a mystery
We woke up to find streams of toilet paper hanging from the limbs of the big cedar elm tree near the street.
We walked around the tree several times staring in amazement - who would do this to us? Teenagers do this sort of thing to other teenagers, right? But not to strangers. I am not sure I even know any teenagers; or anyone else young enough to do things like this. It had to be a case of mistaken identity. Probably some kids were going to be waiting in vain for a response from one of their pals who they believed lived here. On the other hand, had we annoyed someone enough to make them do this to get back at us? We had houseguests in town for a birthday party, could it be connected with that somehow? Probably we will never know.
I tried to pull it down but it just broke off above my reach. My neighbor Cindy knew just what to do, "spray it with the hose." She was right. The wet paper tore from it's own weight and fell to the ground. A few minutes later everything was back to normal. We went back inside to eat breakfast and the incident was forgotten.
first tomatoes
Yesterday's rains cooled things off. After I returned from taking the cats to the vet for their shots I was able to spend a little time outside working. The cenizos were in bloom, as they always are after a summer rain. In the afternoon I sat on the porch swing in front and read the new book by Elaine Pagels. There was no one on the street; only a workman a few houses down banging something out of his van and the mailman on his rounds.
We have two almost ripe tomatoes, with no puncture wounds. I picked them before the birds could get them and brought them inside to ripen on the windowsill.
goodbye ducks
Today is my last day in the office at the current location of the company I work for. On Monday the company will reopen in a new building about 15 miles north of where we are now.
Besides the fact that I will have to drive that long additional 15 miles there are plenty of other reasons why I am not all that keen on the move. I am going to miss my lunchtime walks along the two-mile running/walking path right across the street which goes along some pretty wooded creeksides. I am also going to miss the little lake nearby with its population of ducks and the fitness center right across the street. It's also been really nice to work in the same community where I live, instead of miles away.
All I gain on the other side of the balance sheet is new furniture and a shiny new building, which doesn't mean a whole lot to me.
hedge parsley and other weeds
One of my native plant enthusiast friends likes to say that "a weed is anything that you don't want in your garden." The point being that if you like a plant it is not a weed, no matter what category someone else might put it in. I had a relative who thought dandelions were pretty and let them grow in her flowerbeds. Of course dandelions were originally brought to this country as an edible crop, anyway.
One plant that I consider a weed is hedge parsley or Torilis arvensis. We've got a corner where it has become quite a pest. A few years ago I sowed a wildflower seed mixture there. I sometimes suspect there was hedge parsley in the mixture. That may not be true. It may have spread there some other way. At any rate when it first came up I assumed it was part of the mixture because it has a fairly attractive flower, like Queen Anne's Lace. The obnoxious part is the seeds which appear right about now. They are like velcro and stick to your pants leg and shoe laces. They make a tangled mess in the cat's fur and sometimes have to be cut out.
I was surprised to see a site on the Internet with an action plan to deal with the decline of hedge parsley in England and western Europe. Every plant of course serves some useful purpose. All I can say is that I wish this one were declining in my yard instead of over there.
texas star hibiscus
The first year we had the Hibiscus coccinea it bloomed on Tricia's birthday. Now the flowers come a few weeks earlier but it serves as a good reminder for me.
It will continue to bloom as long as it stays warm, then it will die down to the ground with the first frost. Right now it stands about four feet high, but I've seen this plant get to be six feet tall. It has narrow five-petaled leaves, which leads to jokes from friends and neighbors about the type of gardening we are doing over here.
The Rice Owls are the new NCAA baseball championsl
the black cat
Our garden is being terrorized by a black cat.
I've written about it before in these pages. It's apparently a feral cat who first appeared in the winter, and is now seen in our back garden on almost a daily basis. At first it wore a pink collar but now that has disappeared. According to Tricia that is the type collar that the SPCA puts on their animals, so we theorize that someone in the neighborhood possibly picked it as a pet and then let it escape. Somewhere along the line too it lost part of it's tail.
My wife puts out a dish of food on the back porch for our garden cat. She got left behind by a family who were leasing a house down the road one year and has been settled in our back garden for many years now. Our indoor cats accept her as part of the tribe.
However the garden cat has been in numerous altercations with the black cat and Sam has come in a couple times with bites and scratches too. Consequently we have issues with the black cat and regard it as a trouble-maker. We're contemplating taking some kind of action against it but we don't have a plan yet.
