Design

“Not so fun in the Sun”

ESPatch Jul 9, 2011 10 comments

Our vacation shells have all been poured out around these baby jewels of Opar and this juvenile pinwheel sotol, the shells are a welcome reminder of our cooler and relaxing days spent at the beach. My brief holiday reprieve was immediately tempered on my return with an immediate 100+ degree jolt back into garden install reality. With my iced turban tying skills apparently lacking finesse (lack of practice), I have been forced to adapt to our current heated Texas temperatures the hard way…with a wayward turban combined with some plain old-fashioned hard work in the sun.

By the end of my first week back, I looked pretty grim.

I am hoping the Texas Sage, (barometer plant) that has been blooming all over town knows something the weatherman doesn’t.

One of my favorite tough shrubs. Both of these will be getting a hard pruning after this flush of blooms.

My celosia plants are curling on a daily basis as if they are trying to protect and shade themselves from the scorching rays of the death star,

rays that seem to be getting hotter and brighter with every passing day. The baking sun has been good for one thing though…

It has dried out these dead giant timber culms enough that when I pulled on one the other day It surprisingly moved a little at the base. This could not be a good thing, massive culms teetering over my neighbors house. Oh no, these needed to come down immediately. The bamboo roots had completely rotted and with a sharp twist they came away easily at the base, no saws or machete hacking required! I was feeling quite proud of myself until I realized that I was now wielding a forty foot spear.

“Ach ESP, thats nuthin’ we’ve bult spears twice that lungth before…and used them against the English in batt…”

Pie-hole William, shut it.

After cutting them to size these culms made great additions to my ever expanding bamboo fence.

Talking of fences, okay gates, remember this east side design?

Here is the rendering (left), and here is the hardscape (minus planting) installed and awaiting a softening fall planting. The Tejas black gravel and pale boulders reference the home colors, offering the visual illusion of widening the preexisting pathway.

Moving on:

If this sunken stock tank did not have a Madame Ganna Walska growing in it (now there is something you don’t get to say every day) I would be in it, squatting to my neck with some ice from the corner store attempting to cool down under the canopy of this Arizona ‘blue ice’ cypress.

My goal is to train this beach vitex and keep wrapping it all around the perimeter of the stock tank. (Sorry Les)… http://atidewatergardener.blogspot.com/

These purple fountain grasses,

Pennisetum setaceum ‘Rubrum’

have sprung up so fast this year, basking and swaying in the heated breezes.

This grass will look good well into the fall.

I keep planting the seeds from the background pride of Barbados all down this fence line, every year I seem to gain another couple of plants…

well worth the effort.

Datura is also in full-flight at the moment,

pushing out its psychotropic napkin blooms.

I dug up this star hibiscus late spring and replanted it in a large pot, placing and treating it like a marginal plant in my pond (thanks for the advice Bob, http://dracogardens.blogspot.com/ ). It first went into shock, I kept a close eye on it, then it rebounded with vigor and is doing better then it ever did in the ground. It has grown taller and developing a set of very decorative looking blooms.

Another stock tank experiment is slowly taking shape and filling in slowly with dwarf papyrus and horsetail reed. This tank is commonly referred to as the “disgusting tub’ by my halflings for a number of reasons. First of all I go around systematically prodding it with a bamboo cane, it generally responds with a few flatulent noises to the delight of everybody, secondly, as I filled the tank with Dillo Dirt, conversation wandered to exactly what Dillo Dirt was made from…well the “disgusting tub” obviously gained even more relevance. The event that sealed it as a place to avoid was when a bamboo prod led to the expulsion of the nasty stuff in a particularly violent air-bubble that sent some of the contents airborne and onto the side of my face. (Insert lots of ewwing).

I no longer prod this tank.

Finally:

Things tend to get quite surreal in the Patch when we hit three digit temperatures for a long period of time…

Brains get a little scrambled,

animals start going insane.

“Meoww…Kumo…look what I caught!”

“Is that a Carolina ‘pant’ Saddlebag dragonfly?”

Tramea carolina

” I believe it is my,eoww feather grass loving friend”

“Are you going to eat it?”

“Not immediately Kumo, I just need to torture it a little meow-more.”

“Kitty-kitty”!

Stay Tuned for:

“A Star is Born”

All material © 2011 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

“Oh Yucca!”

ESPatch Jun 11, 2011 11 comments

Oh yucca indeed.

I have been watching one of my soft leaf yuccas turn paler and paler recently. At first I thought it was due to the drought (though I thought this very much out of character with this tough plant). I gave it a little more of the wet stuff but it continued to decline. I decided to dig it out and as I suspected (but was in complete denial about), found the Nazgul had struck once again in the Patch. In fact, not just one of them had been deep mining this time, but three of the retched dark creatures.

