I promise this will be my last post on Clematis for a while (until I get some more pictures of them). Just following up with some pictures of various Clematis I have encountered in my travels and ending with a cool double Clematis in my old garden.
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Clematis montana var. rubens at The Royal Botanic Garden, Kew.
When I see Clematis in gardens I’m surprised at how often they are just planted on their own on a wall or a pillar. When I plant them in my garden I always try to put them in combination either with other Clematis or growing through or up other plants. I do this for two reasons. First of all my garden was small so I was looking to use up every inch of vertical growing space possible. I couldn’t afford to grow just one Clematis on a pillar when I could fit six in that spot. Second I think all plants just look more interesting when they are playing off other plants whether it is complimentary or contrasting colors or different shapes and forms. A well grown plant in full bloom is exciting to me but two or more plants together can be a work of art.
Click images to enlarge.
Clematis 'Rooguchi' with its succulent purple bell flowers looks great against the pale blooms of 'Emilia Plater'. I think in combination both plants stand out more than if they were just planted on their own.
Hello my name is Kaveh and I am a recovering Clematis addict. There is a part of me that feels I should be writing about more current stories of my horticultural life. However there are certain topics that played such an important part in my gardening career that they are worth a look at. Clematis are definitely one of the key parts of my story. It all comes down to the simple fact that I learned the art of gardening so that I could grow Clematis.
Clematis integrifolia is my number one favorite Clematis and for that matter it is probably my favorite plant.
As much as I lament the loss of my old balconies full baking sun one cool benefit is the ability to grow some shade plants. Now if I have my choice between big double flowers and dainty little natural species flowers I will usually pick the latter. But for some reason I love the absurdly oversized flowers of tuberous Begonias. Not the little bedding ones you buy in flats. I’m talking the giant ones with big monster sized flowers.
I potted up a few succulents yesterday and as feared a few of them are starting to show the stresses of being in bright shade instead of full sun. My Nananthus is infested by mealy bugs and other plants have spider mite infestations. I’m just hoping that some of my older or more unusual plants can hang on until my lease is up in December.
Even the balcony railing isn't very bright. The plants get a few minutes of direct sun only when it is setting in the evening.
Still things aren’t all grim. I grew Cuphea viscosissima last year and a seed found its way into my Aloe ferox pot and bloomed at just a few inches high.
So cute!
Anyway from this point forth I vow to remember that plants are the most important thing to me the next time I am looking for a place to live. I won’t be swayed by the view, the hardwood floors, the appliances. It has to be all about the plants or I’ll regret it. Someone be sure to remind me of this because I bet I’ll forget. There was a place just up the hill from me now that had a balcony that was at least 200 square feet and totally exposed. Oh the things I could do with that balcony. But the apartment didn’t have a washer/dryer and worst of all only had street parking. I am very much against the idea of street parking but sometimes I think of that 200 square foot balcony with city views and full sun and think maybe I could have lived with it. I know my plants would have been happier.
Just placed an order for more mesemb and other succulent seeds from Silverhill Seeds in Africa. Can’t wait! The ones I started three months ago were pretty successful. I would kill to have my own green house someday.
Yay! Revolver Maps tracks where my blog visitors come from and today I had my first international visitors (not including Canada). Today I had visits from Spain, Thailand, and Korea. Welcome everyone!
Nicotina mutabilis. The flowers open up white and fade to dark pink.
I haven’t made an official list of my top ten favorite plants but when I do Nicotiana mutabilis from Brazil will be on it. Nicotiana is the flowering tobacco family and mutabilis means variable or changeable because the flowers open white and fade to pink. They are massive plants and are always covered with hundreds of blooms in varying shades.
I believe that one reason that flowers change color is so that pollinators will know that a plant has already been pollinated and won’t waste their time on old flowers but I am not sure if this is always the case.
This particular plant was grown from seed sown last July and is about 7 feet tall now. It survived being accidentally flipped over and crushed when I was repotting it into a much larger container and a trip in my hatchback to my new apartment last December.
All packed up and ready to go to its new home.
The plant was only officially described in 2002 but I believe it had already found its way into the trade at specialty nurseries before that. I first learned of it at a lecture by Derry Watkins from Special Plants Nursery in 2002 and then encountered it myself in 2003 at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden and Annie’s Annuals.
I’m a fan of most Nicotianas but this one is so ridiculously oversized and covered in so many blooms that it will always be a favorite and I’ll always try to include it in my garden. Even if that garden is just a balcony.
I was going to start this blog in March and my first post was going to be about my visit home for Persian New Year but my old PC crashed right before the trip. I generally only go home for visits to the east coast in July for my birthday or September for my father’s birthday so I had managed to avoid seeing snow for five years.
Every year my father asks “Do you want to come visit for Christmas?” and I answer “Are you crazy?” and then he tries again in March “Do you want to visit for Persian New Year?”.
