Mock Orange

“Another Grass Bites the Dust”

ESPatch Mar 28, 2011 22 comments

Hot temperatures and humid conditions combined once again with dusty, dry conditions almost had me reaching into my freezer for a ready-made iced-turban this past week as I continued to perform late clean up chores and a few on-the-spot area reorganizations. This warm spell has broken the winter dormancy of many plants in the Patch, filling out the artemesia, greening up the feather grasses and re-emerging the canna lilies…almost everything has greened up with the exception of my Mexican lime tree (you cannot miss it in the distance, I hate walking past it), but it is always last to show signs of life. I am considering removing this tree and replacing it with another sabal major palm, I have the space and sun here.

My Japanese maple has fresh spring foliage next to my pond, it always looks its best at this time of year, before it gets sun roasted,

and this pyracantha

Pyracantha coccinea

is currently filling the back third of my yard with its distinctive pungent aroma, an aroma that is pulling in all manner of insects like this:

Mournful thyris,

Thyris sepulchralis

It appears that this genus has been changed from Thyris to genus Pseudothyris? Entomologists help here please?

Another apt name for these stout moths is: picture-winged leaf moths. This one was way too busy on these pyracantha blooms to even care about the camera.

Another insect-first in the Patch.

I have my pyracantha tucked well away, squeezed between my garden shed and my neighbor’s fence. This plant is dangerous, and it ranks right up there with bougainvillea and pampas as a shrub wielding an attitude of malicious, flesh-slashing intent to the unacquainted. This plant needs a really quiet place, an out of the way nook, a never-to-be-entered area to flex its gangly and gnarly thorny sprawl. The aptly named firethorn, if appropriately positioned, does provide an impenetrable barrier from any uninvited guests, its defenses also provide protected cover for birds. Check out some amazing pruned pyracantha hedges, berries and more general information here:

http://www.pyracantha.co.uk/

I personally prefer the more natural habit this plant exhibits if left to its own vicious meanderings.

These tiny bugs were all over the blooms of this pyracantha, I pulled a flower cluster from the plant and placed it on a tree stump…this one quickly found a hiding place. Anybody have any ideas what these are?

Thanks for the ID meredee (see comments section)

You can see my pyracantha safely positioned to the left of my shed (right picture).

While I was nosing around in this rather gnarly corner area of the Patch, I unconsciously walked into my shed, grabbed a thin shovel (my now preferred implement of choice for this activity), and took out yet another old pampas grass. This grass has served me well but it was getting rather long in the tooth as you can see, and besides, after taking out its partner-in-arm-slashing-crime a few weeks back, it has sort of been floating in space in all its straggly glory…it simply had to go, I mean look at it! A couple of rugby tackles and some ridiculous jujitsu kicks and lots of root cutting later, it was out and hoisted high onto my already ridiculously high compost pile,

…note to self: I must get some Milorganite…immediately! (Thanks for this volume reducing tip Andrew)

I decided to remove this black bamboo out of this stock tank, (an activity that actually turned out harder than extracting the pampas grass!) I had new plans for this stock tank.

Phyllostachys nigra

I trimmed the root ball significantly and placed the bamboo in its new container:

With the stock tank now empty, I rolled it through my gate into its new position among the Persian ivy.

After back-filling it with scrap aggregate to take up some of the volume,

I filled it up with dirt, then water, and transplanted bunches of horsetail reed for future vertical evergreen structure. A word of warning, when you first fill with water the tank has a tendency to aggressively “burp”, mine actually made a very realistic flatulent noise before proceeding to “throw up” a small amount of dillo dirt onto my shoulder…nice. I will eventually train the Persian ivy into a circle around the tank, now to finish the surrounding hardscaping.

Moving on:

While I was planting the black bamboo I noticed that all of the main branches on my adjacent mock orange had developed cracks, splits and fissures in them.

This shrubs inner bones were exposed as the outer bark was peeling away, surely this had to be a natural growth habit? Just to be sure I made a detour to visit one of my favorite trees at the Zilker Japanese Garden at last weekend’s garden festival, a monster pittosporum, about the same age as me:

There it is on the left.

I was happy to find the same fissures and splits albeit on a much grander scale. These shrubs / trees have an insane trunk structure.

The Hinckley’s columbine, azaleas and sago palms were also putting on a great display…

Back in the Patch I snooped into the hearts of my own sago palms and was happy to find, although now pruned completely bald, new spring growth was slowly unfurling.

On a darker note: (insert…

labored breathing just about now)…Sheee…Cuff

I pried out my final agave americana from the ground after discovering once again a weevil hole in one of it’s sharp blades. I lifted it up onto my operating picnic table, (I thought it a more appropriate extraction setting for yet another patch postmortem).

While I was whistling the theme tune from “Dexter”, my daughter excitedly pointed out yet another Darth Evil Weevil running for safety toward the edge of the operating table. It is funny how these long-snouts seem to emerge after the agave is out of the ground, it is like they are “inconvenienced” and already grumpily looking for another “undisturbed” agave to move into and destroy, but not this one…no chance.

She spotted it, and in a true Rock-Rose fashion http://wwwrockrose.blogspot.com/, she squished it and immediately made me a proud parent.

