Good morning!
The local leaflet otherwise known as the San Diego Union-Tribune has a really good little garden section on Saturday mornings. Included today is a list of all the garden tours that are going to be conducted this spring. Sometimes a neighborhood garden tour can be wonderful. Sometimes just walking down a street can be a garden tour for free.
Near St Paul's Church, on Nutmeg, is a huge Craftsman style bungalow. It has been purchased by someone, I guess, for it's undergoing renovations. The owner has painted the exterior a dark ash-green color. That goes well with the "beams" of wood that criss-cross for decoration across the top of the house. One of the best things so far has been the planting of native-type plants all over the yard, but especially in the parking--the space between the sidewalk and the street. The passerby gets the most rewarding contact with a variety of plants large and small just by walking along the street. I took a little blossom and leaf from a tall airy plant with grey fuzzy leaves and large yellow flowers, and sent it to my son Ben to ask if it were a mallow. No, he wrote back, he thinks it's a flannel bush. I need to go to a Native Plant Nursery to check.
Benjamin lives in the SF Bay Area, in Concord. Concord is so far from the water that it's hard to mention "Bay" and Concord in one breath. However, up to the north he's not too far from Suisun Bay and all that. But in my opinion the climate is closer to that of sundried and winter-frozen Sacramento than, say, Berkeley. Every foot you get away from the water up there is a climate changer. Everyone who loves maps as much as the Yazzybel does should go to an atlas and look at the area where Concord is. Look at the Delta area...that is where the Bay finally goes into lowland and marshland. Islands. Canals. Interesting. Hot as Hades in summer.
Well, anyway, Ben is an avid gardener. He lives in a small condo-type residential area which is traditional (plants of the seventies) and neat and upscale as much as possible. I say condo-type in that his yard ends at the neighbor's wall. He has a nice big yard on that side and a more than generous front yard. He decided to make his front yard all native plants. Not California natives. Real local natives. Those plants should be able to sustain themselves by climate alone, no? Difficult! Plus, nothing is green, much. It is too hot and dry even for natives, apparently. I am in favor of pergolas in such a climate as his and mine. I've found that "full sun" is too much sun sometimes. Tempering with a little shade is often desirable. Like my lemon tree which does much better under some sort of covering, no matter what the Sunset Garden Book may say.
Ben's back yard is wonderful. Last year he had melons, watermelons, cucumbers, peppers, lots of wonderful tomatoes, strawberries, and a variety of fruit trees. Variety is a good word for the fruit trees because hardly any of them bear just one species of fruit. "Fruit Salad" is not a misnomer. Right now he's just put in a cherry that is going to put our five (can that be right? Five? ) kinds of cherries. I'd be happy with just one...
I love people's gardens, and I love the fact that they garden. Right now, I have one heatless jalapeno pepper which is bearing its insipid fruits right now, seven arugula plants which are beginning to look like something...two tomatoes which need a boost for fruiting, and a myriad of blooming plants. The front yard looks nice in front of the garage, where there is climbing rosemary, Cleveland sage, thyme, Mexican sage, Mexican Marigold, and a lot of orange-yellow-gold ice plant to fill in with color. And two thriving Sticks of Fire, which are at their most colorful right now. I need to take a picture and learn how to put it on so that I can show you how pretty it is. The rosemary has blue flowers, the thyme has tiny lavendar flowers, the sages both have purple flowers, the Mexican Marigold has yellow flowers, and there's some white dusty-miller with yellow flowers too. And all that ice plant. And the Sticks of Fire are brilliant rose red with a little yellow and green trim. Lovely color combination. I could go on forever about a garden. YAZZYBEL
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