Two Years!

WordPress just sent me a little note that my blog has just had its two-year anniversary!  Kind of crazy how fast time goes by. Here is a little retrospective.

I had just moved out of my apartment in Santa Monica where I had gardened on a small balcony with a view of the Pacific ocean.

Santa Monica had some really nice gardens but I got bored there and foolishly moved to West Hollywood.

I ended up hating West Hollywood and my balcony there sucked for gardening so I blogged quite a bit about my mesemb seedlings.

I also reminisced about my Clematis collection in my old garden…

And various trips to England…

Where I saw the queen…

and visited Clivedon and many other historic gardens.

I started designing gardens for my friends at Gardens by Gabriel.

And took road trips to Annie’s Annuals where I had to get creative to fit as many plants as I could into my VW Golf!

I went on a trip to Hawaii…

and fell in love with Leucospermum reflexum.

I moved to the Central Coast of California…

and was inspired by the South African Garden at Seaside Gardens in Carpinteria.

I thought about the things I enjoyed about southern California like the California Poppy Preserve…

and Coreopsis gigantea growing in Malibu.

But I was happy to be living in the Central Coast where I designed some new gardens…

Including my own!

Which has come a long way in a year!

Despite some recent drama!

And in case you were wondering Geranium maderense did just fine during the wind storm last night.

So thanks for coming along on my horticultural journey the past two years. Hopefully the next two years will be full of even more beautiful gardens.

England Trip: Chelsea Flower Show (2011)

England Trip: Chelsea Flower Show (2011), a set on Flickr.

This years Chelsea Flower Show starts next Tuesday so I thought it would be a good time to do a photo post of my visit to the show last year.

I did post about my favorite garden at the show while I was in England but never took the time to share the rest of my photos.

If you are a fanatical gardener like me it is well worth a trip to Chelsea at least once in your life (this was my second trip). It really is the most amazing garden show in the world.

Pictures are OK but they don’t really do it justice. This is something that should be seen in person.

England Trip: Barrington Court

England Trip: Barrington Court, a set on Flickr.

Just a few gardens left to share from last years garden tour of England. Barrington Court in Somerset is probably the one I would recommend least of all the National Trust gardens I saw.

The old bones of the original Gertrude Jekyll design are still strong but the garden could use a little restoration or perhaps a few more gardeners to keep it up. But there are some nice specimens and some nice plantings.

Perhaps I was just a little burnt out on viewing gardens but while my brother and sister had lunch in the garden restaurant I chatted with an old English couple who gave me an earful about the sorry state of the garden and what a disappointment it was to them. I didn’t think it was quite that bad but it paled in comparison to the final two gardens I saw (which I will post soon).

I did get some pretty pictures though so enjoy!

England Trip: Eden Project

England Trip: Eden Project, a set on Flickr.

I have sort of mixed feelings about our visit to Eden Project last year. My initial memories before preparing the pictures for this post that it was rather theme park like and perhaps we would have enjoyed visiting a historic or more intimate garden. At this point I was also full blown sick, with a fever and headaches, which was worsened by the stress of having to drive all around England.

Once I looked through the photos my feelings toward Eden softened a bit. Yes it is a bit of a big theme park and if you really hate that sort of thing you might not enjoy it. But it also was a nice break seeing a garden that was only ten years old after looking at so many gardens that were over a hundred years old.

Eden Project is in a converted quarry and the main attraction is two massive biomes. One featuring tropicals and the other with plants from the mediterranean climates of the world (you can guess which one I preferred). It definitely has an educational, environmental, botanical garden bent but there are large borders outside of the domes that are actually really nicely designed and while we were there the beds around the domes were full of hundreds of huge Alliums.

If you would like to go for a tour of the insides of the domes you can type “Eden Project” into Google Maps and then use street view to navigate the interior paths. Of course then you might not feel the need to visit the real Eden Project. But if you are ever in Cornwall and have some free time I would say it is worth checking out.

England Trip: Lanhydrock

England Trip: Lanhydrock, a set on Flickr.

I’m glad I decided to blog about last years trip to England. I haven’t really gone through all my thousands of photos much and I had forgotten about Lanhydrock.

Not that it was particularly forgettable I just saw a lot of gardens in that 10 day trip. This was another Cornish garden but further inland so not as many tender plants.

If you ask me if I am a fan of topiary I will generally say no but really well done topiary like the yews on the entrance lawn at Lanhydrock definitely make an impression.

This is also one of the few houses where I went inside and didn’t just check out the gardens.

Once again to see all the images please click the blue link under the thumbnails to be taken directly to my Flickr page where you can view them as a slideshow or view each individual picture to see my comments.

Enjoy!

England Trip: St Michael’s Mount and Penzance

England Trip: St Michael’s Mount and Penzance, a set on Flickr.

So continuing with my recap of the garden tour of England I took with my family last May and June. Next stop was Penzance. To be honest I wanted to go to Penzance because of a fondness for The Pirate Movie starring Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins (based loosely on the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Pirates of Penzance).

Not the best movie perhaps but it was on cable all the time when I was a kid and you know how nostalgia clouds your judgement.

Anyway Penzance is lovely. It is in Cornwall, almost at the most southwestern tip of England, and the climate is milder than the rest of England. So you start seeing some interesting mediterranean type plants and even succulents here.

