Garden Nostalgia- Fernleaf Peony

When a fragrant white ginger or a loquat tree or the Little Gem magnolia is in bloom, being in Austin seems to have advantages over colder places ... but when Dee of Red Dirt Ramblings put up last year's peony pictures, it makes me feel as if we Zone 8 folks have the short end of the stick! Ah, Peonies!

Dee talked about the possibility of peonies living longer than their owners, and she also mentioned ordering her peonies from Klehm's Song Sparrow Nursery. That made me remember a plant given to me by a long-ago neighbor. Lee said that her lovely Paeonia tenuifolia came from the personal collection of a Klehm family member decades before we met. One autumn she split off a small piece and shared her Passalong peony with me. It grew for a few years before showing the first flower and by 1996 made the May bouquet in the old photo. I knew that trying to bring it here was equivalent to murder so regretfully left it behind. In my mind the fernleaf peony is still there, and still blooming every May.

Tomorrow is Another (Garden) Day

Yes, the weather is hot and it's very dry. Yes, we could be heading to the kind of historic drought that gripped Central Texas in the 1950's. At my house the container plants get water and so do the borders. I water the tomato patch and the young trees and non-established shrubs but not the lawn. The grass looks okay where it grows next to the borders, the lawn is hanging on unwatered in the shade, and it is dying in the parkway and in the sunny parts of the front yard.


But I don't want to talk about any of that! Today I want to be Scarlet O'Hara, ignoring reality to concentrate on what's still good as we mark a "late-1970's ranch-style home" anniversary...it was five years ago that Philo & I bought this house, got the keys and began the move here, bringing a pile of plants along.We'd spent the previous 5 years living in another part of Austin, in a tall house on a canyon with deer in the front yard, a view, and nearly 100 pots of plants hiding from the deer on the deck. Losing the view was not fun and it would be very different to live with a flat, fenced back yard. That almost-blank slate was pretty exciting, even though the backyard was smaller than the front yard and shaped like a trapezoid. In the photo above you see the original long view across the back of the oddly-shaped back yard. Two pecans grew at the far end and most of the yard was grass. The concrete patio was a rectangle large enough to hold the table & grill.
When you entered at the gate a few medium-sized pink crepe myrtles grew along the left fence and a metal shed held tools and the mower. Nothing terrible, just normal and kind of boring. But what we wanted was something interesting. We wanted to walk out the back door and feel as if we were going Somewhere.

Five years in are we closer to that goal? When we open the gate the white Acoma crepe myrtles have filled in along the fence and reached up to soften the magenta explosion from the next yard:

Look down the long axis today and it's obvious that the pecan trees have grown, that the grass has been turned into mixed borders and that the patio has expanded. Our original view from the breakfast room window was the inside of the old shed - now we look out to watch the fountain add sound and motion to the life-giving water flowing for birds & beasts.Whether you come in the gate or come out from inside the house there's always something to do, something to see, somewhere to go - perhaps to check out a magnolia with edges browning almost as soon as it unfurled, its decrepit beauty still appreciated by a bee.
Maybe I could take a photo of an open flower on the Bauhinia/Orchid tree from my friend Ellen so the image can be used to help identify the species.
I can take back my earlier complaints about partial shade delaying the formation of blue blooms on the Duranta and instead rejoice that the shade gives the plant some relief from the intense sun.

Taking out the trash can be an adventure since it brings me near enough to admire the yellow Plumeria/Frangipani against the blue sky, even while hoping for dark clouds!
I can bend down to pull a few weeds and see the Crocosmia flames and Yarrow sparks at the base of the white Acoma crepe myrtle
Against the back fence a few tomatoes haven't given up - not the sturdy grape tomato 'Juliet', which sets fruit in heat and not the old favorite 'Early Girl'. A couple of 'Carmello's have set and might grow to maturity while the single plant of 'Costoluto Genovese' produces one small fruit every day. That's not shade cloth from a garden store - it's an old cotton curtain bought for a slider door, then used on an interior doorway, now draped over the birdnetting, held up by Philo's homemade wooden tomato scaffold.


At the back of the small plot the volunteer Pattypan makes tiny perfect squashes.
And in the shade under the curtain the tomatoes do their best. As you saw in the last post, I bring them in the second they show any color and put them on the counter, ripening just fine because the kitchen is always at least 80°F. Developing inside is a good idea right now. I've finally caught up with the 2009 events at the Divas of the Dirt blog and am gradually reworking the archives from 2001 to 2008, using the text from the original website with added photos. A new song is in the works, too, but until then, here's the Pond Song I wrote last summer - the 18th and 19th of July are the dates for this year's Austin Pond Society Tour.

Our Kitchen Garden

Here at Circus~Cercis we have a Kitchen Garden. It's exciting to see and read about people all over the country deciding to grow food for the first time by starting "Victory Gardens" - we wish all you Victory Gardeners the best of luck! Our relationship with Kitchen Gardens is longstanding, so for us that name sounds better. Growing vegetables wasn't something we decided to do - it's something we've always done.

