The Daily Dig

I first started gardening in 2007 and the 9 photos below show parts of my first experiments growing flowers since I knew that no matter what, I wanted to grow beautiful flowers!  Everything was an exciting experiment and some of the most fun parts for me are captured in the photos below although the photos themselves don't stand on their own as unusually good pictures.   I live in Palo Alto, California which is 30 miles south of San Francisco. We have a mild Mediterranean climate, summer-dry with cool, wet winters (at least we hope they are wet).

The magnolia was here when I bought the house in fall 2006 and the first spring of 2007 proved why people plant magnolias at first.  However in my opinion since this tree is over one of my flower beds, I consider its shade to be too deep, and also, its leathery leaves do not decompose quickly in the compost.  Personally I wouldn't plant it especially since there are already millions of them all over Palo Alto and you can just go for a walk for those brief few weeks when they are in bloom.

I took home seeds (from a plant exchange at a gardening class) of Orlaya grandiflora, said to be a rare German wildflower (clearly similar to Queen Anne's Lace) but Annie's Annuals says it is from Crete.  (My mother who grew up in Austria and is a green-thumb plant person never heard of it, just for the record.) Annie's 'Minoan Lace' looks the same as mine, so let's call it that!  This remains a perennial (no pun intended) favorite. I was thrilled that the first flower seeds I planted actually grew and not only that turned into beautiful, lush bushes of flowers with many flowering stalks and long-lived blooms that attract a lot of tiny insects.

In early spring I went to a fruit tree pruning class and brought home the cut-off branches and stuck them in water all over my small house. They bloom easily. I had about 8 "arrangements" in vases and in ikebana dishes with frogs.  My ikebana is not correct and I don't think passes muster; unbalanced, off kilter. Here is one arrangement next to a chair, to show the size.  I had just moved into the house a few months prior and didn't have a lot of stuff inside it yet.  I think I need to now (4 years later) go back to that mode, and get rid of most of what's in the house! And go to some fruit tree pruning classes in January and bring home some cut-off branches!

What was so interesting to me, who knew nothing about how fruit trees grow, is that the buds swell and the blossoms bloom, and then the branches leaf out as the blossom petals fall to the floor (and actually improve the "ikebana" angle until they get brown and dried up!)

On one side of the house was a rotting wooden deck about 8' x 8'.  So I tossed it out and much to my neighbors' astonishment (everyone thought I'd build a new deck) I dug up the very-nice soil and sprinkled way too many California native wildflower seeds.  There was joy throughout the land when the seeds germinated a week or ten days later! Stay tuned, there will be some "after" shots.  Someone told me to plant pansies for winter color so I obliged with an attempt at a border. I am embarrassed to be revealing what a neophyte I was.  I had no idea what to plant - even the idea of pansies was a revelation.

Maybe two months later, we had lots o' green (also I stuck fava bean seeds in there, thinking there'd be no harm in adding nitrogen) and I started an earthbox with 4 little pepper plants, (look on the right) - all hot or extremely hot, and thus learned there is really no point in planting more than one hot or extremely hot pepper unless you really have a mouth of steel and consume large quantities of hot peppers at every meal!  Now I plant mostly sweet or mild peppers, with one hot and one "extremely hot" - the NuMex Twilight which people grow as an ornamental since it looks like a miniature christmas tree in summer with purple, yellow, orange and red tiny 3/4" peppers on the 12"-18" tiny little pepper bush.

The "butterfly garden" as I called it (although I don't think a lot of butterflies showed up) boasted more than a dozen different kinds of wildflowers, each with tiny flowers and delicate habits that made them altogether impossible to photograph as a group.  Or even singly.

The yarrow started in 2007 is still there, along with some of the wildflower thugs that took over.  I learned that a wildflower garden is limited by the most aggressive plants since they will just take over and push everything else out and if you want that diversity every year you'd better resign yourself to hand-sowing seeds every year.  I decided to go with perennials - sages, lavenders and then a few beloved annuals like Clarkias. In this picture, you can see the fava beans forming.  I didn't have the heart to pull them up when they were in bloom but let them go to seed.

And with apologies to Wallace Stevens, there's my 13 Ways to Look at a Butterfly Garden.