Succulents and More™

Two years ago, in June 2015, I bought a dwarf jacaranda sold by Monrovia under the name 'Bonsai Blue' and I planted it in large concrete container on our back patio. Click here to read my original post. A lot of people have asked me how that jacaranda has fared. Time for an update! 'Bonsai Blue' is very much alive. In fact, it's blooming for the first time ever! I'm very excited because I wasn't sure it was ever going to flower, seeing how it receives only a few hours of direct sun. In full sun, I imagine it would be covered with flowers, just like a regular full-size Jacaranda mimosifolia .

I’ve made no secret of my love for the blue jacaranda ( Jacaranda mimosifolia ). This South American native may be a messy tree— really messy, not politely so like our ‘Desert Museum’ palo verde —but few trees can hold a candle to it for sheer beauty when in bloom. And even when it isn’t, its fern-like foliage is attractive year round. Quite a few cities in warmer climates turn a sea of blue when Jacaranda mimosifolia blooms in the late spring. This includes Pretoria , South Africa; Sydney , Australia; as well as Los Angeles and other places in Southern California. Even here in Davis we have a few jacarandas although my favorite tree on 8th Street was cut down last year (no idea why; it was the only thing pretty at an unattractive older apartment complex). When we removed the truly messy (there’s that word again!) ornamental purple plum next to the driveway in September 2013, I briefly toyed with the idea of planting a Jacaranda mimosifolia but ultimately decided in favor a ‘De...

We spent a good part of Saturday cleaning up the front patio. Over the winter, a lot of debris had collected in the nooks and crannies, including tons of leaves from neighborhood trees. It seems that our house always ends up with everybody else’s leaves! I’m really happy with how nice everything looks—although I have no illusions that it will stay that way forever, LOL.

At the beginning of the year I described 11 gardening projects I wanted to tackle in 2011 ( projects 1-5 , projects 7-11 ). How did I do? Let’s take a look.   1. Get more bamboo While 2011 didn’t see any major bamboo additions to our own garden due to a serious lack of space, I got a few small divisions in trades with other collectors: Phyllostachys aureosulcata 'Spectabilis', Fargesia nitida and Phyllostachys kwangsiensis . The Fargesia nitida died due to gardener error (mine), but the Phyllostachys kwangsiensis is growing nicely. The Phyllostachys aureosulcata 'Spectabilis' has tripled in size and is ready to go in the ground. I’m considering putting it in one of our two stock tanks in the back yard . Our existing bamboos put on a lot of height this year, especially the three in front of our house, Bambusa oldhamii , Bambusa chungii ‘Barbellata’ and Bambusa multiplex ‘Alphonse Karr’. These three clumping bamboos have grown tremendously, considering they ha...

I spent a couple hours in the morning removing suckers from two of our ornamental pear trees (‘Aristocrat’ and ‘Bradford’) that keep coming up everywhere. What joy! I wrote about this sucker problem before , so the less said on that topic, the better! To reward myself, I decided to tackle a few potting projects I hadn’t gotten around to yet. The first one was simple: Put the 1-gallon Puya coerulea var. violacea I bought at the last UC Davis Arboretum plant sale in a larger and nicer container. Puya coerulea var. violacea in its 1-gallon nursery container Puyas are terrestrial bromeliads and hence related to pineapples—the top of a pineapple looks quite similar to this puya. Most puyas are native to Chile and given time and space will form large clumps and eventually produce stunning flower stalks. This spring several large puyas were in bloom at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden but unfortunately I never got around to seeing them. My puya is a smaller species and will produc...

#3 of my 11 projects for 2011 is to dress up the dirt area next to our front patio. Initially I wanted to lay flagstone but due to my inexperience with this kind of work, I decided that decomposed granite (DG) is the way to go: cheaper and definitely faster. Since we needed bark mulch for the planting strip outside our front yard fence anyway ( click here to see this project ), I ordered some DG along with it. This is what this area looked like before:   I really hated the bare-dirt look, not to mention the fact that every time it rained this area got muddy. A couple of hours of prepping and hauling DG were all it took to produce a marvelous transformation. The color of the DG (officially called “ginger”, but to me it looks more like a sandy coral) really complements the existing flagstone patio as well the chocolate color of our house.       The DG really sets off the potted plants (mostly succulents) in this area.   This is ...