Reed Fencing on Chain Link Fence

My neighbors are attempting to be urban farmers and have a flock of several chickens. The neighbors initially wanted their chickens to be entirely free range - not even any fences to keep them in the yard. I like chickens, but they are powerful diggers and can do a fair amount of damage to a garden in just a few minutes. I would often come home from work to find large ruts dug in my various beds, mulch kicked over paths and groundcovers, new growth of some plants pecked and eaten, and on one memorable occasion, the chickens left a spectacularly large and messy turd on my porch. After I complained about the persistent damage, the neighbors reluctantly put in some shoddily installed chain link fence scraps wired to recycled metal fence posts.

This worked to contain the chickens and I barely noticed either the fence or the chickens for a couple of years, until I cut back my massive English laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) hedge. What was previously an evergreen, nearly impenetrable privacy screen 60 feet long by 20 feet wide and 20 feet tall (18m x 6m x 6m) was now a void offering a clear view to the chain link fence and the neighboring yard. Since my neighbors live uphill, it also gave them a clear line of sight into the previously secluded garden courtyard and much of the house.

Neighbor's chicken coop and chain link fence before.

Building a proper cedar privacy fence is probably not in the budget this year, but a solution was to be found in the garden shed: several rolls of reed fending which I had planned to use for a landscaping client but never did. An hour and half and several small zip ties later and a fair amount of privacy has been restored:



Neighbor's chicken coop and chain link fence mostly hidden after.

Hopefully even this reed fence will be invisible after planting some new shrubs and allowing for a couple years of growth.


Bloom Day Addendum: Loquat

I overlooked my loquat tree (Eriobotrya japonica), which has been blooming steadily since about Thanksgiving, for the December bloom day. The buds and blooms have survived two rounds of mild frost without damage so far.

 

Loquats rarely set fruit in Seattle due to the blooms' sensitivity to cold. Fingers crossed I might see some fruit this coming year.

Flash Back: Nursery Hopping 2014

I suppose that having gardening as a main hobby means that nursery hopping is likely secondary hobby. The Seattle area as some pretty good nurseries from which I obtain plants and inspiration. Here's a small selection:

Flower World. This Maltby area nursery is vast and reasonably priced. It does not have much in the way of choice collector type plants, but it does have many staples. It also has a houseplant section that is unrivaled in the Seattle area and perhaps all of Washington. Here is the interior of one of their many greenhouses featuring baskets of glowing variegated Algerian ivy dripping down onto ranks of evergreen shrubs:

Here is a small part of the houseplants selection at Flower World:

Molbak's. This Woodville institution has a large selection of plants, though in recent years it has shifted its focus more toward garden décor. This year they had a nice selection of ornamental grasses, with these handsome Yucca rostrata nearby.

Lowe's. Normally I would not include a big-box retailer on any list of nurseries I would consider worth a visit, but their regional buyer has been bringing in some interesting plants (for Seattle anyway) the last few season. Here is one of the surprising finds this past summer: several large palms at reasonable prices, about half the price of comparable plants at local specialty nurseries, on the few occasions when they are even on offer. Most of the plants below were in the $59-79 range for 3-6' / 1-2m tall specimens. The selection included windmill palm, Trachycarpus fortunei, pindo or jelly palm, Butia capitata, blue hesper palm, Brahea armata, desert fan palm, Washingtonia filifera, Mediterranean fan palm, Chaermerops humils, and the blue form of the Mediterranean fan palm, Chaemerops humilis var. cerifiera. Some of these are not reliably hardy in the Seattle area, particularly Washingtonia and Brahea, which leads me to think they were ordered for California stores but ended up in Seattle instead. I was going to get one of the blue Mediterranean fan palms (which I had never seen for sale at this size), but they were snapped up by the time I returned and I had to settle for a jelly palm.

 

Sky Nursery: This Shoreline nursery nearly doubled its retail space in recent years. It has also been expanding its inventory of interesting plants. This season they had a good selection of agaves, with some fairly large (for Seattle) specimens available. Here is a herd of Agave parryi var. huachucensis. A couple of these may have come home with me.

Flash Back: Summer 2014

Winter is dark and dreary in Seattle, so today, the winter solstice, is a good day to post some images as reminders of summer.

Cheerful flowers at peak in the small section of my garden given over to cut flowers. I do not usually go in for cheerful, but it is nice to revisit these on the short and rainy day:

 

Containers in my front entry area:

Light and shadows on bamboo. I love watching the light and shadows play over bamboo plants gently swaying in a warm summer breeze.

