Deergrass

The deergrass grows quickly and is nice, thick and healthy. It has handsome seedstalks for a lot of the year. A really nice, large mounding grass. After I saw how these did the first year, I got some more. And last year the first year's bunches were big enough to divide, so I risked a division and moved the littler parts down to the other end of the hellstrip, where they;re now thriving. I love this grass and can't recommend it enough. It's also nice because it's green year-round.

The Las Pilitas nursery website has a nice description of this grass, but a few things were different in my garden from their description: it does grow quickly, but took more like 4 years to get to "mature size", assuming that these large mounds I have now are finally mature. (But they're not next to a seasonal creek, so probably get less water than they would in their natural habitat. No, actually, I have no idea how much water they get, because they but up against the neighbor's lawn, and he waters a lot.) And the seed plumes are more like 5 feet tall, not 2 feet, in my garden.

For reference: shown here are 3 plants that came in 1-gallon pots from Theodore Payne nursery, planted in my garden at the beginning of February 2009. The hellstrip planting area width is 4 feet. The pictures were taken in August, 2008. This area receives full sun in the summer and partial sun in the winter. After the first 2 years, the grasses have received NO supplemental water from me, although they probably receive a little from the neighbor when he waters his lawn, which starts where these end. Last fall (fall 2007), I divided 2 of these plants and put the (much smaller) divisions on the other end of the hellstrip. The divisions are doing well, are the same height, and are now about 1 foot in diameter.

Discovery in the passion fruit vine

I was halfway through pollinating this passionflower this morning when movement fractions of an inch from my fingers caught my eye -- this guy was shifting around. There's a native Californian praying mantis, maybe this it it.

The hellstrip

This seems to be the new name for the section of "lawn" between the sidewalk and the street. Difficult to water, compacted by walkers, surrounded by hot concrete impermeable to rain, they're difficult spots to garden. In LA, they're also apparently legally required to be planted with short-mown grass.

Here is mine in June, 2008 (above) and May, 2007 (below.)


Using our little car as a guide, I measured where the door of a car that was parked on the street with its front bumper right up to our driveway opening would open onto the hellstrip. Then I dug the dirt out and filled it with decomposed granite to form a path. Then again on the other side of the street tree. Turns out most cars are so much bigger than my car that their doors open right into hte tree, so this was almost pointless. Still, it does seem that people mostly walk on the "paths" I made for them rather than on the tender plants. (Or LA is just so car-happy that all the cars that park there contain only their driver, so no passengers have to get out onto my hellstrip anyway.) I hope this is a good balance between a safe and neighborly offering of convenience for passengers, drought tolerant design, and plantings that please me.

And here, in detail appealing only to other people trying to garden with natives in LA (all 2 of them) , are the lists of plants shown.

Top pic: the grasses are deer grass (muhlenbergia rigens) and little baby fescue grasses (festuca glauca siskiyou blue), santolina (not native), lots of recently transplanted little chalk dudleyas (dudleya pulverulenta). The small flowers on the left are some yarrow grown from seed. In the center, the dark green mat is a manzanita, arctostaphylos edmundii parviflora. The yarrow are really best with more water than falls naturally here. With supplemental water, they're lovely, though.


The pink flowers are clarkia, grown new from seed each spring and self-sowed. Easy, aggressive, self-seeding, tolerant of medium to minute amounts of water after germination.

Next Long Topic: Front Garden

Living in California, it strikes me as reasonable to garden primarily with plants from California, especially local ones. So mostly my garden contains local natives, except for plants that have other very appealing features, like edible parts that I actually want to eat. Or unless they were here before I was.

When we moved to the little house we live in now, it had a pretty jewel-green lawn. I like the soft, velvety look of that sort of lawn, but it had to go. Neither of us was willing to mow it, fertilize it, put the required water into it, pamper it. So I sliced it off and used the topsoil to build raised beds in my backyard. Then I planted it with California natives appropriate for dry shade in southern California, surrounded them with lots and lots of shredded redwood bark, and waited.

