Frisco Vista

We’ve had several cherry tomatoes, but this is the first full-size tomato of this summer. Always an event!

Since converting our swimming pool to a garden we have had a lot more wildlife around. This year two pair of kestrels have taken up residence. We also have a lot of butterflies, beas, and hummingbirds.

This caterpillar is a swallowtail.

This year our garden has been a little deficient in red flowers. An exception is the Maltese Cross, which produces large globular composite flowers. These are doing well. Above you can see them in the garden; below is a close-up

This is the garden from the narrow side, looking west. Clevr had trouble with this image, so I just stitched it in Photoshop.

Hey! I see a weed!

Panorama of pool garden, year 2 on CleVR.com

We actually took a step backward this year, in a way, because we expanded the garden by taking out more concrete, and so we undid some of our work from last year. But the garden recovered nicely and is doing well, especially considering our cold, gloomy June. The monster plants on the right are tomatoes, which are already starting to bear fruit.

We have many bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds in the garden this year.

This year we decided to expand the garden that used to be a swimming pool. We broke up the decking that used to surround the pool.

The pool garden — the garden that used to be a swimming pool — turned out so well that we are expanding it. We hired a guy to break up more concrete from around where the pool used to be. It only took him about an hour. The result will about double the area of [...]

How bad has our drought been here in the San Francisco Bay Area? It’s been so dry that we were able to let our Thai hot chili peppers dry out on the vine. I harvested them just the other day, in January!

In April we filled in our swimming pool and turned it into a garden. This is what the garden looks like at the beginning of August.

Verbascum bombyciferum ‘Arctic Summer’ is a kind of mullein native to the mountains of Greece, but it makes quite a spectacle of itself in Bay Area gardens.

Perhaps the most attractive feature of the place is its large, wooly, silvery leaves, which grow in an attractive succulent-like (although the plant tolerates regular water) basal rosette pattern.

Well, three weeks, but we were away on vacation for one. Recently we filled in our swimming pool, which has now become a garden. I had some plants in containers waiting to be transplanted, and I’ve planted a bunch of other stuff as seeds. The garden is still a little raw, but I’m reasonably happy with the progress so far.

Hearst Castle offers five tours covering different parts of the buildings and grounds. One of these is the garden tour. The gardens are not spectacular, but they are decent examples of the mediterranean style.

At this time in spring, lantana is a prominent feature.

 
Mr. Vista has finally finished filling in his old swimming pool, which was built in the 1950s. He topped up the job with some local hero veggie mix from American Soil and Stone.
Dirt, as Jon Carroll has observed, is hardly dirt cheap. I think local hero runs around $35 a cubic yard. But it’s a [...]

San Francisco was hardly a forest before the swell in its population in the mid-nineteenth century — it was mostly coastal dunes, scrub, and marshland. The city’s most extraordinary transformation was achieved by John McLaren, who magically conjured up a woodland out of Golden Gate Park’s dunes.
Today the city is home to many types [...]

To celebrate Lunar New Year, the Conservatory of Flowers is presented a display of penjing, the miniature Chinese landscapes that were the precursor to the Japanese tradition of bonzai. The tiny landscapes are said to have begun as a way for China’s dynastic emperors to visualize the landscape of their far-flung empires. The landscapes [...]

Cold and rainy as it’s been, January and February are the best time to prepare Bay Area gardens for spring and summer bloom. With its yellow flowers edged in purple, I think “Etain” is one of the prettiest violas, and it does really well in our area. Highly recommended. You can get it from Annie’s Annuals.

This weekend (Jan. 26-27), a gardening symposium will be held at the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. The main focus is sustainable gardening. There a good lineup of speakers, but, regrettably, the symposium is rather expensive at $134 for day one and $125 for day two (slightly less [...]

Here’s another in my series of photos of water lilies. This is from the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. With this one you get a bonus: a water snake on one of the pads.
Lily 1 (Getty Villa)
Lily 2 (San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers) (Illustrator artwork)
More to come …

Here’s a good plant for Bay Area gardens. Most people probably know the common stock that is grown as an annual in many parts of the country. This version, perhaps close to the wild species found in the eastern Mediterranean, is a perennial in most of the Bay Area. It has a woody stem and grayish green foliage. It grows to about 2½ feet. In the summer it gets fragrant white flowers on short spikes. It can be grown from seed, or it’s available in 4-inch containers from Annie’s Annuals. Full sun, average water.

Annie’s Annuals in Richmond (at 740 Market Avenue) is holding their spring party this weekend, April 14-15. They will have free “supermarket sweep” raffles every hour — winners get 15 minutes of free shopping. There’s also a “gardening olympics” (“no athletic ability necessary”). Plus Calypso music, complimentary snacks and drinks, and gardening talks, as well [...]

It’s freezing — literally. Over here in the East Bay we’re looking at a week of lows around or under the freezing mark. I’ve been watering my plants and covering them with plastic at night when I can. But I don’t have enough plastic (or time) for all of them. My fuschias and brugmansias are [...]