Musings on a Microclimate

The first real cold snap in the little garden is over, and the results are encouraging.  As you can see, temperatures dropped a little below freezing.  They crisped not only the flowers, but also the leaves and branches on the bougainvillea bush that grows against the west side of the house.  (Not to worry, it is fairly sure to come back strongly from the roots.)  Other than the wall, the location offers little protection either in winter or in summer.

The garden itself is on the east side of the patio.  The patio roof shields it from the west, the house wall gives it a little shelter from the north, and a slope allows colder air to drop away more quickly.  That, at least, was the idea when I chose the location.  My experiment with microclimate seems to be working thus far, with tender plants sustaining little or no damage from the frost.

I was rather concerned about the succulents, in particular Senecio "Blue Fingers" in the newly planted corner at the bottom of the garden.  Perhaps a few marks from the cold, but nothing to cry about.  It is looking very vigourous, and the broken-off section that I poked in next to the main plant is settling in well.  I covered both with a bit of hay - the only thing I could get hold of in a hurry - when temperatures dropped low, but no other protection was needed.  I'm not even sure it needed the hay.  Perfectly pleased with itself!

A plant that I had questions about trying at all is the Russelia.  Native to Guatemala and Mexico, it is definitely frost-tender though it is said to come back well from the roots if cut down by a little too much cold.  I positioned it right up next to the patio as I thought the concrete would hold some warmth for it.  I did not so much as cover it with hay, but it has breezed through the cold snap lush and green, as if unaware of anything unusual.  It has, however, held its many buds closed for weeks longer than I expected.  That may have been due to the cold.  Just a few are open.

The newly-planted Penstemon parryi received a little protection.  It is an Arizona native and fully hardy, but I thought it might be damaged simply because it was so freshly planted.  It seemed to feel a bit suffocated under the hay and is much happier now that its stalk is out in the open.

And throughout the garden the flower buds are unscathed.  The rosebuds, predictably, had no objections to a mild freeze.

The Tetraneuris, in the new corner with the Senecio, is smiling.

And the buds on the young Eremophila "Valentine" are still plentiful.

Pardon me for gloating a little.  The results from the first microclimate test are very satisfactory!

Monday Vase: Winter Roses

Just before Christmas the big rose bush on the patio began sending out a bloom or two.  Now it is loaded with blossoms so I've cut four for today's vase.

The bush in question is "Sun Flare", a floribunda raised in 1981 by Warriner.  Despite its character as a cluster-flowered variety, many of the blooms just now are on sufficiently long stems to cut and slip into a small glass.

I'm afraid I am the sort of person who finds it easier to buy for herself at Christmastime; I do attribute this in part to having hard-to-buy-for people in the family!  At any rate, when my sister and I dropped into our little local resale shop a month ago, trying to find something for Mom, I spotted these small glasses - not so well designed for wine since the stems are open and difficult to clean, but very handy for flower stems!

My sister actually beat me to arranging roses in the glass.  It was such a perfect match that I made up my own grouping today.  Just four roses...

I tried briefly to add a couple of stems with yellow leaves from the pomegranate tree (bush, to be honest!), but they were extraneous to say the least!

So for today just four roses - still with this morning's raindrops on them - in a small glass.

Linking today's vase - as always - to Cathy's meme at Rambling in the Garden, where a few lovely flowering branches are hinting that winter doesn't last forever...!  Here in the desert, however, we are not in a hurry for summer... not with roses like these!

Happy Monday!

A Tale of Two Gardens

So here I am, carving a small garden out of a raw patch of the Sonora Desert.  Despite the spectacular scenery, it's not everyone's ideal garden location.

 But for me it was a dream that unexpectedly - and in the middle of tragic circumstances - came true.

In August 2013 we were living in eastern San Diego.  We had moved there from the Midwest the year before, following the loss of my father.  I'll say very little about that, except that he - and all of us with him - battled a year and a half, first with leukemia and then with complications from a bone marrow transplant.  After his death we returned to San Diego, where much of my mother's family still lives.  In June the next year, her 91 year old mother passed away also, giving us pause to rethink continued residence in San Diego.

Because, by that time, the downside of life in southern California was becoming fairly insistent.  Concerns over the high cost of living, intense regulatory gridlock, quality of available healthcare (something we had become very sensitive to!), and constant presence of crime and petty litigation were all adding up to a feeling: we don't have to live with this...!  But we wanted to remain in the southwest, and we didn't want to get too far from family.

We took a three day run to check the housing market in Phoenix, Arizona.  Then we went back for another...

Personally, I fell in love with the place.  I had dreamed of living in the desert for years though I had only been familiar with it from cross-country drives, those marathon car trips to San Diego from our home of many years in Kansas City.  This time I had the chance to get off the freeways and drive down the back roads, seeing the countryside on its own terms.

