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gardening, landscape

gbbd: the garden and beyond

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mission-trails-lotus-scoparius-with-dichelostemma-capitatum

mission-trails-fortuna-peak-boulders

It’s spring, all right. The garden continues to bloom away manically, but the outdoor places around town have been no slouch, either, when it comes to flowers.

This Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gardens, features a gallery of some blooms from the garden mixed in with blooms from Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego.

In the top photo from Mission Trails you can see that the yellow-flowered deerweed, Lotus scoparius, has colonized many of the sunny areas that burned four and a half years ago. As the landscape recovers, other plants will come in and stake their claims. The second image from near the top of Fortuna Peak shows that other areas are also recovering from the fires, though slower than farther downslope.

You can hover over each image below for its name, or click it to see a larger photo. While you can probably tell what’s a wild plant and what’s in the garden, there’s an answer key at the end if you’re into quizzing yourself. (A few of thee are tricky in that they’re local native plants that have been incorporated into the garden.)

Answers:
Wild, garden, garden;
garden, wild, wild;
wild, garden wild;
garden, garden, garden;
garden, wild, garden;
wild, garden, wild;
wild, wild, wild.

gardening, my garden

sage as a cut flower

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In the past I’ve occasionally cut flowers from the garden, only to have them wilt immediately and disintegrate into a pile of organic matter on top of a table I wanted to look nice for company. Last weekend I was trimming back the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacaliaefolia. At first the stems went into the greens recycling can. But they looked too pretty there and I wondered how well they’d do as cut flowers. So into the house they came, making a big, informal bouquet/science experiment for the dining table.

Cut flowers of ive-leaved sageThe verdict? The flowers looked great through day three, with only the occasional flower falling off the stem. Then after that the ends of the stems where the flowers live started to droop. By day five, although the leaves still looked perfectly presentable, the flower ends were totally wilted, blooms had dropped off the stems, and there was a dry, black, granular something or another (pollen? seeds?) littering the table surface. Time for the greens recycle bin.

That was no worse than the lifespan of many of the more classic cut flowers, so I’ll be treating myself to vase-fulls of ivy-leaved sage the next time I cut it back.