St Michael’s Mount is a castle on a small island just offshore and is managed by the National Trust. We could see it from Penzance so my brother and sister decided we should walk instead of drive. Unfortunately I think this is the day my mysterious month-long illness began, so I was tired and cranky when it turned out to be a four mile walk. But once we got there the island and castle are pretty impressive.

The most exciting thing was getting to see a gigantic Puya chilensis in bloom. A first for me. Enjoy the photos of St Michael’s Mount and a few from around Penzance as well.

Once again to see the entire album please click the blue link below the thumbnails to open up the Flickr gallery.

England Trip: Knighthayes Court

England Trip: Knighthayes Court, a set on Flickr.

Knighthayes Court was one of my favorites of the gardens we visited last year. It is a gothic Victorian mansion in Devon and features a walled kitchen garden, a wildflower meadow, formal gardens, a conservatory, a paved garden with alpine beds and woodland gardens.

I spent so much time exploring the (huge) kitchen garden and the gardens around the house that I didn’t even make it to the woodland. The kitchen garden, which was recently restored, provides organic produce for the restaurant on site.

There is of course a cedar of Lebanon on the lawn and many formal clipped hedges including one depicting hounds chasing a fox.

I have visited over a dozen gardens on my two trips to England and this one is at the top of my “must see” list.

England Trip: Hestercombe

England Trip: Hestercombe, a set on Flickr.

Continuing my series on last years trip to England with my family.

Next up was a visit to Hestercombe in Somerset in early June. The grounds are rather expansive but while my brother and sister explored the landscape garden I stuck close to the house and formal garden.

The restored formal gardens are one of the best examples of a Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Edwin Lutyens collaboration that you can see today.

Once again to see all the photos please click on the blue link under the thumbnails to be taken directly to the Flickr album.

England Trip: Hidcote Manor

England Trip: Hidcote Manor, a set on Flickr. Since I am super busy this week I thought this would be a good time to revisit my trip to England last May. Those of you who have been following the blog … Continue reading →

Will the real Catherine de la Mare please stand up?

I posted pictures of Penstemon ‘Catherine de la Mare’ last year, and based on the photo, I’m sure you will understand why this plant name stuck in my head and went on my “Plants I NEED” list.

Penstemon ‘Catherine de la Mare’

The photo is from Wakehurst Place in England back when I interned at Kew in 2004 and all these years I have hoped to find Miss Catherine here in the states.

Here she is in all her glory planted with a Ballota pseudodictamnus. Incidentally the walled garden at Wakehurst Place remains one of my top favorite gardens to this day.  I hope to get back there for another visit some day.

Penstemons are hugely popular in England and from what little I could find about this cultivar I am assuming it is a P. heterophyllus sport or hybrid selected in England.  It has an Award of Garden Merit from The Royal Horticulture Society and was apparently named after the daughter-in-law of English poet Walter de la Mare (This should also clear up any confusion of the spelling of the cultivar name. I have seen the last part of the name listed as Mare, Mere, Mar, and Mer.)  I wasn’t even sure I would be able to find it here in the states.

I was very happy back in 2010 when I found plants labeled as P. ‘Catherine de la Mare’ at Grow Native Nursery in Westwood and bought three one gallon plants for my friends garden that I was designing in West Los Angeles.  I was a bit suspicious though.  Would this in fact be the same plant I saw at Wakehurst?

Well, you be the judge.  Here is the plant in bloom about six months after being planted.

What do you think?  I was a little uncertain because I thought it was supposed to be a P. heterophyllus cultivar and it seemed pretty beefy.  Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the leaves of the English plant but I remembered them being a bit more oblong and strappy in shape and the flower color isn’t really right.

Of course for all I know this could just be because of the wildly different growing conditions between southern England and Los Angeles.  The quality of light is quite different between England and California too though I did see each plant in person and the colors were as different in person as they appear in the photos.

Even if it didn’t look exactly the same I was thrilled with the way the plants behaved.  They are in poor compacted soil and after an extremely wet winter they went through various stages of over and under watering over the course of the next year and all grew like gangbusters.  The above picture is of one of the one gallon plants after being in the ground for a year.  But as you could see from the six month blooming photo they were already huge.

I thought of taking cuttings for when I moved up to Los Osos for my own garden but I just never had time.  So I continued to keep a lookout for plants going under the name of ‘Catherine de la Mare’.

Well I found two!  But they are a teeny bit different from each other.

The first one I picked up at a local hardware store and it is from wholesaler Growing Grounds.  It reminds me of the plant from Grow Native that I planted at my friend’s place in Los Angeles.  In fact it is entirely possible Grow Native got their plants from Growing Grounds.

The second is a smaller plant that I mail ordered from Dancing Oaks Nursery in Oregon (great selection and quality by the way, and they sent me a few free plants which is always awesome and much appreciated).  It has the more lance like leaves that I remember the one in England having, with red margins and red stems.  I guess it is possible it will beef up once it is older but it seems like a distinctly different plant to me.

What do you think?  I am really curious to see how they will turn out when they bloom and will be posting pictures as soon as they do.  And maybe if I see P. ‘Catherine de la Mare’ from other sources I’ll buy those too.  You can’t really go wrong with purple Penstemons though so I’m sure they will both be beautiful.