Succulents and More™

Of all the shrubs in the garden, my favorite is Acacia aphylla . This oddball from Western Australia lacks traditional leaves (hence the common name “leafless rock wattle”). Instead, its zigzaggy blue-green stems perform photosynthesis. These stems, which give the plant its striking sculptural appearance, are adapted to reduce water loss in the dry, arid conditions where it naturally grows – not so different from here. From a distance, Acacia aphylla looks like a bluish cloud hovering over the sidewalk bed. In late winter, mid- to late-February, it’s covered with bright yellow ball-shaped flowers. This is what it looked like this year: The red-flowering shrub behind it is Grevillea ‘Scarlet Sprite’, thought to be a hybrid of Grevillea rosmarinifolia and another unknown grevillea: I like the two together, but both were getting too large for this spot – or any spot in our small garden. This is what Acacia aphylla looked like yesterday morning: With curbside yard-waste pickup coming up ...

Last week we hired a yard service professional to dig up two large clumps of miscanthus in front of our house. Over the weekend, I did a lot of additional trimming and pruning. By Sunday evening, we had several yard waste piles waiting for Monday morning pickup.

It goes without saying that I’m fond of the plants we have in our garden. After all, why grow something you don’t like? The same applies to our bamboos. We have about 30 different bamboo species in our garden. About half—the clumping bamboos--are in the ground, the others—running bamboos—are firmly contained in pots. While I like virtually all of them, I do have my favorites. One of them is chocolate bamboo ( Borinda fungosa ), a shade-loving clumping bamboo from the mountains of southwestern China. When exposed to the sun, its culms turn a lovely reddish brown, hence its common name. I planted a chocolate bamboo in our Asian-inspired woodland garden in the fall of 2009. Read this post to see photos of what this area looked like at the time. In the following two years, what had started out as a spindly-looking plant grew into a beautiful specimen that has become the focal point of this corner of the backyard. I loved how everything looked this spring: May 14, 2011 Over the cou...

Sometimes you do one big thing in your garden that has an immediate and dramatic impact, like installing a water feature or plopping down a giant rock. But that doesn’t happen all that often. Most of the time it’s many little things that contribute to the overall result. Chores fall in that category. Each one individually may not be much, but it all adds up. For me, a typical weekend of gardening consists of a variety of seemingly unrelated tasks. Some are dictated by the weather or the season, others are the result of what I feel like doing that day. I often bumble about from one thing to the other, with no aim other than to be outside and have fun in the garden. Today was a day just like that. I didn’t really know what I wanted  to accomplish when I started out, but at the end of the day I felt satisfied with what I had gotten done. The first order of business was doing some pruning on our Washington Navel orange tree. It’s a dwarf tree, more than 15 years old now, and we’re t...