilkerson pitcher and flower

Today I feature some striking pitcher plant leaves to mark the occasion of April’s Foliage Follow-Up, the blog meme begun by Pam of Digging.

The story goes that the early settlers mistook the carnivorous trumpet-shaped leaves for flowers. And how could you blame them? These tall tubes formed from modified leaves feature interesting shapes and colors in the green-yellow-white-pink-red range, often with the colors forming striking patterns. They’re easily as interesting as most flowers.

Botanist Donald E. Schnell writes in Carnivorous Plants of the United States and Canada, “there seems to be nothing subtle about pitcher plants. Their general appearance begs attention, and when we encounter them we are almost startled. But once we look for awhile, then wander among them, we can begin to peel apart layers of subtlety and see many little secrets that collective fit these plants so neatly into their bog habitat–and we still do not know all their secrets.”

Schnell has divided the carnivorous pitcher leaf into 5 different zones, each with a different morphology. The scary insect-eating and -digesting carnivory takes place down in zones 3 and 4, the lower parts of the pitcher. But these photos concentrate on the backs of the top lid of these pitchers, the entire lid being what Schnell calls zone 1.

The top of the pitcher of Sarracenia Leah Wilkerson
Sarracenia Mardi Gras
Sarracenia leucophylla, red, Franklin County, Florida
Sarracenia leucophylla 'Tarnok'
Sarracenia mitchelliana. Within a few weeks the pitcher will be entirely maroon.
Sarracenia (flava x mitchelliana). Plants with brownish leaves are often a hard sell, but I think this plant makes a good case that they can look rich and wonderful, not like dead leaves.
Sarracenia Judith Hindle
Sarracenia W.C.
Sarracenia Red Sumatra. This early in the season it looks more like Pink Sumatra, but the color will darken before long.

Even though my sarracenia plants get to live in a cushy USDA Zone 10 garden (not to be confused with the zones of a sarrecenia pitcher), their internal clocks seem more tuned in to seasonal cycles of daylength or relative temperatures than to absolute temperatures. Most of the species and hybrids have been suspicious of San Diego’s warm climate and keep their flowers and foliage developing in the rhizomes all winter. Only now are most beginning to bloom and send out leaves, though maybe a little bit earlier than in the American Southeast, where these plants originate.

As the season progresses, these leaves will often develop different colorations. The veins in some will grow more pronounced, some pitchers will go all-red, others will show a golden underglow. The brief burst of spring flowers in these plants is great, but the foliage makes for months of really cool leaf-viewing.

For all sorts of other foliage happenings in the garden world, check out the links in this month’s Foliage Follow-Up post at Digging. Thanks for hosting, Pam!


gardening, my garden

blue and orange (gbbd)

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The color combination of blue and orange reminds me of noisy kiddie toys, of hard molded plastic waiting room chairs, of harshly lit 1970s fast-food restaurants trying unsuccessfully to look modern and friendly, or of jerseys for some high school football team. With two colors screaming at each other from opposite sides of a color wheel, it’s not a combination that brings me a lot of joy or peace.

But spring is here, and part of the far back yard has been blooming away. Its main colors are–you guessed it–blue and orange, mainly hot orange California poppies and sky blue flowers of nemophilia, baby blue eyes.

As much as I generally don’t love these colors together, it’s hard for me not to like this little zone of perky chaos.

Even the blue flowers against the brick hardscape reinforces the blue and orange (or blue and orange-red) colors.

But in a garden you hardly every have two strong flower colors alone. The varieties of leaf green serve as peacemakers, separating the warring colors and injecting their own shades into the garden color palette. Other secondary leaf or flower colors help the enrich the palette and keep the peace.

From some angles a softer blue-gray provides a background to the hot orange flowers. Here the foliage is the now-common chalk fingers, Senecio mandraliscae. It’s still a blue and orange theme, but the blue is less emphatic and the orange is permitted to dominate.

Little pockets of cool-colored plants provide areas of visual rest. Here’s baby blue eyes and chalk fingers with a dark purple-black aeonium. Pretend I cut back the dying narcissus foliage…

Some viewpoints let the cool colors predominate, with just a few punctuation marks of poppy orange. New into this photo are whitish-violet flowered black sage (Salvia mellifera), magenta freeway daisy (Osteospermum), with a softer orange-red desert mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) in the upper left corner.

I’ll have to rethink what the combination of blue and orange means to me, at least in the garden. These flowers may be gone in a couple of months. Maybe this a combination that I should embrace and associate with “spring.”