What has me wondering lately though is how this situation came about. We've had other visitors to the garden before - raccoons and possums - who the cats accepted. Why are they hostile toward this one? I see them watching us for cues when the black cat is spotted, so I know that part of the answer is because they feel our hostility. But didn't our feelings originate out of concern for their welfare, after the hostilities had already began?
How did the black cat become demonized into The Evil One instead of being peaceably integrated into the community? Is it something inherent in the nature of the black cat, or is the cat just a victim of our hostility toward it? It is probably hungry and frightened and just trying to make it's way in the world as best it can. Did it all escalate from a bad move in an early encounter?
garden tourism
It was 95 degrees here this afternoon. Too hot to work but not too hot to tour gardens.
The Water Garden Society sponsored a tour this afternoon with dozens of gardens open. Too often this tour is a disapointment to plant people because the water gardens can turn out to be little more than big outdoor aquariums plopped in the middle of a suburban backyard lawn. We've done this tour before and been burned. This time we plotted a small group of five in a tight circle and set out.
One had landscaping by a friend of ours, Carol Feldman, so we definitely wanted to include it. A second happened to belong to the ex of one of Tricia's close friends, so if nothing else, that might provide a topic of conversation in the future.
We started out with the landscape designed by our friend and it was delightful, with lots of lantana in several colors, cigar plants, cotoneaster, a mexican plum tree and a tall hedge of martha gonzales roses. It was the front yard of one of those big new houses that are rapidly replacing the older ones in inner-city neighborhoods nowadays. The pond itself, which Carol did not design, is separate from the landscape and inside a small courtyard, so that you must walk over it on stepping stones to arrive at the front door.
Our second stop turned out to be the least interesting of the five. Described as a meditation center it was a 12-foot diameter pond in one corner of the backyard, with a high waterfall on one side. Not a lot for a plant person to see here, but at least it was constructed of real stones and not the fiberglass ones we had seen on our earlier tour. There were some great dragonflies though and I had fun trying (without success!) to get a good photo.
Next we came to a real garden which happened to have a stream and a pond in it. This is actually what comes to my mind with the phrase "water garden." This large garden had a sunny side and a shady side, separated by an archway covered with passionflower vine. The sunny side was a series of massive wood-sided raised beds about 2 feet tall, with grassy paths between them. The shady side was mostly ferns and hostas under an oak and a hackberry. There was a short stream flowing over a couple of short falls into a calm pool. The owner/builder said that she wanted the stream to seem natural and since the yard was flat she kept the maximum elevation to 18 inches.
Fourth was the house belonging to Nancy's ex. This busy backyard felt a little like a New Orleans courtyard on one end, with old brick paving and second-story balconies overlooking it. There was a large pond with many fish and a winding stream descending from a small earthen hill in the middle. A narrow path managed to cross the stream several times over footbridges. As the path descended the other side of the hill the yard transformed itself into a country garden with little rustic bowers set into two different corners.
Our final stop was a house we had passed many times and admired. It's an older home, possibly from the 40's or earlier but recently remodeled and in a beautiful setting on a hillside under huge trees. Here we saw two "water features". The first was large and splashy and helped to keep the adjacent patio and swimming pool isolated from the sounds of a street just a few feet away beyond the shrubbery. The other was a small fountain in an isolated side garden with a table and chair. What great writing I would surely do sitting at that table.
It turned out to be a enjoyable tour. We've talked about adding a pond to our garden, but so far we've not been willing to do the necessary work. Seeing the ponds this afternoon though made me wish I had one.
missing lettuce
Regular readers here may remember my lamentations over the lack of a lettuce crop. Well it turns out we could have lettuce after all.
I needed to pot up a large plant a couple weekends ago that was a gift. Being out of potting soil and not wanting to go shopping, I decided to "borrow" some of the best soil I have. The corner of the garden that was devoted to the lettuce was bare so I took a few spadefuls of dirt from there to top off the pot. When I checked the pot this morning, I saw several little lettuce plants were thriving. I guess the seeds must have been planted too low originally or something. Luckily the pot they are in now is probably large enough to hold them.
new bulb source
Tejas Native Bulbs is a new resource for native plant enthusiasts that I learned about this week. They have a small selection and some of them are not that hard to find in nature. I may splurge and order some celestials.
Go Rice Owls
The Rice Owls baseball team beat Texas last night in the College World Series. Over the weekend they will play a three-game series for the championship against the winner of tonight's game between Stanford and Cal State Fullerton. Should Rice win, it will be their first-ever NCAA championship in any sport. Go Owls!
still no tomatoes
The tomatoes keep getting bigger and there are plenty of them, but they are all still green.
