Roses Past

When we moved into our last house nearly 30 years ago, I inherited a rose garden occupying half of the strip between our driveway and our neighbor’s yard. At that time the neighbors had a tall evergreen hedge which screened our view of their yard and provided a background for the roses. I had never really thought about growing roses because they seemed demanding, ugly as garden plants and not very exotic. (After all I was in Southern California after a Midwestern upbringing and education. You can grow roses in Missouri but not hibiscus.)
Anyway, we had other more important priorities and so the roses stayed. Eventually, I decided that since they were there; why not give them a little attention. I learned to prune them and provided some occasional fertilizer. They responded by not dying and providing a springtime show – some a better one than others and gradually I considered adding some more interesting varieties. I don’t remember the ones that either died on their own or were ripped out but two were with me until the bitter end after which the new owner ckeared every plant in the front yard and replaced them with a grass lawn livened up with one palm tree carefully placed in the center. Oh well….

Survivors

The roses that survived my reign at the old house were good credible varieties that I would never have selected. They kept being good enough that I hesitated to cull them. They were also hybrid teas (well I guess Queen Elizabeth is not really and HT but close enough) which I never even consider anymore.

Queen Elizabeth

In my garden it was a gangly teenager with ok but not beautiful flowers. It did keep blooming.

Chicago Peace

Just did enough to survive although it was on my list.

Additions

The Dark Lady

My first Austin. It had a nice deep red color and the flowers were attractive and full but it didn’t bloom a lot. I treated it like a hybrid tea which probably didn’t help. I was just getting to understand Austins when we moved.

Evelyn

My second Austin. Lovely flowers and a reputed wonderful smell although I can’t remember being overwhelmed. It was just getting going when we left.

Souvenir de Malmaison

My first old rose, a Bourbon. Slow growing and just coming into its own when we left but with beautiful flowers.

Mme Cecile Brunner

I mistakenly ordered climbing which because a huge rambling mound in my rose bed. Lots of blooms.

Scentimental

I was trying here to get some blooms. I also planted a grouping of three to get some mass. It worked well but made the overall look of the bed rather odd.

French Lace

Same planting as Scentimental. I loved the color and shape.

Things I learned

Over time I got better at pruning but only at the end did I begin to understand that not all roses are hybrid teas and since I kept eliminating the hybrid teas and replacing them with other types, I had to develop some sensitivity which is not a normal behavior for me. (I am still learning that as you will hear in my NorCal rose report sometime soon)

I also explored better fertilization adopting a four week cycle of fertilizers, Epsom salts and something else I don’t recall and a Spring tonics of alfalfa pellets. I got good growth but I think my pruning sabotaged the effort.

I never got to the point of thinking I was a rose expert but I was beginning to feel competent. So much so that when I was telling the landscape architect what to include in our new backyard plan, I told him I wanted some roses. He blocked out space for three.

How is it working out three years in to the new yard. I'll get back to you.

Water Lily

Some action on my resolutions. I ordered a dwarf hardy water lily for my courtyard. It is supposed to be an excellent variety for growing in a container. Knowing nothing about water lilies I take the word of the purveyor and purchase Helvola. Now all I need is a big pot.

History

We are beginning our fourth year in a new house located in a severely CC&Red community in the Sierra foothills. Before we lived 3 blocks from the ocean in a rural seeming suburb of Los Angeles. We enjoyed frequent fog and very temperate weather. It never froze and seldom got to the high 80's. My gardening was limited by time and budget (for two years I was working in Sacrmento during the week and driving home for the weekends) but I had a few roses, some cacti and succulents and a bunch of cymbidiums. I was growing a living hedge of lehua to enclose a front yard patio off my wife's home office.

Finally, we decided that a new house near Sacramento would make life better for us all and we selected our plan and lot and the builder started building. We selected a lot with an upward sloping back yard. There is a 15 foot level yard, then a retaining wall and maybe another 30 feet of slope. We selected the lot for the privacy and the idea of looking out to see a green slope from our house.

We found a landscape designer and he developed what is proving to be a very nice plan as it grows in. Three maple trees are just getting big enough to shield us from the incredibly hot setting sun in the summer but are bare and let light and warmth in for the winter. The hillside has Canary Island Pines and an African Sumac (the designer specified a Crepe Myrtle but I had never seen one that I thought was attractive and asked for something else). There are strips of pittosporum, raphiolepis and grevillea with manzanita filling in the bare spaces and rosemary billowing over the retaining wall. We have a dry creek bed meandering down the middle of the lot but ran out of money for a water feature.

On the flat area we have a crescent of lawn, a lemon tree and some small shrubs (mostly pittosporum. The beds surrounding the lawn were largely bare to begin with and four years later are not much better. I have tried to introduce some plants and had some success but more failure which I will recount at some later time along with some of my problems with the slope.

For now this will give you an idea of the kind of gardening I had leaned at my former house and some idea of what is coming as I relate my growth as a foothill gardener.

2008 Resolutions

For this year I am resolved to accomplish some goals set when we moved into our new house in 2004 and some new ones.

The old ones are:

1. Build the raised bed for vegetables on the side of the house- mostly tomatoes
2. Increase the substance for the flower beds on the level area of my backyard

The new ones are:

1. Grow a water lily in a pot in my courtyard
2. Create some ambiance in the afformentioned courtyard

New Direction

In my previous life as a blogger, I focused on politics with occasional detours into my garden. Having realized that I offer little in the way of new insight into the political follies and recognizing that rage is not attractive and seldom useful, I am redirecting my blog energy to the documentation of my steps and missteps as I learn how to garden in the rocky Sierra foothills.