Spring is bringing lots of other colors combinations and other flowers to gardens around the world. Check them out at May Dreams Gardens, where Carol is hosting yet another Garden Boggers Bloom Day. Thank you, Carol!

gardening, my garden

plant it once, have it forever

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There’s a prominent Northern California nursery* that advertises on its website that a variety will self-sow and naturalize. Or in its peppy, enthusiastic way: “Reseeds!” One of the plants so listed has a followup note: “Due to agricultural restrictions, we cannot ship this plant to Arkansas, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.”

Read between the lines: This plant, under the right conditions, might just run wild, out of control, and take over your garden or an ecosystem! (Not all plant restrictions are based on their invasive potential, however. For instance, some might be controlled because of known pests or diseases the species may harbor.)

Over the years I’ve added interesting plants to the garden, only to have them sow and propagate themselves all over the garden. For most of these, I don’t worry huge amounts that they’ll escape to the nearby wilds because they’re wimps when not pampered in a garden, but with regular watering they’re aggressive thugs. Pretty thugs, to be sure. But still thugs.

Here are a few of my mistakes. Some are merely annoying. Others require multiple hours of labor every year to keep under control. Colder areas might not have the same problems with these that I do, but I’m sure you have your own monsters. (My apologies in advance to the fine nation of Mexico. I just noticed that four of my selections have “Mexican” in their common names…)

Mexican petunia (Ruellia brittoniana). Pretty, tough. Also pretty tough to eradicate in my garden once it got a foothold. I should have paid attention when the guy at the plant sale warned me that it might spread. According to Floridata, “Mexican petunia is listed as a Category I invasive species by the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council. This means that it is ‘altering native plant communities by displacing native species, changing community structures or ecological functions, or hybridizing with natives.’ This warning applies to all parts of the state of Florida (and other areas with similar mild climates). Where hardy, the Mexican petunia excels at invading wetlands.” It also can be a nuisance in a dry garden like mine where it spreads underground and via exploding seed pods.

Mexican fan palm (Washingtonia robusta). Maybe it’s a uniquely California thing: You go out to the garden to pull weeds, and along with the crabgrass and spurge, you end up pulling up little palm trees. Folks in colder climes might be thrilled to have some of these, but here they’re a nuisance. Our Mexican fan came with the house, and it took us a few years to finally remove it. All that time we were yanking baby palms all over the front yard, and the seedbank remained viable for several years afterward.

Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima). I’ve dinged this plant several times before. I won’t add anything more here other than to note that I’ve probably pulled up a hundred seedlings this season. At least this is down from the orgy of seedlings that I had when there was a harem of adult plants in the garden that apparently had nothing on their mind except sex and reproduction.

Mexican evening primrose (Oenothera species, I think it was O. speciosa). I was on vacation at the Grand Canyon in 1991. Innocently I bought a packet of seeds of these that were sold as a “wildflower.” I was thrilled when they came up the first year and I had a gregarious patch of delicate bright pink flowers where there’d been a patch of dirt previously. Little did I know they’d resow and spread by underground runners and continue to annoy me to this day. Wild flower, indeed.

Sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima). Don’t let the “sweet” in its common name fool you. I continue to weed alyssum seedlings popping up around the garden from a single packet of mixed colors I planted in the late 1980s.

Fortnight lily (Dietes iridioides). A few clumps of these came with the house. The tough, hard seeds lay dormant in the ground for years and plague you with unwanted seedlings long after you’ve removed their source.

Calla lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica). I’ll have to admit that I have a soft spot for these plants and don’t pull them out the same way I pull out other unwelcome plants. My parent’s house came with a fifty-foot foundation planting of them on the north side of their house. The way the plant can spread, however, now makes me think the previous owners might have started with just a half dozen plants. Feral callas are plants of concern in some California wetlands. A couple well-watered garden spots seem to generate calla lilies out of thin air.

Epazote (Dysphania ambrosioides). I won’t quite call planting this Mexican herb a mistake, since I use occasionally in cooking. It does spread about the garden a bit, however, and pops up in unexpected places. There are reports [ including this one ] that it’s colonized parts of New York’s Central Park–though that’s not my doing. I popped over to Wikipedia and learned this pretty interesting detail I’d never heard before: “Epazote essential oil contains ascaridole…; in pure form, it is an explosive sensitive to shock.” Botanical TNT–Wild!

To my mistakes, I’ll add some native California annuals and perennials that have been really successful in reproducing themselves in my garden. Currently, my plants are wandering around an area where they’re desired and haven’t escaped far. I won’t call them mistakes at this point, but I can see that they could become unwelcome in some situations.