“Blinded by their greed, they took them without question, one by one falling into shadow. They will never stop hunting your specimen plants.”

This takes the snout nose weevil’s death count up to three mature Agave americana and this yucca so far this year and has forced me to go into a diatomaceous earth regimen around all my remaining yuccas in an attempt to keep these pests away…time will tell. If this fails I will move onto much stronger methods of control.

I am concerned presently not only with the evil weevil but also this:

Just how much contact does she have with the Naboo when I am away, or not looking? She has begun creating these tribal tortilla “masks” in a matter of seconds of sitting down in a restaurant, and I must say, she is getting rather adept at constructing them. Although she is enrolled in a dual language program, I am pretty sure that the rapid mouth clicks she now practices over dinner are not part of the regular AISD curriculum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c246fZ-7z1w&feature=player_embedded

And even stranger is that Kumo seems to understand and interpret these clicks and clacks as commands. Here he is directing an impending aeronautic turn (his second job).

Talking of masks…

The wolf-like head markings on this young Black and Yellow Argiope

Argiope aurantia

spider, gives potential predators the illusion of a much larger creature.

Here is a close-up of the adult:

I am always happy to see these beneficial spiders around as they seem to be less and less prevalent around the Patch.

The furnace-like Texas winds continue to take their toll in the Patch, frying my Japanese maple and this pepper to a crackling crisp even before summer officially begins on Tuesday.

In stark contrast, this stock tank filled with King Tut Papyrus and various canna lilies relish the heat. A great combination so long as the planter is kept moist. I fill this tank up so that there is an inch of water above the soil level, this keeps it very happy for a couple of weeks, until the next top-up.

Moving on to a suburban front garden make-over:

This one felt a little like:

With the brunt of the work being implemented in a couple of days, followed by a lot of:

and…

Ahhing. “Its that tendon again isn’t it George? I told you not to over-do things.”

Here is where it started…St Augustine grass in decline due to insufficient light from a spectacular front garden tree.

The planting and foundation bed was just too small to add any real presence to this area, everything needed a little help and punctuating definition. The first thing to go was that plastic edging, naturally.

Here is the initial design visualization that I presented to the client. The back-bone of the plan was very well received but the plant selection I proposed needed some tweaking with some client preferred plant selections. Also instead of referencing the dark gray of the trim and roof, it was decided that the grey flagstone should be replaced with a paler color to reference the house color. Moss boulders were substituted for limestone in the final scheme.

Raw materials arrived, in parallel to the

the foundation bed-enlargement, prep work, soil amendment and total grass eradication activities.

The final result:

The front garden now blends out from the house – an aesthetic extension that anchors the home with the decorative flagstone that draws attention and the eye around the focal front tree. The corner front bed receives more sunlight and is planted up with purple fountain grasses and a knockout rose.

Limestone boulders of varying scale (one huge one, naturally) now line the larger house foundation bed and are partially buried to offer an embedded, naturalized look. The colors of the boulders work well against the white of the house and the tan of the granite. The ornamental red urn pops out some warmth and vertical stature to the scene. Pockets of fox-tail ferns will spread like miniature fir woodlands over time, filling in the designated areas.

Once these plants get established most of the sprinklers in this front garden will be permanently turned off, reducing the homeowners water bills.

Inspirational images this week:

Now these trees are tough, just look at that terrain…and to think I moaned about what lurked under the ground at Mt Bonnell! This scene looks like a set from:

The Dragon Tree is related to Agave and Yucca and it is most unusual with its mushroom-like form. It is a rare subtropical tree that is endemic to Canary Islands, Madeira & Cape Verde, where only a few specimens can be found growing naturally on the islands of Tenerife and La Palma in dry bush at the low elevations of the islands’ rocky mountain ranges. Many ancient examples are 20 to 30 feet tall and believed to be up to a thousand years old.

Also known, as the Dragon’s Blood Tree because when the trunk or branch is cut or scarred it produces red sap that resembles blood.

This tree is related to Ladon, an ancient dragon with a hundred heads, each of which spoke in a different voice.

The natives of the Canary Islands harvested the resin of these trees for mummification. They made shields of its bark and colored their hair red with its leaves. The odd branch formations resemble the hundred heads of the dragon. Fossils of this tree have been found in southern France. During the Spanish Conquest, dragon trees were over-harvested; nowadays they are very scarce in their native areas and are protected.

Because of its various medicinal and magical properties, it was sought by various cultures around the Mediterranean, Europe and Africa. Today the Dragon’s Blood is still in use to produce a hard, shiny furniture polish. There is something very otherworldly about these trees and it is hardly surprising to learn that the dragon’s blood resin has been held in high regard by sorcerers and alchemists of old.

Stay Tuned for:

“Across the Gulf”