A Five-Gallon Plant in a Three-Hour Hole

The tall native Yaupon Holly at the garage side of the house gives food and shelter to the birds and delights the eye with its white bark, evergreen leaves and red berries. But it's not visible from our windows - we need another yaupon, planted where we can see it. In mid-December we bought a small, berried Ilex vomitoria at the Natural Gardener and for a couple of weeks moved the container around the yard, looking at it from the breakfast room window, from the bench near the gate and from the table on the patio. We settled on this spot with morning sun and afternoon shade. If we live long enough, the slow-growing yaupon may soften our view of the neighboring house.

Wouldn't planting a tree on New Year's Day be a good way to start 2009? It should be a snap for two people to plant one 5-gallon container. We know how to plant native trees in Austin: dig the hole no deeper than the depth of the rootball but at least 2 or 3 times as wide. But knowing and doing are not the same thing when we've been here only 4 and 1/2 years while the house and garden have existed for 3 decades.
Two Cobrahead tools removed grass easily and the digging fork and spade made a small dent - time to bring out the mattock.The expected fist-sized rocks appear but what the heck is under the grass? With effort we pry out something in 3-inch thick, broad, flat chunks. This seems to be a rather broad and solid layer of ....what? Not exactly rock....it's hard but the edges crumble when smashed with a tool.... could it be compressed sand?
Philo examines grooves molded into this not-quite-sandstone substance
He thinks the grooves were made by the plastic liner of an above-ground pool or pond. Perhaps the weight of the water compressed a thick layer of sand into this rock-like layer. The chunks of compressed sand are hauled off to the no-man's land between vegetable garden and fence.
Sailing is still not smooth - mattock, breaker bar and sledge hammer are needed to crack up larger subsurface rocks so at last they can be taken out in pieces. We need all our tools. That's Philo's older Cobrahead with the yellow handle; my prize from Spring Fling is light blue. The breaker bar is heavy black iron. Philo made the bench.
The rock chunks are added to the pile under the pecan on the south end of the yard.
Three hours after beginning this project the yaupon is watered in. Grow little tree!
After all these photos of rocks and dirt you deserve something pretty. The pink climbing rose has one bloom - out of focus because I had to hold the camera way over my head.


One camellia flower shows behind the Chinese Witch Hazel/RazzleDazzle/Loropetalum chinense, which is unexpectedly in bloom now.One paperwhite has opened in translucent beauty. Lori the Gardener of Good & Evil has been tweeting her attempts to find a good-smelling paperwhite. This bulb has been in the garden a few years but it was originally potted for indoor forcing with no species listed on the gift package. When it bloomed on the windowsill its beauty was equalled by its stinkyness - I'm glad paperwhites can grow outside in Austin!

March Means Hauling & Planting

Last week our tree service informed us that the stump-grinding machine was temporarily broken, so we can't procede with our plans for that area.

We plunked a birdbath on the stump of the Arizona Ash and ignored the front yard to concentrate on the back.

This was a hunter/gatherer weekend for the Transplantable Rose, with stops for a few tomato and pepper plants, several trips to the U-dig place for organic compost and decomposed granite and a trip to pick up more rocks.
Last year we planted a good-sized Barbados Cherry/Malpighia glabra in an existing border, evicting what was left of a corky spiraea. At that time, we cleared out every visible bit of the hideous Asian Jasmine, decided to leave some mini-roses in place and put off thinking about the wooden border edge until some future date.

M Sinclair Stevens had shared some of her Oxblood Lilies/Rhodophiala bifida., She kindly handed the bulbs over to me while they were still blooming last September, which meant we enjoyed the flowers even before the bulbs were were planted here.

There was space at the very front of the border for some Oxblood lilies, a few bargain daffodils, a motley collection of former holiday Amaryllis and small divisions of the purple oxalis from another border.

This doesn’t sound like the kind of project you’ll see in a glossy magazine, does it? So much of our puttering is making small changes, reusing what’s already here, nibbling away at the parts we don't like and doing a lot of things just to see what will happen.
After the ice and cold this winter, I was disappointed but not surprised when the Barbados cherry showed no sign of life. [Both Durantas, some Lantanas and both Tecoma stans/Esperanzas look like goners, too.] So last weekend we pulled up the dead cherry and decided to make the back half of the border into a raised bed, using some good-sized rocks from our stash as walls. But that meant hauling more compost, and a lot of decomposed granite.

Finding what you want in a garden center or material yard can be easy, but buying it can take forever. Over the weekend, some nurseries were fast, some not, and at the U-dig place things did not go well either on Saturday or Sunday. People running registers didn’t know how to enter the prices, and on a return trip we ran into non-functioning computers.

Unfortunately, after too many long lines, I behaved as erratically as the computers. I was inside waiting to pay for compost & gravel while fretting that Philo was doing all the grunt work. At one point, distracted by photos of gigantic, organically-grown Alaskan vegetables, I mistakenly thought that a young man was line-jumping and got quite cranky with him. He was perfectly innocent, and even worse – the guy had on an Austin Film Society shirt, and I’m a member of the same group. At least I didn’t have on a Divas of the Dirt t-shirt, because I wouldn't want the other Divas to be disgraced by my public display of grumpiness!

By the time I got outside, Philo had done all the heavy loading work for a second time, and we went home to finish planting the bed.

Although the Barbados Cherry didn't work out, we hope to make a different native evergreen grow in our garden. In the raised part, we planted a Rhus virens/ Evergreen Sumac bought at the Lady Bird Johnson Winter tree festival. That's a narrow decomposed granite path behind it, so I'll have somewhere to stand when clipping and fighting the wiry, insidious jasmine. The sumac is small, but has an interesting shape and beautiful leaves. I really hope this one survives! And maybe by the time it has gained some height and substance, we’ll be able to replace that clunky wooden border with something better.

This post needs a beautiful flower photo. Last November, Pam/Digging gave me a division of her ‘Amethyst’ iris, and on Sunday it produced this flower. In the past, two other Iris plants labeled purple turned out to be orange. I'm still hoping that another, not-yet-bloomed iris will be somewhere in the promised purple range.
But when Pam says it's a purple Iris you can count on it.

I’m thrilled, Pam! Thank you so much. We had two-and-a-half inches of rain last night, for which I’m also thrilled and thankful.