California poppies (Escholzia californica). What? Our sacred state flower?! Well, there are some unwelcome escaped colonies in Chile and Australia. And the seeds regularly find their way into cracks in the pavement.

Baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii). Not really what I’d call a thug, though these seem to be pretty successful at reproducing themselves. It’s easy to pull out the occasional unwanted plants, but who’d want to?

Clarkia (Clarkia spp.). I haven’t grown many clarkia species, but the one that seems to wander around the most for me is C. rubicunda ssp. blasdalei.

*There’s a good chance you’ll have guessed the identity of this well-known nursery if you’ve spent any time at its website. I don’t mean to diss them at all. You can get potentially rambunctious plants from virtually all nurseries, including those dedicated to native plants.

gardening, my garden

mowing is like vacuuming…

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I don’t have many opportunities to mow the lawn. I’ve basically told John that the day he can’t keep up with the grass will be the day I break into the Monsanto factory and abscond with all the Roundup they have and then apply it to the lawn. There’s lots of other ways I’d rather use the space.

The day has come. John had some work done on a foot and will be hobbling around for a couple months. The grass, however, well-watered from the January and February rains, didn’t stop growing, and it was time to have the conversation.

Well, in the end, I’m embarrassed to say that I caved, reasoning that he should be back to pushing the mower around in a few weeks, and now isn’t the best season to think of planting something that will require water to keep it going through the dry summer and fall ahead. Besides, John really likes his little patch of lawn, and he lets me have my way with most of the rest of the garden.

So I popped some allergy tablets and pulled out the electric mower and headed for the patch of grass. Back and forth I went over the browning green surface. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s weirdly meditative, like vacuuming, I decided, only with a device that can chop off your toes.

My diverse lawn

As I took down the seed heads it was a chance to look at this what we call a lawn. It’s never been a fanatically maintained piece of green, and features little colonies of Saint Augustine, Bermuda, rye, clover and whatever other species the wind has delivered. The biological diversity of this patch would do the Amazon proud and drive any single-species lawn fanatic to distraction.

The cat, last fall, shaking off the thatch from the lawn. This is inside the house, of course.

By mid-summer it’ll go mostly brown as we cut back on watering to continue with our water conservation. At that point, facing four to six months of brown, four to six months of thatch being tracked into the house every time you walk across the garden, that’ll be when we might continue our discussion with whether we might want to do something else with this patch of prime garden real estate.

Whatever we decide, you can rest assured that we will not be installing the plastic turf that’s getting to be a popular garden surface around town. In fact, I like that stuff so little I’ve started my very first Facebook group, Plastic Turf Must Die!!!!!! As far as I’m concerned fardens are about life and growing things, and this stuff is as dead and cheesy as anything out there. If you’re any sort of joiner and hate the stuff yourself, join the group!

gardening, my garden

culturally insensitive plant names?

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On one of my trips out hiking one of the group went running over to a plant in hysterical full bloom, Pedicularis densiflora, something she referred to as “Indian warrior.” It’s a stunning little plant that’s at least somewhat related to the plants in the genus Castilleja that are sometimes called “Indian paintbrush.”

I can’t say that I’ve had a conversation with anyone about this pedicularis. But in this age of heightened cultural sensitivities and school mascots being changed to less potentially offensive characters I’ve been trying to use the more generic name of “paintbrush” when discussing the castillejas. Most people still know what I’m referring to.

A quick look at Calflora turned up dozens of other California natives that have “Indian” in the name, including Palmer’s Indian mallow (Abutilon palmeri), Indian manzanita (Arctostaphylos mewukka), Indian milkweed (Asclepias eriocarpa), Indian strawberry (Duchesnea indica) and Indian headdress (Tracyina rostrata). I’m not Native American but I wonder if these common names might not be the best to use.

Tradescantia albiflora. Some people call it inch plant--probably a better name for it.

Trying to come up with other plant names that have left me a little queasy I thought immediately about the common houseplant, wandering jew, Tradescantia albiflora. The former owners of my house planted some in a bed, and I’m still trying to eradicate it, twenty years later. I keep telling myself that “wandering Jew” is just a plant name and I’m not being anti-semitic when I take the weeding fork to it.

Algerian ivy is another incredibly noxious plant pest, but I know that it’s named after the country where it originates and not the people who live there. In this case I don’t feeling like I’m committing genocide when I yank it out by the yard. Same goes for all the thousands of other plants named after their country of origin, both in their common and scientific latin names.

