It has been terribly busy in the last few months since we are moving to a bigger home. We have put up our old home for sale and it is almost certain that it will be sold in the next month or so. When we first bought it in 1999, the backyard was 1000 square feet of bare dirt. My wife and I spent most of our leisure time for more than a year to get it into shape. About eight tons of bad soils were hauled out before new soil, new pavers, and new plants all came in. It seemed like every week there was a pile of something on the driveway, and it was very exciting to see all the changes and progresses. That experience was a major factor for me to make the decision of becoming a landscape designer. It was so much more rewarding than working hard on an engineering project for several months only to see it getting cancelled for some other reasons.
Here are some photos of our garden in the beautiful and wet spring of 2010:
1. One of the frontyard beds completed in 2008 after removing a boring Bradford Pear tree and a small patch of lawn. The big shrub with blue spikes of flowers is Echium candicans ‘Star of Madeira’ and the giant-leafed plant in the back is Tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Steroidal Giant’. Both are extremely fast growers.
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Every February I get a nice preview of most of the new things that will show up at our local nurseries by attending the NORCAL trade show in San Mateo Event Center. This one-day program is intended for all the wholesale vendors and suppliers to show their products to retail outlets. Naturally the most important visitors are the buyers from retail nurseries and some of them will place orders on the spot. As a landscape designer, I am also a potential customer and I get to see a lot of cool new garden products such as fountains, containers, tools, etc. However, the plant nut in me is always attracted to those star plants making their debut, and this year we have several noteworthy newcomers.
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Right before the beginning of this week-long barrage of storms, I went on a tour to see a Persian fruit tree nursery (Pars Produce in Alamo, CA) and a hilltop garden in Lafayette. Even though the nursery was messy and had exorbitant prices, they do stock some unique fruit cultivars from Iran. I ended up getting a Saveh Pomegranate and a tart Cherry of Esfahan.
Our next garden, however, is a total gem that covers nine acres of a south-facing slope studded with native oaks. The homeowners are young and energetic, and one of them owns an exotic plant nursery. Naturally his garden has become a trial ground of some of his favorite plants. Here are some snapshots of that wonderland.
Garden Gate with flanking Chamaedorea radicalis
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In early May, I was fortunate to get invited by the Huntington Botanical Garden to give a talk about Classical Chinese Gardens in Suzhou. While over there, I went back to visit the Classical Chinese Garden on site, Liu Fang Yuan (流芳园) The Garden of Flowing Fragrance.
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Winter can be dreadful even for USDA Zone 9 gardeners, especially when we saw temperature reading like this in my garden on December 7 (30F, or about -1C). The cold night before means that for the rest of winter we have to look at some damaged leaves, which are said to be better left on for their residual protection against more frost. However, in my case I can not help pruning several subtropicals since too many of them suffered moderate to heavy damage, including Alocasia Caliodora, Hedychium Dr. Moy, Ensete ventricosum Maurelii, Michelia alba, and Brugmansia Miner’s Claim. In the top right photo, a Heliconia scheidiana ‘Fire and Ice’ is doing a little better than a Babaco plant beneath it, which means the former might be one or two degrees hardier. (more…)
Ask any serious art collectors and they will tell you that the contemporary art scene in Beijing is on par with all of those traditional strongholds such as Paris or New York. For many, 798 Art District is a poster child of this movement, if not already a little over its peak since its popularity with tourists has made it less attractive for artists.
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Sorry if there is any confusion, but my topic today is a new garden of ancient plants at the San Francisco Botanical Garden near its north entrance . I happened upon this garden after I took my brother to the California Academy of Sciences last month. Even after a tour that is too brief, I can strongly recommend this little gem to all gardeners for not just its nice collection of exotic plants, but also for its very well designed layout and beautifully constructed hardscape. Here are some of my photos:
Dinosaur foot prints set the mood!
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Just before I typed this, I have finished frost-proofing most of my semi-tender plants in containers. The forecast says that we will have some cold Arctic air arriving tonight and it will get down to around 34F with the next night even colder. Normally what we have here in the Bay Area is dry freeze with clear nights and no wind. For that I usually just put up umbrellas and awnings, and use anti-transpirant such as Cloud Cover if it is below 28F. But this time it looks like it is going to be a rare wet freeze. Hopefully it will not go down below 32F, or my garage will be completely filled with plant refugees.
This year is an El Nino year, and usually that means wetter but milder weather through the winter. I still remember the last major El Nino in 1998 when it seemed to have rained non-stop from January to May with a few flooding events thrown in. So far this fall is a particularly mild one as proven by these wild mustards at an empty former orchard field near where I live:
Fields of gold
Close-up
Normally this kind of show is reserved for March, but this year is definitely not normal. One English poet once said: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”. It seems like spring has cut the line this time and I hope that she won’t get punished too severely.
The title is a bit misleading, but I am talking about China Doll Tree, or Radermachera sinica, which is a common house plant. A friend told me about a mature tree in downtown Mountain View on Bush street near Dana. I went for a quick look a few months ago. This particular specimen is already a medium sized tree that is much higher than the two-story building next to it.
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As the capital of China for the last six hundred years, Beijing is blessed with many huge and elaborate royal gardens. Surprisingly, it can not lay claim to the largest surviving royal garden. The 1380-acre-plus Imperial Summer Villa is in a small city called Chengde about 160 miles to the northeast of Beijing. Since I have never been there even though I lived in Beijing for over ten years, I made sure to include this garden on my trip back to China in October. (more…)
