Garden
Burden Or Beauty?
My two yards are like a mullet: business in the front and party in the back. I’ve never gotten around to converting my scruffy front lawn to a more interesting water-efficient landscape, but my husband and I have created our personal paradise in the back.
I didn’t mean to keep it a secret, but only a small circle of family and friends usually see it. Our garden was designed for my obsession with plants and my husband’s addiction to tomatoes, not for garden tours or large-scale entertaining.
Our Urban Forest
Whenever I hear a chainsaw buzzing in my neighborhood, my heart sinks and my stomach clenches. Are we going to lose yet another beloved shade tree?
My husband and I see ghost trees everywhere in our East Sacramento neighborhood, remembering majestic giants that once filled the now-empty sky and shaded summer-sizzling sidewalks and yards. These trees weren’t ours, but we loved them and miss them still.
The Art of Espalier
I began seeing espaliered plants long before I knew the word “espalier,” and certainly before I knew how to pronounce it (either es-pal-YAY or es-pal-YER is correct). However you say it, the practice of training woody plants, such as fruit trees or ornamental shrubs, flat against a wall or support can be decorative and interesting, produce more and better flowers and fruit, and allow you to grow otherwise too-large plants in a limited space.
Garden of the Gods
It’s still summer, but it’s time to plant winter (cool-season) vegetables.
If you get them in the ground while the days are still relatively long, you can harvest this winter. If you wait too long, peas will pause and broccoli will balk. Dormancy sets in when there are less than 10 hours of daylight. You need to give winter crops a head start before plant growth slows down or stops altogether.
More Plants, Less Mulch
In Sacramento gardens, I’ve observed that the roots of drought-tolerant plants, such as lavender, salvia and penstemon, will rot if they are kept constantly moist by a layer of woodchips.
I’ve also worried that covering up all bare soil with mulch, which UC Berkeley entomologist Dr. Gordon Frankie calls “mulch madness,” will make it hard for native bees to find places to nest.
When should we mulch? And when does mulching create more problems than it solves?
Nasty Nutsedge
A friend sent me a photo of a dramatic flowering stem displayed proudly in a vase. It looked a bit like a floral firework, with a single triangular stalk topped by spiky leaves, centered with clusters of little white flowers. “What is this plant?” she asked. She had been told that it was papyrus, which it resembles, but she feared it was something bad. It was.