Next year I want to plant some of this dwarf corn.
martha gonzales
This little guy has almost as many flowers as leaves right now. He's only about 15 inches tall. If it keeps a proportionate number of flowers when it gets big it will be stunning.
It looks better in the larger version you get when you click on the thumbnail. I am kind of color-blind in the red spectrum myself, so if it looks weird then that is my excuse. Pictures of bright red flowers never look quite right to me.
rose geranium
We have a new addition to the path between the driveway and the house. It is a rose-scented geranium. I looked it up in my books and it is actually not a true geranium but a Pelargonium graveolens. The foliage smells like rose-scented soap. We put it in a container along the path which also has a large rosemary, thyme and oregano. A very fragrant path. Actually there is a salvia along there too. But no parsley. That's in the vegetable garden.
lots of rain this week
We've had lots of rain this week. That's made it difficult to work outside in the garden, but it's also kept the temperatures down. So when it's been dry enough to get out, it's been rather pleasant.
The rain and cooler temps have breathed new life into the roses. We've had many blooms on the Martha Gonzales and on the Mutabilis. Those are the two we planted this spring and they are both still fairly small plants. The two Rouletti roses also have a lot of new flowers. The lantanas are just beginning to bloom. Our vitex trees are still full of blooms which I believe is later in the season than usual for them. This has been the best season I can recall for them. On the other hand, we had almost no flowering on the stand of monarda we have out back. There was a little flowering on a smaller stand in front, but not what there usually is. One of the nice things about keeping a journal like this will be the opportunity to refer back to it in future years to see just when the plants did bloom.
We also have our first sunflower of the summer. I just realized how nice it is to photograph sunflowers. They are just about the same height as I am, so no need to crawl around on my knees and get my trousers all wet and muddy.
This weather has not worked to advantage with our driveway project. It's been so cloudy and cool that the grass under the plastic has mostly stayed alive so far. I pulled up the plastic yesterday afternoon, mowed the grass down to the lowest setting that the mower could go, and then put it back down.
rio grande drying up
For the first time since the 1950's the Rio Grande has gone dry. According to the Alpine Avalanche there are only pools of water where the once-vigorous river once flowed through Mariscal Canyon in Big Bend National Park.
"It will have momentous consequences to the resources we are charged to preserve," park wildlife biologist Raymond Skiles told the Avalanche. He indicated that similar conditions existed along the entire four-mile stretch of the Rio Grande that he and others hiked on May 9.
The river runs along 118 miles of the southern extremity of BBNP, and Skiles said that pooling conditions without flow were present for about two-thirds of that length, with the lower canyons most intact from a water-level standpoint.
Severe drought conditions, both in the immediate area and throughout the West and Southwest, have contributed significantly to the decreased water level. For the past eight years, the Big Bend region has experienced about 11 to 12 inches of rain annually, compared with a normal average of 12 to 15 inches.
In addition to the drought, irrigation, commerical and business use of water has contributed to the problem. Biologists are predicting dire consequences for fish and wildlife that depend on the river for their existence.
jimson weed
The dramatic purple-tinged trumpets of my Datura wrightii bloom only at night. They are big flowers that fill the air with their fragrance. You've probably seen some famous paintings of datura by Georgia O'Keefe.
Gardeners tend to be sharply divided over daturas. The foliage is large and ungainly and worst of all it is poisonous. Some people get a rash just from touching them. The infamous jimson weed or Jamestown weed is a datura. On one of my gardening discussion boards recently I learned that it can also be used as a treatment for asthma. Native Americans used it as a medicine and as a hallucinogen. It was one of the plants Don Juan used in the Carlos Castaneda books. I've never tried it but I suggest staying away from it. If you are interested you can learn more about it here.
I enjoy seeing the big white flowers in the late evening but I keep the plant trimmed to a small size and hidden behind other plants, so it is less visible and less likely to be accidently touched.
i'll fly away
I have business in Birmingham, Alabama. I'll be back here in a few days.
cinderella story
Are these guys eating your parsley like they are eating ours? It's okay, they grow up to be black swallowtails. Just be sure to plant enough so you'll have some too, because they eat a lot. They also like dill and fennel.
You can learn how to grow your own butterflies with this book by Judy Hominick.
We planted some mexican milkweed this weekend to attract some Monarch butterfly larvae too.
the secret room
A Cadillac pulled over to the curb as I was tending the beds in the front garden. A man got out and walked over as his wife sat in the passenger seat. He wanted to know if I knew anything about Alfonso. I've had similar inquiries before. Alfonso was the son who inherited this house on his mother's death and I had met him when I bought the house. But I had no idea where he was now.