Persian New Year or Nowruz is on the first day of spring so in the past I’ve always said no. The weather is still pretty dicey in March. I almost gave in last year and at the last minute changed my mind which turned out to be lucky because there was a nor’easter that tore down a blue spruce and other large trees on my fathers property and he also lost power for a week. This year I decided I should visit and pay my respects. Attending a family party at my aunt’s apartment in Manhattan first and then later in the week my father had a big party with around fifty guests.
That is me on the right with my brother and sister. Persian New Year 2011.
Of course it is always nice to see my family. My father lives in northern New Jersey, my brother lives in Brooklyn and my sister is currently at the University of Pennsylvania studying to be a veterinarian. I’m the only one on the west coast so I do miss them.
But I also miss my old garden at my dad’s place. It wasn’t my first garden or even my second and it isn’t a particularly great garden. The setting is a busy four lane road in a New Jersey suburb of New York City, the lot is not especially large or attractive, and the materials I used to hardscape were sort of cheap. But it was sort of an experimental playground for me while I was in school studying horticulture and some collections of plants I had held onto from my older gardens. It has suffered a lot of neglect because even while I was living on the east coast I was often too busy with school or away on internships. It is amazing how quickly a garden reverts back to a semi-wild state if you leave it unattended.
The current care taker of the garden is my fathers handy man who doesnt know much about gardening but does his best.
The weather was 80 degrees in New Jersey but of course that changed when I arrived. It snowed not once but twice so my five year snow-free record was shattered.
Snow and freezing weather are probably my two least favorite things in the world.
I tried not to let the weather deter me too much and I made it into the Bronx to visit my friends at the New York Botanical Garden despite freezing weather. I went to my old neighborhood in midtown and took the train in from Grand Central so it would be just like the old days.
Grand Central Terminal feels like home.
I did visit the Orchid Show but I am not terribly excited by Orchids so you’ll have to check out some other blog for pictures of that. I did of course pay a visit to the jade vine which is my favorite plant in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.
Strongylodon macrobotrys or jade vine. I pretty much love all the plants that come in this color.
It was very cold out but beautiful and sunny so I road around with my friend Jean who I used to work with in Plant Records as she put out plant labels and we gossiped and admired the early spring blooms.
Prunus mume Peggy Clarke was looking fierce in the Ladys Border.
Scilla tubergeniana at Wamsler Rock. From a distance it looked like snow.
Iris Katharine Hodgkin outside the rock garden.
Back home in New Jersey it finally got warm enough for me to tackle some of the woody plants that needed pruning.
These Graham Thomas roses hadnt been properly pruned in at least 5 years and were over 8 feet tall. The Cotinus, Hydgrangeas, and Vitex needed some work too.
Try not to laugh at the horrible pillars. I had a collection of about a hundred Clematis at one point and needed every surface imaginable for them to climb up. In fact some of the shrubs in this border exist for the sole purpose as suport for Clematis.
I learned to prune roses from the great horticulturist Mike Ruggiero. I think he would be happy with my work. It wasnt easy after all those years of neglect to find a suitable framework to prune back to but I think I pulled it off.
One regret I have is that I didn’t plant lots of Hellebores in the garden. I’m not really sure why. I think I just never got around to being a Hellebore collector. My focus has always been on late spring and summer plants and I am not a fan of winter but Hellebores definitely make later winter and early spring more tolerable.
This nameless white Hellebore near my pond is the only one in the garden. Now I wish I had planted more of them.
My quest to obtain Chiondoxa sardensis was a failure but on the plus side the garden now has hundreds and hundreds of Chiondoxa luciliae.
One of the coolest plants in the garden is a self sown Euphorbia palustris growing out of the rocks and moss in our ponds waterfall. Palustris is Latin for swampy or marshy and it is living up to its name by growing in a steady stream of water. It is something I couldn’t have planned if I tried but the cool thing about Euphorbias is they are seed flingers so you never know where they might end up.
This self sown Euphorbia palustris has been in this spot for about 9 years and has formed a gnarled woody caudex. It looks like something swamp hobbits would live in.
Here is a wider angle so you can see how it is growing in proximity to the water fall. If you look closely you can see that the plant is encased in ice but doesnt seem to mind.
I found this old picture of the parent plants in 2004 at the side of the pond. They are still going strong and always look fantastic in spring.
There are many beautiful Euphorbias for gardeners to choose from. Succulent, shrubby, or herbaceous. Euporbia palustris is one of the nicest of the herbaceous types with beautiful chartreuse blooms in spring and a really nice habit through summer and fall. If it gets too leggy and tall after it blooms you can cut it to the ground and it will come up fresh.
