Wide Shots - October 2017

How quickly 3 months can fly by!  My last wide shots post was published in July, at which time I bemoaned the condition of my summer garden.  At the time, I harbored the delusion that the weather would be much cooler by October and that my garden would have slipped into its refreshed autumn mode.  In actuality, we're not there yet - my garden looks sorrier than it did in July and, while I've pulled out most of summer's casualties, I've yet to fill the holes left behind.  The nights are reliably cooler but the heatwaves have continued off and on.  Daytime temperatures are comfortable at the moment and I've been hard at work getting bulbs in the ground but the forecasters say that yet another warm-up is in the offing for the weekend.  Still, as long as Santa Ana winds and brushfires stay away, I'll stop complaining.  At least the morning marine layer has begun making a regular appearance again.

This was the view looking out toward the Los Angeles Harbor from the backyard on Saturday morning.  While the sun was shining at our elevation, some 800+ feet above sea level, clouds and fog blanketed the harbor and the city of San Pedro below us.

I'll start the tour of my garden as I usually do, in the back garden.

Most of the plant losses are hidden in this view.  You'll have to take my word that they're there.  In addition, large segments of the creeping thyme surrounding the flagstone path are dead, while other areas are still thick and lush.  That's one of the downsides of an automated irrigation system - water delivery is never even.

This is the view of the back garden from the north end looking south.  My home office is on the other side of that roof overhang on the right.

This is the view from the south end of the back garden looking north.  The mimosa (Albizia julibrissin) tree's pink flowers are gone, although dried brown fuzz continues to drop, along with the tree's leaves and seedpods.

Rounding the house, the next stop is the garden on the south side.

After taking a good, hard look on this area in the process of gathering my wide shots, I've decided I'm not very happy with it.  The Echium candicans 'Star of Madiera' doesn't fit here and, as I have another in the front garden, I may replace it with more succulents.  The pots that mark the transition from the back to the side garden need to go too.  And both the Helichrysum petiolare and the Agonis flexuosa 'Nana' are overgrown.

Sitting at the patio table behind the hedge of Agonis, you can no longer see the garden or the harbor

View of the south side garden looking through the arbor toward the harbor

The front area is in better shape overall than the rest of the garden.

View of the front garden from the south end looking north.  I got carried away cutting back the Centaurea 'Silver Feather' (to the left of the path) and it's not springing back so I may have to start over in that area unless the winter rains work some magic.

Front view from the driveway's edge looking directly at the house.  I pulled out a dead Coleonema pulchellum 'Sunset Gold' in the bed to the left of the front path but haven't decided what I should replace it with.

View of the front garden from the north end looking south

Most of my work in the garden over the past 2 months has focused on the area in front of our garage.

The area in the foreground here has proven to be sunnier than I thought when I planted it early last year.  Many of my original plant choices didn't handle the summer's intense sun well so I've been swapping them out; however, the detail isn't readily visible here.

Most of my time went into renovating the succulent bed on the north side of area.  You can find the post detailing that effort here.

The vegetable turned cutting garden is currently the most colorful area of the entire garden.

While some of the dahlias are still producing flowers, their foliage looks awful and I've pulled out all the sunflowers and about a third of the zinnias thus far.  The happiest plants in this area are the Salvia elegans and Euphorbia 'Sticks on Fire'.

Moving through the garden gate brings us to what I've generally referred to in the past as my dry garden.  However, with the exception of the cutting garden, most of the garden is now comprised of drought tolerant plants so I'm just going to refer to this area as the northeast garden from now on.

I dug out the ratty germander (Teucrium chamaedrys) and weedy Geranium incanum in the area to the right of the gravel path here, added topsoil and cactus mix to raise the soil level and improve drainage, and have started to replant.  So far, I've added Vitex agnus-castus, Melinus nerviglumis, and Grevillea lanigera 'Jade Mound'.  Three Grevillea 'Scarlet Sprite', a slow-growing Echium, and a Salvia clevelandii sit to the right of the new plants outside the frame.

The slope looks pretty awful.  I still dream of bringing in help to transform the space but thus far I've managed to divert myself with less expensive projects.  In the near term, though, this area needs a good clean-up.

There was a large orb weaver spider sitting in the middle of a huge web just beyond this point so I didn't venture down the stairway to capture a better photo.  The area to the left of the metal fence belongs to my neighbor.  On my side of the fence, you can see that the last heatwave stripped most of the leaves off the fig tree.

Two days later, when the spider still hadn't moved on, I sent her packing and snapped this shot from the bottom of the slope.  The lemon tree on the left, the Agave attentuata in the foreground, and the Pittosporum 'Silver Magic' outside the frame behind the lemon tree are the best looking elements of this space.  Cleaning up the Euphorbia, Ribes, and Centranthus will improve the appearance of the area below the stairway but the steep area above it's still a messy mass of ivy, honeysuckle, and weeds.  

If you've reached this point, the tour is almost over.  There are just 2 areas we've missed.

This is the succulent bed bordering the street on the southwest side of the property.  It hasn't changed much, although the 5 Xylosma congestum shrubs we planted a year and a half ago to close the gap in the hedge are growing, albeit slowly.

This is the nicest view I snapped of the area behind the street-side succulent bed, showing a portion of the west-facing slope.  The area outside the frame, between the stacked stone wall and the street-side bed, is the future location of my lath house if/when it gets built.

Maybe things will look better in January when I publish my next wide shots post!  Hopefully, by then, we'll have received some real rain and I'll have filled in the majority of the holes summer left me with.  And, if I'm really lucky, my husband will have started construction of my lath/shade house.



All material © 2012-2017 by Kris Peterson for Late to the Garden Party