The Countdown Has Begun

Only four days left to get my wreck of a garden whipped into shape for Saturday's open and there's so much left to do.  Here are a few shots of how things are looking at the moment.

'Fragrant Cloud' rose is at it's peak, perfuming the air beautifully.  Of course by the weekend the petals will be falling all over the place, mostly into the pond beneath them. Neat.

Meanwhile 'Chrysler Imperial' has fallen over because it didn't get cut back this year.  Oops.

When one is stashing pots before the blooms emerge, clashes like this frequently happen.  Tasteless.

Oh well, if you can't impress them with color, give them something to laugh at.  Hammer head - get it?  Note to self, slip that Monrovia pot into something else.

 

If I had the energy, I'd futz a bit more with the Danger Gardenette.  

To the right of the danger gardenette, this jungle is unruly.  I would clean it up but the hummingbirds are fond of the Eccremocarpus scaber taking over the palm.  Yes, that's it, the hummingbirds. 

 To the right of the Danger Gardenette  Maybe I should take that hand trowel off of the table.

Of course, there should be a minor disaster.   See that lovely variegated pineapple plant growing oh so nice and straight?  Well, there used to be two of them up there.  The other one was growing a little sideways.

Yes, that sorry thing all trussed up and pouting. It decided to fall off of the shelf where it was before.

And land, splat atop this Begonia boliviensis, flattening it.  Oh well, 

Some of these have taken a turn in the Danger Gardenette in years past.  Many of these get hauled back into the house for the winter.

Somehow the shelves still look full.  They just get more cramped  in the winter.

Amorphous konjac is looking gorgeous.  I really should find space for it outside.  Since it's winter dormant, though it gets stored under a table for the winter.

This is just about ready.  I do love spending time in here, but like the rest of the garden, I seldom just sit and enjoy it but find pleasure in working around the plants.

The floor could use a nice spray down with 30 second cleaner but the smell is awful and lingers for a while so we'll just be happy with the natural algae look.

Yes, the glass table top got cleaned.  When you spray neem oil on the plant above it every week to control spider mites, it gets pretty grungy looking.

Just outside the greenhouse a hanging begonia that I purchased a couple of months ago is looking terrible.  Meanwhile the one to the right of it which lived through our mild winter, much to my surprise, looks fabulous.  Maybe I'll bring a begonia from the front garden down here to replace it.  The pot ghetto is supposed to be a holding area for new plants but it's full of other stuff now, like that dahlia that was planted in a pot a couple of years ago with plans to plant it out in the garden.  That never happened but the plant survives under the eaves of the greenhouse where it doesn't get any winter water.  It's so hard to get rid of something that survives and blooms,

Old bamboo culms die from time to time.  Removing them is such a chore.  Why not just paint them and leave them in place? 

 It's not a pot ghetto if the pots are decorative, right? 

Most of the rest of the garden looks something like this at the moment, this post is getting long, and I need to go to bed so that I can be up at the crack of dawn to blow, sweep, pick up, and rake the damned bamboo litter which is everywhere.  (One day, I'll get rid of it!)  I'd be lost without my collection of plastic buckets

One of these days, when hoses, tools, and piles of manure aren't everywhere,  I'll show some other parts of the garden. 

Work Continues on the Danger Gardenette

Here's a picture of a few plants awaiting attention last summer.  Notice the wall of green foliage behind the table.  That thicket if Kerria japonica was about 5 feet deep. 

I finally got rid of the thicket and gained a lot of space.  A bit ago, I started working on creating a new Danger Gardenette in this cleared  space.  Here's a picture of the previous Danger Gardenette form a couple of years ago when Loree visited my garden.

 Here we are at the beginning of the new space.