Before starting, I read a lot of landscape books. I also did a lot of reading about native plants before choosing the ones I used. I looked at other gardens in my neighborhood and everywhere else we visited. It was difficult to find examples of plants and settings similar to mine: in Los Angeles, fully shaded in the winter, mostly shaded in the summer.

I had never grown California-native plants before. If other gardens were using them (mostly, they weren't), I didn't recognize them when I saw them. And looking at images of the plants in entries in book encyclopedias and websites just doesn't give you a good sense of what the plant will look like in your garden: the shades of color, the texture, the shininess or matteness of the parts, the final size and shape. And these are among the essential things you need to know to grow a lovely garden.

I don't have a lovely garden. But it is thriving, fully of interesting bugs and creatures, and very low in water use. So I would like to list all the plants I put in, what happened with them (a few died or had to be moved), and include lots of pictures with scale. Some pics with closeups, showing the detail of leaves and stems and flowers, some more distant, so you can see the size and shape of the plant relative to other plants. And when possible, how the plants grow over time. I bought everything in 4" or 1-gallon pots. I hope this will be useful to others who are experimenting with these plants.

Above is what the front garden looked like in May, 2007. Below, June 2008.

Milan

We spent a couple days in Milan, partly to meet an American friend who was passing through. We had our first brush with the famous Italian bureaucracy there. We had a package of 7 rolls of developed film to send home. We looked up the address of the main post office on our transit map and confirmed it with our guidebook. It turned out to be a massive gaudy building stuffed with ornamentation, with 'Poste Italia' written in story-high letters on the top. Inside, the cavernous lobby was lined with windows -- 1 through 47 or something like that. None of them were labelled except with signs that say they are closed or are for mail. So we stood in a short line for awhile. Eventually, when we got to the front and showed the woman working behind the window the US address on our package, she said something long and passionate in Italian that included the number 4. So we went to window 4 and stood in line. There the woman behind the window eventually told us something passionate in Italian that involved pointing back toward the building entrance, and included the number 4.



We walked back toward the building entrance where she had pointed. There was nothing there except the building entrance. We walked out the entrance and around the corner, looking for another door. All the way on the other side of the building was another door. It was labelled Bank of Italy. We peered in. It appeared to be the Bank of Italy. We went back to the plaza where the map indicated to see if there was a building 4 on the plaza. An Italian man was telling some young English tourists, in
English, where something was, and we asked if they were looking for the international window of the post office. We and the English couple and another guy who had apparently also been searching for an international postal window finally reached the
right building, down the street a bit, not on the indicated plaza at all. The building was labelled with the names of lots of little unrelated office businesses; it had no Posta signs.



We went inside the first door on the left, as the friendly Italian guy had instructed. After standing in line for awhile, we got to the window, where an Italian guy asked us in Italian whether we wanted express mail or normal mail. I asked (I thought) in Italian, how much it would cost to send it express. He said, express or regular. I said regular. He said, "No, there" and pointed at the entrance of the big room. So we left the room and found another room with post office-like windows. We stood in line at the huge window that said Internazionale. The guy told us in English, "Stamp! Stamp! 4!" So we stood in line at bullet-proof glass enclosed window 4. Getting stamps involved going down to another window and putting our package into a box in the counter from which the number 4 postal worker retrieved it. She weighed it, sent it back through the box in the counter and we got our stamps. We glued the stamps on with a sticky brush and a pot of glue and went back to the Internazionale window. They tossed our package into a box of packages and we hope someday it will arrive in the US. We did not, among all those transactions, fill out any of the customs forms that are customary in other parts of Italy and Europe, so we may never see our 7 rolls of film again.



Also in Milan is the stupendous Duomo and the gorgeous Galleria, which if we have to have shopping malls is definitely how they ought to look.

Bologna

Bologna had a great covered farmer's market in the center of town with all the usual fresh veggies, sausages, cheeses and game, plus lots of strange local delicacies. We saw something in an elegant little jar called homogenized rabbit.



Bologna also has one of the highest remaining medieval towers in Europe (it told us which rank it had but that was a week ago, sorry) and along the (498) steps up to the top they have proudly placed plaques showing the heights of lesser towers.

Pisa

Sept. 10, 1999



Silly tower.