“I promise I will not mention the weevil ever again…Jenny” :-)

Between the weevil and the frosts of last winter, my agave population has been substantially diminished. I thought this would bother me, but it has not. The process, like my recent purging of four pampas grasses, has opened up new areas to fresh evaluation and potential new plantings and hardscaping opportunities. Also my planting tastes have changed significantly since these beasts were placed in the ground.

For now, the new gaps in my cactus and succulent bed will be taken up with this mammoth ceder carcass courtesy of Bob at Draco Gardens, http://dracogardens.blogspot.com/

it fits in Patch perfectly.

Finally:

A sotol wearing a bright ragwort tie…

…and more new mountain laurel growth then I have seen in a number of years.

The best things this week: an Austin bloggers get together at Pam Penick’s garden http://www.penick.net/digging/ and afterwards a daddy-daughter dance / date…dinner at Guero’s, then onto the dance to trip the light fantastic.

Okay so we finished at 9:30pm, but it felt like midnight to us both. I had a great date Miss P, and I am eternally sorry that I broke out into a habitual rock / goth dance as soon as Joan Jet: “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” came on, I could not help myself…still, better get used to it now, it will be even more humiliating when I perform it with my customized satin black walking frame…it is only a matter of time.

Thanks for my birthday dinner, cake and Wii fun G&T.

Stay Tuned for:

“Plants vs Zombies”

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

“Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop” – Garden Benches

ESPatch Apr 3, 2010 21 comments

“Smell my finger”…

Err…”No Thanks”!

I would rather smell this, thank you very much! The aroma from my

Pittosporum tobira ‘Variegata’

or more commonly known mock orange, is hard to put into words. It is filling the entire back quarter of the patch with the most amazing scent right now, in fact, I am making fake journeys and excuses to go back there just to catch another whiff of it.

The sweet orange blossom aroma from this shrub / small tree will perfume a garden with an aroma that will last for weeks. It makes an excellent specimen plant and a beautiful tree form when trimmed correctly. I have trained mine in the same fashion that I do with my mountain laurels, Vitex and Opuntia …that is as high as possible.

Now to business…

The past few days in the Patch I have spent contorted into unusual body positions, performing unusual maneuvers with rather antiquated tools, namely a hand saw, a screwdriver and a drill, I ache in places I never even new I had. What was I doing? Well for some strange reason I sort of fell into a project that I have been thinking about for ages. I have just never really known how to get started or where to begin. Having some spare lumber already on hand to form the backbone of the project, I decided it was time to jump in and give it a bash. I was going to build a bench!

“I am Maximus Decimus Meridius and this garden bench SHALL prevail”.

It turned out that this activity was perfectly timed with The Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop – “Garden Benches”, over at: http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=11763

This bench would not be planned, it would not be exact, it was not going to adhere to any ergonomic standards, in fact the whole thing was going to be improvised, winged, made up on the spot…

No spirit levels, no circular saws and strictly no set squares, oh no, that would make the job too easy. It was either going to end up looking like something from the Beverly Hillbillies or miraculously turn out looking like something that resembled a garden bench, I had no idea.

My intent was to develop some form of seating between these two trellised vertical posts, I say “some form” as I really had no idea what was going to form, or how I was going to build it. The two posts were also not aligned, the right one was actually twisted…mmm, I would deal with this little inconvenience later I told myself. Early on in the non-planning stage it slowly dawned on me that the Mexican weeping bamboo that I had only removed from the front of my house a couple of weeks back was slap-bang in the middle of the right hand side of where the future “seat” needed to be. As much as I dreaded digging the beast up once again it just had to be done.

A few Home Depot brackets and a bit of concrete later I had the skeleton of my Frankenstein’s bench blocked out. Photo courtesy of elder Hobbit.

I was determined at this point, that whatever I built, it was going to have a building code equivalent to Fort Knox…oh yes, this bench was going to be solid and quite large as it turns out.

Putting on the seating slats had to be one of the most mundane jobs…ever, especially considering that I was screwing everything down by hand, it took me the best part of three hours, each panel having four screws in it. While I was performing this mind-numbing task I actually taught my daughter the meaning of the word “tedious”, just to take my mind off it. The smell from the blooming Meyer lemon was the only thing that kept me sane.

Here is the final Alice in Wonderland throne in all her pre-stained glory. In order to secure the backboards to something in the middle, I found that I required yet another post to be concreted in for support, digging that hole was such a joy! Not! I used the top of this new post for a small shelf, I figured it may come in useful for something in the future, like citronella candles! You can see it behind “Alice”, she is already hosting a tea-party on it!

“Interesting proportions ESP.”

Likewise Helena !

The bench seats all members of the Patch with room to spare! Just a couple of finishing touches…

Well you have to have one of these…

“Nice touch ESP”!

…and a couple of lucky horseshoes to ensure your arse stays splinter free! Now I need a few more coats of stain, a seating mat and some pillows and its done. An improvised bench that took three days. My oldest hobbit calls it the garden sofa, me? I have many names for it, most of which will make your hair curl!

This new bench offers a great lounging place from which most of the garden can be viewed, in the shade!

The unintentional over-sized proportions really gives it a sense of presence in the Patch…where has it been all my life! I have another two vertical beams that I am thinking I may use to construct another, but not until the memory of building this one fades into my subconscious.