Lowly Weeds Take Over the Yard and His Vacation
Each spring I get so busy writing about gardening and visiting other people’s gardens that I never get enough time to enjoy my own. This year was going to be different--I would stop and smell the roses. I would take a week off when the garden was its fullest and just sit in the spring sun and enjoy it all. That was the plan.
The freak April storm that pounded us about two weeks ago was not part of the plan. Not everyone got the 2 inches of rain or the hail that fell from the night sky like I did. In Paramount, there were tornado-like winds.
A garden that looked glorious one day looked beaten after the storm. The hail shattered rose blossoms, snapped delphinium stalks, flattened some annual flowers and bent others. Days later, little dots appeared on the leaves of begonias and some succulents, bruised by the bullets of hail.
I am constantly amazed at the resilience of gardens. Although it took most of my one-week vacation for the garden to completely recover, it did bounce back. The storm left it too wet to work in, but after a few days the soil was perfect for weeding.
Weeding wasn’t in my vacation plans either. I actually like weeding, but people look at me rather sadly when I tell them I spent my vacation weeding. So I usually save this “chore” for Saturday mornings.
But it was hard to look at the garden and not weed because the longer I stared, the more weeds I spotted. Ignore them and they will scatter seed and there’ll be even more next year.
Many weeds are masters of camouflage. That burgundy-colored cousin of the common weedy oxalis can be right at your feet and you won’t see it until suddenly your eyes lock onto the color and then you see it everywhere. Another oxalis weaves itself into other plants hoping you won’t notice its leaves. Often I don’t, especially when it is interleaved with the similarly sized Australian violet in my front yard.
A new weed in my garden is an oxalis that grows from a cluster of little bulbs just below the surface. It is suddenly all over the place, and although I do not yet know its name, I suspect it might be “trouble.”
The dastardly weed named false garlic (Nothoscordum inodorum) tends to look like other, desirable bulbous plants. The weed has slim, grayish leaves and nodding, white, bell-shaped flowers. Although I carefully dug all the false garlic from my garden many years ago, I still find good-sized clumps, which means it managed to grow undetected for several years. If you let this one go for a year or two, it will make dozens of little bulblets that fall from the roots when you dig it up (false garlic also sets copious seed).
So dig deep, and carefully lift the roots and bulblets along with some soil, and throw them all in the garbage. Try to save the soil and you will also keep some little bulblets that will come back to haunt you.
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Another bulb--a tulip of all things--is becoming weedy. In a section that is seldom watered in summer, the lady tulip (Tulipa clusiana chrysantha)--the wildling from Iran and Iraq with the red and pale yellow petals--has made a dense clump of leaves and spread into some low plantings where it is not supposed to be--the definition of “weed.” This tulip blooms each year (unlike most others), but when there are too many of these little tulip bulbs, blooming stops.
I decided that the many weedy leaves weren’t worth the few, short-lived flowers, so I dug all the bulbs out while they were still attached to their leaves, hoping that not too many baby bulbs were left behind to become future weeds. While I was at it, I dug out a germander in the same bed that had overstrayed its welcome.
Lest you think my vacation was all weeding and no play--and that I am a very dull boy indeed--I did find plenty of time to just sit on the raised lip of the lily pond in back, or on the steps in front, where I could enjoy the view and the scents of spring. The garden really was quite nice, though the crescendo of blooms came a week after I had gone back to work.
Predicting when a garden will hit its peak is a flat-out impossibility. Gardeners are constantly saying, “You should have been here last week” or “in a few more weeks.” This year has been harder than most since everything seems determined to bloom at once. The roses were late and the agapanthus early, which has made our garden “look like a candy store” according to my wife. There are almost too many flowers in bloom--one hardly knows what to look at first.
I can blame this look partially on the fact that I am constantly trying new things so I can write about them with at least some authority. I don’t want to be recommending some new plant that turns out to be California’s next roadside weed.
As many nursery people can attest, I also have a hard time saying no to buying a pretty plant. There was a time when my garden was carefully planned--down to the colors I would allow--but that time is long past. Any and all are now welcome. The best I can do is make sure that similar colors get grouped so the garden is not too kaleidoscopic.
My spring bulbs are almost finished, and there were disappointments and triumphs in this department. I was crushed when a Dutch iris named ‘Rusty Beauty’ turned out be mostly yellow, not brown, as I had hoped. I mentioned in an earlier column how I had planted it near a rusted metal gate in the hope that the two would harmonize. It was a very pretty iris but not the color I had hoped for.
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On the other hand, a newly available (in the fall) onion relative named Allium siculum, from southern France and Sicily, did a fairly good imitation (from a distance) of brownish tan by mixing the green, cream and purplish maroon in its pendulous flowers.
On 32-inch stems, these flowers stand well above others, and this is their second year blooming in my garden. That means this allium is probably a bulb with staying power, and I find the odd coloration of unusual merit. Of course, you could be of the opinion that it is a sad excuse for color.
More new stuff that looks good this spring: a compact and bluer native sisyrinchium named ‘California Skies’; a pure, blood-red native monkey flower that came from the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden sale two autumns ago; Orthosiphon labiatus, a little shrub from a Huntington Botanical Gardens sale of several years ago, with frilly, lavender flowers that usually bloom in the fall but are in bloom now; and a watsonia named ‘Peach Glow’ that is a wonderful, warm orange, currently lighting one corner of the front garden.
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Watsonias are grand but often-overlooked bulbs for California gardens, tolerating some summer watering (which most bulbs don’t like) and growing tall, from 3 to 6 feet. We’ve been growing one with small pink flowers on spikes that get to 7 feet high, arching out of our garden and into my neighbor’s driveway. It was sold to us as Watsonia marginata, but I suspect it’s something else. Whatever it is, this is a big bulb that almost doesn’t fit in our garden!
You’d think that someone who knows he has planted way too much would stop. But ask Frank Burkard at Burkard Nurseries in Pasadena. On the very busy Saturday just past, I bought some peach-colored verbenas, a begonia appropriately named ‘Cherry Blossom’, several new grasses and a 4-inch-tall burgundy carex that I plan to grow between stepping stones, plus a dramatic gold and burgundy black-bearded iris named ‘Spanish Dancer.’ What can I say? I’m a sucker for a pretty face!
Write to Robert Smaus, SoCal Living, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053; fax to (213) 237-4712; or e-mail robert.smaus@latimes.com.