The work continues.  It's kind of fun because to get to this part of the garden, one has to walk through the grove of phyllostachys vivax and pass by lots of big leaved jungly looking stuff and then you come upon this collection of plants that like arid conditions. (Yes, I know that there's stuff all over the place - still working)   

The big turquoise pot on the pedistal makes no sense from this angle.  It's one of a set of two.  (originally four around the perimeter of the seating area.  Removal of these reqires a sledge hammer and concrete flying everywhere.  Instead, they will be filled with hanging plants that largely cover them up. 

Some transplanting from plastic to clay pots still needs to take place, a few more plants brought out of the glass room,  the bricks and marble power washed and some plants moved around a bit but for the most part, I'm happy with the way it's shaping up.  It reminds me a bit of how a choir looks standing on risers or a staged family photo.

 We'll just grab some more plants that haven't yet been brought down and change that choir formation. A  bit more re potting and some clean up and I'll be able to play in other parts of the garden for a while.  Have I gone too far with this silliness?

Someday I publish a shot of this area when it's more or less finished.  If you have any suggestions for making this look better, by all means, share them!   Happy new week everyone!

Who Doesn't Love a Challenge? And Some Questions.

In September, my pal, Loree, who influenced me to start blogging (blame her,)  threw down the gauntlet with  The 2015 Ornamental Cabbage and Kale Challenge on her fab blog, Danger Garden. Loree is a recent convert to the charms of Ornamental Kale and Cabbage but I've loved them for looking so handsome all winter for years and usually have some in my garden.  What fun it would be to see how others use OK&C in their gardens!

Such a nice sight in winter!

In our wet winters, any plant that holds water droplets like jewels has my admiration!

Slugs and aphids love them too.   Ain't nature (and hybridization) swell?

I came up with a couple of things before the challenge to fill the pots occupied by brugmansias during the summer:

This weekend, I brought in the last of the tender plants and filled the greenhouse, so some are spending the winter in the human house.  More on that in a future post.

During the summer, the Danger Gardenette looks like this:

or this:

However, during the winter, it looks like a random collection of vacant plant stands with a few empty pots thrown in for good measure - a bit unsightly so I'd simply not visit that part of the garden in the winter or walk by and promise myself that tidying it up would be next on my list but with sufficient procrastination, it would be spring and time to move the plants back out again.  

This Saturday,  I decided to perhaps do something else with a few OC&K's that I had on hand and came up with these:

There are a number of potted evergreens in various parts of my garden and I thought it might be interesting to bring them together on the site of the Danger Gardenette along with the OK&C pots to create some winter interest there so here's what it looks like now:

Still needs some tweaking but at least I won't have to avert my eyes when passing this area all winter.

The Questions: As only one image can be entered in the competition, should I use one of the pots or, with a bit more work, submit the entire D.G. area or should I come up with something completely different, perhaps incorporating glass in some way?    Will you be joining in the fun of the challenge? It's open to everyone and submissions will be accepted until November 1 (All Saints Day.)  For more details click here.

The Danger Gardenette Gets a Floor.

Perhaps you remember last spring when I cleared out this area, formerly a thicket of interesting but overgrown shrubs, to make space for my growing collection of potted succulents and cacti that had outgrown their former place in my garden.  I've called the collection The Danger Gardenette in honor of Loree at Danger Garden whose enthusiasm for this group of plants, especially agave,  influenced me to grow them.

The previous location.  The plants were covering too much of the path. 

Here's a view of last spring's effort in progress.

Beginning to add plants.

More or less finished.

A view from the fall just as the greenhouse was being wired and days before these all moved inside for the winter.

Once the plants were all taken away, the empty space was fairly ugly.  (Forgot to take a picture.) When we emptied the garage for the conversion, there were many piles of free pavers that had been stored in the garage but were now uglifying various parts of the garden.  The idea of using the pavers to make a better-looking floor for the D.G. would solve two problems so one day, I did just that.

This will look much better in the winter than the random collection of stands sinking into the  weed-filled mud.  I've started moving a few plants out for the summer.  For some strange reason, there are more plants this spring than there were last fall. Some may become permanent greenhouse residents. The migration begins!