Happy solstice!

Plant Review: Digiplexis 'Illumination Flame'

If there were an award for most overhyped plant of the year, it would have gone to Digiplexis 'Illumination Flame.' This cross was supposed to combine the hardiness of Digitalis purpurea, the common foxglove, with the exotic beauty of its Canary Islands cousin, Isoplexis canariensis. While it was in breeding development, it appears that Isoplexis was reclassified as a section of Digitalis, which means the proper name of this plant should probably be Digitalis 'Illumination Flame,' but it had already entered the nursery trade as Digiplexis. These plants were everywhere in Northwest nurseries this year. Everywhere. I have never seen a plant rolled out into production and aggressively and uniformly pushed to market as this one.

Here's a shot from plants in my garden earlier this year. The plants are about 3 feet / 1m tall:

Digiplexis in happier times, blooming in the garden in July.

The foliage looks and feels very close to that of the common foxglove, and the growth habit is also similar. The flowers have pointier corolla lobes, however, more similar to those of its Canary Island parent. The color is lurid in person: rich buttery apricot in the interior of the floral tubes blending to hot pink at the tips. (My amateur photography does not do it justice.) The inflorescences last for several weeks and the plants readily sprout secondary spikes if dead-headed, although subsequent spikes are much smaller with fewer blooms. Curiously, bees were uninterested in the flowers in my garden, unlike common foxglove.

I fear the plants may not be as hardy as advertised and, unlike the Canary Island parent, are not evergreen. Supposedly they are hardy to USDA Zone 8, but a few days with temperatures dipping to 25° F / -4° C reduced my plants to brown mush. This was the result after a few weeks of typical Seattle winter rains:    

Same plants after a month of winter weather.

These same conditions would not have damaged common foxglove. Careful probing at the base of the plants suggests they will not be returning in spring. I'm leaving them just in case in an atypical act of optimism.

Verdict: Delayed pending potential reappearance in spring.

Project Update: Courtyard Hardscape Before and During

The retaining wall and stair project in the courtyard has been expanding in scope, as often happens to my projects. A few days of good weather has allowed me to make some progress. The "before" photos are a bit painful to look at since I like the overgrown, jungle-like before shots. Most of the plants have been moved or trimmed back, but it leaves the "during" shots looking sort of barren.

Before: retaining wall with laurels, bamboo (Hibanobambusa tranquilans 'Shiroshima'), redwood, and groundcovers all but hiding the shoddy retaining wall:

During: The same section of retaining wall from a slight angle with a new, tidier retaining wall under construction with an integrated bench for more seating (or, more likely, pots full of plants) and a staircase leading to a path to another garden expansion. The variegated bamboo from the previous shot is visible in the upper left:

Before: Northeast corner of the courtyard and southeast corner of the small shade garden. The large leaves of Rhododendron praestans are on the far left and the upper central part of the frame features Akebia ternata:

During: Raw materials are piled in the background. Most of the shade plans and the Akebia have been removed, and the laurels have been heavily pruned back. The new retaining wall will be a bit higher than the previous one:

Hopefully construction will be done in time for spring planting.

Bloom Day: December 15, 2014

Not much is blooming in the garden due to some frost earlier this month, and because much of the garden has been torn up for some major infrastructure changes. Still there's a few things, like Mahonia x media 'Charity', which reliably brightens up winter.



Close up of the flowers.

 

Youngish plant in the shade garden (soon to be moved).

Also blooming is silverberry, Elaeagnus pungens 'Fruitlandii', which has a nice, sweet fragrance. I like the tiny brown-speckled pendant flowers.

Tiny pendant silverberry flowers.

There are also a few fuchsia blooms on some plants overwintering in the shed, but they were a little too buried to photograph.

New Project: Turning Broken Concrete into Walls, Stairs, & Benches

I must always have at least one landscaping project in process at any given time. This time the plan is to rebuild retaining walls along the far side of the courtyard to make them tidier, and to incorporate both stairs and benches, in order to connect with other parts of the yard and add some much-needed seating. This fall I assembled a few tons of broken concrete, also called urbanite, from demolition projects advertised on Craigslist, which took several trips in the trusty station wagon. Over the next few months, weather permitting, the stairs, retaining walls, and built-in benches will take shape, hopefully in time for spring planting.





The courtyard filled with a few tons of urbanite gleaned from local demolition sites (lighter pieces) and pulled from the previous crooked retaining walls (darker pieces).