This man said he was Alfonso's cousin. He started to talk about family gatherings at the house and cookouts out back on the patio. I could tell he was familiar with the place. He talked about the brick grille out back and the outdoor lights in the trees, which are no longer functional but which have been there so long the tree bark has grown around the fixtures. I asked him to come in and look around but he gestured toward his wife and said he was in a hurry.
Then with a wink he asked me if I had "discovered the secret room yet?"
Yes, my house does have a secret room. It is hidden behind built-in bookcases just like in the movies. Actually it's more like a secret closet, since it is pretty small. And you would have to be blind not to see the hinges. There is not really anything mysterious about the room. No treasure hidden there. No underground passageway to the bat cave. No indication that runaway slaves ever hid there. Just a storage space really. But somebody had had the romantic notion of hiding the door to it behind a bookcase.
I would have loved it as a child. I can imagine the games and stories I could have made up about the secret room. As it obviously must have stimulated the imagination of this man as a youngster visiting the house. We have children visiting us from time to time, but so far I don't think any of them have discovered the room.
I have never known what to do with the room other than to store some of our less-used "stuff" there. I have sometimes had dreams about a house with a secret room and speculated on the meaning. They say a house in a dream represents the self, so I guess that a secret or hidden room must represent a part of oneself that is kept private or hidden from others. It's ironic that now that I have a secret room in real life, it has such a prosaic use.
But it does add to the karma of the house just as the ghost does. Yes, this house also has a ghost. I have sometimes glimpsed out of the corner of my eye a woman dressed in white sitting on the patio or walking through the garden at twilight. When I look again she is always gone. I believe she is the former mistress of the house still looking after her garden. Older people in the neighborhood have told me stories about her. People are said to have stopped their cars to take pictures of her azaleas. The azaleas are long gone, but we do have many other remnants of her garden still here to enjoy.
I don't think I want to haunt the garden after I die. But someday after I have sold the house I may drive by when the new owner is outside and casually ask if they have "discovered the secret room yet."
we tour some gardens
Tricia and I have just returned from a xeriscape garden tour. Some of the members of our garden club were included on the tour, so we plotted a route that would take us past each one of those and then added a couple more that were conveniently along the route. We couldn't possibly see all of the gardens on the tour but five made a nice day's outing.
Several of them were front yards that had recently been converted from lawn grass into installations of native wildflowers and drought-hardy shrubs. They were definite improvements over an expanse of St. Augustine, but more what I would call exterior decorating than gardens. They did not seem like places I would want to spend much time in.
The two that appealed to me were both small backyards, private spaces rather than public spaces, and both were shady. Those are features that I appreciate but they were not the main reasons I liked them. One was a simple stone courtyard extending the length of the backyard surrounded by garden beds with mature plants chosen by the owner who was a landscape designer as well as a gardener. It appealed because it was such a comfortable space for outdoor living and entertaining.
My favorite though was behind a tiny cottage. Beneath a giant cedar elm, certified as the largest in Texas, was a fairyland of ferns, groundcovers and small understory trees and shrubs. There was a winding brick path and interspersed among the plants was a variety of small sculptures and old musical instruments. It was all very quaint and whimsical, but every one of the woodland plantings seemed so naturally to belong where it was that you could easily believe that it had just grown up that way by itself.
It had not just grown up that way, however. This turned out to be the only one of the gardens that had not been designed by the owner. In fact it was designed by the well-known author Sally Wasowski, although the owner had added the musical instruments and made other changes.
freshening up
Yesterday was rainy and the garden has been freshened up. We have new buds on the ever-blooming roses and we are starting to get a few flowers on the summer bloomers. The monarda and cenizo are hinting at more to come this weekend. We have lots of coneflower and yarrow, the zexmenia looks great; we have winecups, four-nerve daisy, mexican oregano, abelia, pavonia, day lilies and indian blanket. The blackfoot daisy and the salvia greggii have revived and produced a few flowers in response to the coolness. The vitex still looks pretty but is past it's peak. The lantana is building up a mass of greenery but there are no flowers yet. In the vegetable garden there are lots of tomatoes but all still green.
the dean strategy
There has been some interesting posts at Off-the-Kuff and at CalPundit regarding the presidential campaign strategy of Howard Dean. Charles Kuffner at Off-the-Kuff compares it to bridge strategy and makes a pretty nice argument that events could turn it into a long-shot winning hand. At least it sounded convincing to someone like me who has never played bridge. If I understand his argument correctly, he is saying the Dems have such a bad hand that they have to play for the long shot. Dean is betting that enough bad news will start to come out of the Iraqi occupation and hindsight on the war that public opinion will start to turn, and then he will be seen as the only candidate who took the right position from the start.