Philo remembers long drives to the small town where his grandfather lived, the small frame house and the garden with rows of beets and onions .
I remember my grandmother's small Chicago garden with Swiss Chard and Rhubarb and parsley and remember 'helping' my aunt with her suburban garden.

Where Philo and I grew up, even if there were no rows of vegetables, most yards had some kind of food plants - apple or pear trees, a grape vine for jelly, a clump of rhubarb or a raspberry thicket.

Almost everyone had a tomato patch. I well remember the gross-out chore of picking hornworms off tomato leaves and there's a permanent photographic record of Philo's early success with tomatoes.




As newlyweds in the late 1960's we planted flowers and a few vegetables near the door of our aluminum graduate school hut and squeezed in a few tomatoes and flowers around a rented townhouse in the early 1970's. Once we bought a house on a quarter-acre of land, we could begin the first of 5 real kitchen gardens. In all five gardens we've dealt with clay soil, semi-shade, tree roots and ravenous animals. The first three houses were in the Western Suburbs of Chicago.


Garden #1 (1973-1977) had several large wild cherry trees on the lot but there was a sunny place behind the garage to grow beans and tomatoes and squash and peppers.

Garden #2 (1977-1987) was on a lot with old pear and crabapple trees and wild grape vines. Philo fitted the main bed into the semi-sunny corner of the back fence, eventually adding raspberry trellises and garden grapes.


Another patch in sun on the opposite fence let the kids in the sandbox watch the zucchinis grow and a trellis on the side of the garage let us enjoy the new Sugar Snap peas.

At Garden #3 (1987-1999) we had a reasonably large space at the back of a long narrow lot. Even though the lot was overhung with wild cherries, mulberries and Box elders, this garden really pumped out peppers and tomatoes! Philo had all the salsa he could wish for but I never had enough zucchini. The fence helped keep out rabbits and groundhogs but couldn't save the squash from the squirrels.


Then we moved to Texas, and instead of owning arable land we lived in the deer-filled Austin hills. At Garden # 4 we did our best to grow a few peppers in pots on the deck and tomatoes inside this 4 and 1/2 foot tall, deer-resistant wire enclosure. The soaker hose failed in this situation and the deer nipped every leaf that dared to stray outside the wire. Philo started our current Kitchen Garden #5 in fall 2004, a few months after we moved to this house and had Swiss Chard & tomatoes by June 2005. As usual, the plot isn't in full sun, the soil is heavy clay and tree roots creep in from the other side of the fence, but after 5 years of stooping over to fit into the wire house, this feels like a real garden!Instead of either Kitchen Garden or Victory Garden, Yolanda Elizabet uses the term Potager, encompassing not only her decorative vegetable plantings, but grapevines, fruit trees, cold frames, a greenhouse & conservatory. That very cool word may be a little too grand for a 9 X 10 sort-of-raised bed of tomatoes, peppers and a few salad vegetables. We have no greenhouse or conservatory but we've grown wonderful lemons, we hope each year for loquats, pomegranates and figs, were astonished by a crop of edible pecans one memorable autumn and all year long use the herbs planted in troughs and tucked into flower beds. Marjoram and thyme grow in the hypertufa trough above, along with a plant of Italian parsley shared by Rock Rose Jenny. No matter how long you garden, there are new things to learn. We no longer incorporate pecan leaves from our two large trees into the soil, but once the juglone-free Arizona Ash leaves fell this winter we had enough to redo part of the garden using a modified version of Renee's lasagna method. We used timbers to hold up the 'lasagna' in two areas of the garden, one 3' X 4' square and another 2' X 3', making layers of existing soil, decomposed granite, various composts and the dry leaves, then watered regularly and waited. The front edge got a sprinkling of radish and spinach seeds, some shallots and a line of red onions. About 10 days ago I dug the rest of the bed over and made cedar mulch paths. I hunted around to find the soaker hose and decided to give it another try. Last week Philo revised and reinforced the Tomato Scaffolding from last summer and we set it into place. On Sunday we planted a few tomato and pepper plants, adding more soil, compost and granite as we planted. 'Juliet' already has a few flowers but I'm still trying to decide whether it's a good idea in this climate to cover the soaker hose with mulch - what do you think? Even if the drought breaks, the intense summers mean we can't get yields in Austin like the ones in Illinois, but we'll enjoy whatever we can get!In the back of the garden I'm experimenting with an old wooden box discarded by my youngest son and his friends. For years the guys kept it behind the shed, hauling it out once in awhile to use as a backstop. After long exposure to Austin weather one end started to rot off and the box was moved to the trash area, waiting for Bulky Trash Day. But then I had the idea to talk Philo into fixing the bad end and drilling drainage holes in the bottom. I lined it with roll window screen, put it near the fence where nothing ever grows, filled it with potting soil and even though it was a little late in the season, planted seeds. To keep the squirrels and birds out of it I covered the soil with some old racks from the garage. On a recent visit my son took a look at the vegetable garden, and I showed him the seeds sprouting in the repurposed ammo box, saying that it might need a decorative sign. My son knows me too well...he raised an eyebrow and asked, "Peas on Earth?"

Pretty close - what I'd been thinking was "Give Peas A Chance".