I’m not sure how much work I want to put into further developing this garden. My father bought an apartment in Manhattan where he will retire in a few years and it is possible that the entire house will be torn down and a McMansion put in its place and most of the gardens replaced with lawns. But I may go back for a visit in September to renovate the big driveway border a little bit. The center of it was taken over by some large weedy clumping grass and once that is removed there will be a lot of empty space. And while I currently do not have a garden of my own it is nice to have one I can visit even if it is on the other side of the country.
For the past eleven years or so I have spent most of the time living in apartments. When I was going to school in the Bronx I lived in an apartment in midtown Manhattan that barely has enough light for houseplants. But at school I was surrounded by plants and on the weekends I would garden at my fathers house in New Jersey so I survived.
But California has been mostly apartment living and I have to say I am getting a little tired of it. My dream of course is to live out in the country on several (flat!) acres with lots of sun and room to make any type of garden my heart desires.
Until that happens I have to just make the best of it. My first experience gardening in Southern California was on my balcony in Santa Monica where I lived for two years. It was only about forty five square feet but it was a southern exposure six blocks from the ocean.
The views were great. The ocean to the west took up most of my view and was what sold me on the apartment.
My beautiful ocean view. Catalina Island was visible on clear days.
When I moved into the apartment I discovered that when you were out on the balcony you also had a view of the San Gabriel Mountains.
San Gabriel Mountains covered in snow in winter.
Now all my life my only views had been of walls and other apartment buildings so as you can imagine I was pretty excited. But I was even more excited to start a balcony garden. At this point I hadn’t been able to do any gardening for about two years I was starved for plants. Any plants. I pretty much just ran to every nearby nursery and bought every brightly colored thing I could find. In the past I had been quite the plant snob but now I didn’t care. I just grabbed everything in sight.
I just wanted color and lots of it. So I set about creating a cottage garden on the fourth floor.
I decided my garden needed a purpose so I decided to make it a hummingbird garden. I bought lots of Salvias and Pelargoniums and anything else I could think of that would attract hummingbirds.
I am happy to say it was quite successful. I had a contant buzz of hummingbirds visiting my fourth floor garden.
The view from my living room was pretty great.
I was pretty happy the first year and had some really nice specimens.
Viola Etaine
Salvia patens
The hummingbirds loved the garden and as plants went out of bloom I would toss them to make room for new ones and I even started growing plants from seed. The balcony was always over planted and I usually didn’t have much room to walk around out there.
Annas Hummingbird
Cuphea viscosissima grown from seed.
I rigged up some shelves to make the most of every square foot.
Now the weather in Santa Monica this close to the ocean is mostly really cool and quite nice. winter, spring, and summer it is sunny but we often have a thick layer of fog rolling in off the ocean. It reminded me a bit of northern California weather. But the fall can be brutal. Temperatures would jump to a hundred degrees and the sun felt like it was cooking you from the inside. You feel as if one day you are in San Francisco and the next you are in Pasadena.
Salvias do OK in large pots but with that kind of weather and in that exposure I needed to water them every day. So I started phasing them out and began collecting succulents.
I started collecting succulents at the end of the first year and slowly began replacing my water thirsty plants.
Senicio rowleyanus inflorescence.
Fenestraria rhopalophylla subsp. aurantiaca
Crassula Campfire To get it this red in winter I neglected the plant all summer long leaving it in full baking sun with little water. After the fall and winter rains it starts to green up again.
After two years of living in Santa Monica I got a bit bored and decided I wanted something new. Yes I had an amazing view but my balcony was so small and the apartment itself was rather drab.
I found a place in West Hollywood with beautiful hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances, glass tiles in the bathroom, a washer and dryer INSIDE the apartment, and best of all a balcony with a southern exposure that was more than twice as big as my old one.
I was so excited about the rest of the apartment that I didn’t really examine the balcony closely enough. I moved in December and it rained for ten days straight. I remember thinking “Wow all that rain and not a drop of water on the balcony. I’m not as exposed anymore. That roof really covers the balcony well.” A short time later it occurred to me that the only reason that this balcony had any sun at all was because it was the middle of winter. Sure enough the closer we got to spring the higher the sun got in the sky. My sunlight began shrinking bit by bit and now I have a bright shade balcony with absolutely no full sun. The roof overhang protects me a bit too much.
Lots of room but not a lot of sun. All the succulents have been moved to the ledge and shelving in the brightest spot. If there is an earthquake they will go crashing to the driveway below.
So my poor succulents will have to hang in there. I’m hoping that the bright light will be enough for them to get by until I move again. The Nicotiana mutabilis that I started from seed last July is doing OK but had to be staked. I am making the best of it though. I started up some mixed containers of shade loving plants like Fuchsias, ferns, and Abutilons. I ordered a bunch of large flowered begonias which will hopefully be really happy. In the meantime I keep dreaming of that house in the country that will be mine one day.
At least the Ledebouria socialis and Haworthias should do OK.