There is still a lot that could happen before a candidate has to be chosen so I guess it is good to have that base covered. I'm glad all the Dems are not betting on the same strategy. Mostly I have liked what Dean has had to say, except I have been bothered by the squabbling with Kerry. That doesn't seem necessary to me.
Julie
Julie, our youngest cat, likes to sleep in the to-be-filed basket on my desk. Sometimes, like now, she watches me with big, unblinking eyes while I type. Other times she looks out the window, where she watches birds and insects in a big abelia bush and can see the street past the lawn through the branches.
She has her rituals. Unless you catch her asleep she will not allow you to pick her up or touch her. But every night at bedtime she jumps into the bed and wants to be petted. She will stay as long as the light is on but the minute it goes out she is gone. She won't drink directly from a bowl. She dips her paw into the water and then licks the paw.
Julie is one of Sapphire's kittens. The other two we found homes for but Julie was always too unique to match with anyone. Living her whole life with her mother has seemed to limit her. She has never quite grown up. She still looks to Sapphire for cues as if she were a kitten and Sapphire makes sure she stays in line.
In the book Tribe of Tiger, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas told a story about a cat who knew her place in the household. Her cat was well down in the cat social order and knew that she was not allowed to become pregnant. When she did against her will, she killed her own kittens rather than break the social rules. Of course Jule is neutered so this could never happen to her; but I can imagine her doing that.
Her fur is thick and of course she hates to be brushed. Our other two both love it but Julie cringes from the brush. She will never scratch you though. No matter how frightened she might become when you are holding her she always keeps the claws retracted. Last year her fur got so matted that we had to take her to the vet to be shaved. She was really embarrased when we brought her home, but her fur was so silky as it grew back in. I think she kind of liked having it short though. This summer she seems to be trying to pull it out herself.
One thing I have wondered about tortoise-shell cats. I have known several and they have all been at the bottom of their respective cat social orders. Is it possible that this could be a personality trait that is inherited along with the coloring?
daylilies
Daylilies, like irises, are a plant I've never actually bought at a nursery. Every one here either came with the garden or it was obtained by gift or trade with another gardener. That adds to the fun, especially if there are stories that go along with the plants. But there is a drawback too, because I usually never get to know the variety name. Also I tend to move the bulbs around so after a few years I even lose track of which ones came from where. Both of these fall into the unknown variety and origin category.
That's too bad because it might help me understand more about them. One thing I would like to know is why there is such a difference in when they bloom. The photo on the left was taken almost a month ago and that plant finished its blooming weeks ago. The lily on the right just opened its first blooms this morning. I would have expected them to bloom about the same time.
They are both beautiful though and as far as I'm concerned they can bloom whenever they like.
driveway project
We need more parking space. Our driveway is only one car wide and we have two vehicles. Invariably the one we want to use is blocked. There is a strip of lawn grass between the driveway and a hedge that is just the right size to park another vehicle. We can't widen it the whole length because there is a nice tree down by the street that we would hate to lose.
We decided to see if we could do this project ourselves. We don't really want more concrete. Instead we are thinking that some nice pea-sized gravel instead of the lawn grass might work just fine. But we definitely have to get rid of the grass first. We are going to see if we can use the heat and sun to our advantage to kill off the grass. We spread a big sheet of clear plastic out over the lawn this morning. Most gardeners I know use Roundup to kill grass, even the native plant and organic gardeners. I really hate to use that much poison though. I am hoping this method will work. I'll keep you posted.
vitex
Vitex is a common sight in older neighborhoods hereabouts. I started this one from a cutting taken from a tree in my parent's back yard. It makes either a small tree or a big shrub depending on how many trunks you allow it to develop. This one is kind of in-between because I couldn't quite decide.
I have another one which I started at the same time which has only one trunk and it is now definitely tree-like. Unfortunately it is next to the house and in the front yard so to really appreciate it you have to see it from the street. I usually try to plan my garden the opposite way - so that it looks good when seen from inside through the windows.
Vitex is said to have been widely planted around monasteries in Europe because the seeds were supposed to reduce sexual desire. That is why it is sometimes called chasteberry or lilac chaste tree. The leaves are very fragrant. They are shaped somewhat like hemp leaves and more than once I have been accused of growing that instead.