It is big country, miles and miles and miles in view, mostly flat but punctuated by mountainous upthrusts.  The sun is, of course, brilliant and ever-present.  (Dropping down from the sombre San Diego coastal mountains into the Imperial Valley desert gives one almost the effect of a second sunrise.)  It is country that one can simply walk into... and get lost in.  It's the first place I've ever lived where there was enough sunlight, enough space, and enough silence.

The skies are gorgeous.

The wild flora is fascinating, albeit often prickly.

Housing prices at that point were about half of the SD market, and we enhanced the effect by purchasing in a rural area where we were able to buy a lovely home on two and half acres - enough for our two horses (which had come with us from Kansas City) and for a garden, with some extra empty desert in our own yard.  The house has a second garage workshop that was already fully wired for our ceramics studio.  And there are a few bearing citrus trees: two lemons and an orange.

By the middle of last summer, I was ready to plan for some garden.

My previous garden in Kansas City had been carved out of the lawn grasses on the south side of our house.  I loved the plants, particularly the bulbs, that I grew there: snowdrops, narcissus, and lilies, as well as roses.  I was not (and am not) a very organized gardener, and I waged inexperienced warfare while the lawn and other weeds attempted to overwhelm my flowerbeds.  These were freeform, cut a little haphazardly from the turf, and my experiments with hedging were not very successful - particularly my Rosa multiflora hedge...  Even Sleeping Beauty's castle would not have survived a hundred years of R. multiflora, pretty as it is in summer!

Kansas City is a beautiful place to garden, despite defects in the climate (humid heat in summer, dry, sub-freezing cold in winter).  Daffodils and species narcissus grew very well for me; tulips might have also, but our property backed up to a nature preserve and for many years I gardened with a plenitude of rabbits and deer.  This led to experimentation with herbs and other plants of pungent foliage, including a few lavender varieties, which tended to be short-lived in that garden.

So in planning my new garden, I rethought the framework question.  This garden is going into land so raw that a strong structure seems a necessity.  I am putting in a narrow hedge and using straight-edged beds for a more formal effect.  The backbone plants must be well-adapted varieties, and I am using an assortment of native desert species, Australian varieties, and more traditional Mediterranean plants.  Roses are on order for spring.

As for flower bulbs, some narcissus went in a few months ago; for some reason none have broken through yet (nervewracking!)  Lilies I will probably try in the next few years though the heat may prove too much for them.  I think snowdrops are out of the question as my chief feeling is simply how much the poor things would suffer!  There are some specialized bulb varieties that may be good choices; much exploration remains to be done...

And this is my chance to grow lavender at last.  I am keeping a sharp lookout for different varieties.

Lavendula stoechas "Madrid"

And so it's all a new adventure here - a bit of gardening frontier.  As I explain in my About page, I want to create a more traditional planting than is typical in this region (not counting the cliched snapdragon and petunia plantings of public spaces, of course!).

Luckily for me, Jessica of Rusty Duck asked only how we had arrived here, not why!  Why I love the desert would be hard to explain, though it has much to do with a sense of well-being created by ample space and sunlight.  No, it's impossible to explain why...!

Wordless on Wednesday

In a Vase: Native Charm

Although there are a few flowers scattered here and there in the garden, I decided to use mostly dried material for this vase.  (And yes, it's Tuesday!  Yesterday's schedule allowed me to collect the material and partially arrange it, but I have had to finish and take the pictures today...)

This is a collection of native plants: two wildlflowers whose names I still don't know, and Hesperaloe parviflora, another native plant now frequently used in landscaping in the arid southwest.  First, here are a few pictures from earlier times in the year when these plants were in full bloom.

One is a small sub-shrub whose beautiful bell-flowers are hardly visible unless you look very closely.  The flowers are gone now, but in bloom they looked like this.

Another is a large shrubby plant with strawlike bracts tasseled with fine silk.  The silk is gone now, but the bracts are still showy against the green stems.

And lastly, Hesperaloe parviflora, whose much larger shrimp-pink bells hang from stalks ranging from about 4 feet (1.2 m) to about 7 feet (2.2 m) tall.

However, this is January, even here in the desert; and all these formerly-flowering stems are either dried or drying.  So today's vase is a monochromatic combination of stems, bracts, and seedpods.

The hesperaloe seedpods are marvelous.  Many still contain a few black seeds, which rattle around inside like a toy.

Stems and all (a little top-heavy, perhaps!) went into a stoneware pitcher that I made last year while experimenting with forms.

The weather has warmed a little, and I had no trouble shooting these pictures outside against the patio wall.  I hope you enjoy this excursion into the wildflower patch!  As late as I am, I will go ahead and link this post to Cathy's Monday Vase meme, always inspiring!

Hesperaloe seedpods