Dried leaves of Citrus hystrix

Looking on the web I came up with a couple other plant names that folks might find offensive. Golden Gate Gardener had a note about Keffir lime, Citrus hystrix, and Keffir lily, Clivia miniata. In Arabic, according to one of the commenters on the post, “keffir” refers to a non-believer, something similar to the way “heathen” is used in English. Possibly objectionable. But when the word traveled to South Africa it became a seriously troubling epithet for the non-white population. Ick. I buy the leaves of this lime in Asian groceries for when I make curry or pasta, and I’ll make a point of calling it something else. Thai lime, maybe. As for Clivia miniata, the latin name comes to the rescue. Even my mother–not prone to show off with scientific names–called it clivia.

Plant names are important. They can tell you plenty about the sociology of those who did the naming, and they can shape how you perceive the plant. I’ll try to pay more attention to names when I use them, and I’ll try to reject the ones that really shouldn’t have a place in modern, accepting, pluralistic society.

gardening, my garden

bog chronicles

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Several ponds and a waterfall came with the house when we moved in a couple decades ago. They looked cool and the waterfall continues to provide a nice gurgling noise that helps mask the usual din of a residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.

One of them was so tiny it was good for breeding mosquitos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.

The mid-sized pond turned out to be a critter magnet. Rummaging possums and raccoons ate all the fish and regularly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog garden, and is today filled with carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants. I was concerned about how much water a bog garden would require, but last year I figured it out that it required only about as much water as an equivalent patch of grass.

Maybe five years ago it became apparent that we had a growing leak on the largest pair of ponds and linking waterfall. The concrete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were prying up the decorative rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a volcanic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leaving the front half to cascade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Nothing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turning it into another bog for my growing pitcher plant collection.

I started by removing several hundred pounds of dirt. Taking away the dirt exposed the reason why nothing seemed to thrive in the bed. The surround plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up whatever irrigation I provided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a brutal pruning on all the adventuring roots, but figured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wander into.

To keep roots out of the bog I decided to containerized the bog plants in plastic storage tubs from Target. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the surrounding soil dry, reducing the attraction for marauding roots. I used two sixteen by twenty-two inch containers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.

The super-secret ingredients that went into my bog mix: sand and peatmoss. You need to be sure the peatmoss doesn't have added fertilizer, which could make the bog plants fail.

I packed dirt around the tubs to stabilize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphagnum peat moss and washed plaster sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most carnivores prefer to grow in. Finally, after several hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doctor is about to tell me I can’t do anymore, I got to install the plants.

The bog, ready for plants.
One of the Sarracenia alata rhizomes that went into the bog.

I selected several species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main planting, Sarracenia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I figured out that these often grow naturally farther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tolerant. Still “drought tolerant” is a relative term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.

Ta-da! The finished bog.

To finish off the planting, and to partially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I surrounded one of the tubs with divisions of one of my native rushes, Juncus patens, a riparian plant that doesn’t seem to resent drying out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good throughout the year, something that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their several months of looking severely cool and amazing with several months of looking dying and pathetic.

I’ll post progress photos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their potential. I’m hoping this won’t turn into another failed pond.

gardening, my garden

high spring (gbbd)

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This is it. High spring in San Diego. There are probably more things blooming now in the garden than there will be at any other time of year.

I start with the current state of the agave that I’ve been showing for the last few months. It’s bloomed its way from the base of the flower stalk to very near the very end. The plant will soon die and you won’t see any more photos of it. Fortunately the plant has several other growths to keep it going into the future.

The spike has arced up and come back to the ground, where its final blooms are resting.

I’ve provided a few captions, but there are too many flowers to comment on in detail. For the rest of the photos, hover your mouse to view the names or click to enlarge.

Leaves of the unknown Gasteria.

An unknown gasteria. The flowers are nice, but I grow it mainly for the foliage.


The weird double blooms of this pitcher plant, Sarracenia leucophyll 'Tarnok,' shown with the first pitchers of the season.
The bloom of another carnivorous pitcher plant.
Geum and blue-eyed grass.
Salvia lyrata 'Purple Volcano.' It's rather weedy according to Robin Middleton, but it does have its nice garden moments.

The not-quite black flowers of Salvia discolor.

Flowers on the grapefruit. They smell great. And they bode well for a good crop next year.


Thank you thank you thank you to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Stuff is beginning to bloom everywhere. [ Check it out all the blooming gardens! ]