Look for posts reprising the last three years interspersed with my plans for the next year and updates on my successes and failures.

Obscene Amenities

Amenities International produced this short video to showcase the luxurious accommodations enjoyed by US military personnel in Iraq.



read more | digg story

Garden Update: Freeze Dried

Tough love for my plants this month. I did not make any effort to shield them from night temperatures 32 degrees or below over the last two weeks. Time will tell the consequences of my neglect but my philosophy as I adjust my gardening skills from coastal southern California moderation in all things to foothill northern California expremes is " Survival of the fittest".

Right now, my favorite plant is narcissis. Rynveld's Early Sensation is just what it's name says. They started blooming in early January and are still going strong through the freeze. It is the second year for these bulbs so I know that they can handle our weather extremes. Other bulbs are coming up but not yet ready for prime time. I need to plant more of these guys next fall.

Next on my favorites list are my cymbidiums. One pot of my miniature green, King Arthur, was blooming before the freeze and now , to my amazement, a second pot has a bloom stalk. Only one pot looks like it might not survive the winter and it was marginal before. The plants seem largely unaffected by the temperatures. I did nothing to shield them but they do receive full sun during the day. Last year I did not get them to bloom. I am hoping that the others will follow King Arthur and flower this year. Now I know that they can survive here, my next challenge is persuading them to bloom.

Among the other plants, I can do nothing but wait and see what comes back. Because it has been so dry, I watered all the pots on Saturday after reading in the paper that the combination of cold and dry is very stressful, Now we will see what happens. Nights are staying above freezing so I think that the worst is over in terms of temperature. We do need rain.

Wife Beating in Islam - The Rules

Unblieveable wisdome from the religion of peace.

HT wizbang

John Kerry's Embarrassing Visit to Iraq

He's Ronry.

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Saturday Night Live: Nancy Pelosi

HT Betsy's Page Saturday Night Live does Pelosi.

Garden Update

In the continuing saga of adjusting my gardening skills and plant palette from coastal southern California to Sierra foothills, I have this observation. This year is cold. Algore notwithstanding, for me and my garden, global warming is a crock.

It has been just above freezing every night for over a week now. No frost in the morning and no snow yet (our last snow was in February and broke our African Sumac). Interestingly, one of my early cymbidiums is blooming. The poor things are so confused by the weather here but somehow this one pot got it right. This is exactly the time it would have bloomed in SoCal. Between the super hot summers and the super cold (relative to SoCal) winters, I probably should just give up and find something that will grow here but I am a stubborn cuss and will keep growing them so long as they continue to cope.

I continue to be surprized by my Brugmansia. I thought it would be among the first of my SoCal plants to succomb. Not so. In fact, there is a one which I see hanging over the fence down the hill that seems quite happy here. My plan is to plant my large potted brugmansia in the ground in my back yard. I rooted some cuttings from the big plant in late summer for backup. The ones from hard wood rooted nicely but the softwood cuttings failed to root. I have two small ones in reserve. The large one got infested with some bug or other. It amazes me that a poisonis plant can fall victim to bugs. The leaves got spotted and the new growth was covered with webs. Spraying with the stuff I use on my roses reduced it but did not eliminate it. I am not confident about planting it but intend to proceed. I missed the good planting time before it got cold so I will wait now until at least March.

My next project is to find a replacement for Agapanthis. Whey does anyone plant them here in hot Sacramento? They look awful in the Summer heat with their crispy brown leaves. I am thinking about a small Aloe of some sort or maybe Kniphofia.

The catalogues have started coming so I can begin my garden fantasies for 2007.

ZUCKER TAKES ON THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP AND JAMES BAKER

Those who don't srudy history are doomed to repeat it.

LA on My Mind - Continued

Lunada Bay

I always thought that we had done great by our kids raising them in a beautiful semi-rural ocean-side enclave in the great LA megalopolis. What I have learned about parenting is that, in my case at least, it was all about me. I wanted my kids to grow up in a tony neighborhood with college prep schools so different from my Missouri farmboy childhood. If I had thought more about my sons, we might never have come to LA.

Our old house, newly rejuvenated, stands naked and defenseless with only one small, newly planted palm tree. I would love to see the renovations inside, although I am sure that they are not to my taste. I can just see the plantings in the back yard around the side of the house and recognize that some of them survive. I drive on an notice that one by one the oldest of the houses in my neighborhood are replaced by ‘tuscan’ wedding cakes. When we moved to Lunada Bay, there was an interesting mix of ordinary middle class and wealthy housing. Now that land values have risen, only the very wealthy can afford even the ordinary houses which are disappearing. The vacant lot where the old Shell gas station used to be is now a park but the core of Lunada Bay retail remains. In addition to the walkable neighborhood schools, the hardware store, grocery store and drugstore were very persuasive in selecting our house. The drug store is now a bank but the market and hardware stores are still there. Over the last five years, the neighborhood schools have reopened bringing back the appeal we originally saw in the neighborhood.
It is a delightful community, still unpretentious and accessible (none of the gates which are so fashionable these days), even with million dollar home prices and tuscan wedding cakes sprouting like mushrooms. It's the only place on the hill with neighborhood shopping. I alwlays said that if you have to live in LA, Palos Verdes is the place to choose and Lunada Bay is the best of PV.

Getting it off My Chest

Maybe you have noticed my absence from blogging lately and maybe not. After the election, I tried to keep a stiff upper lip and controll my rage at the clowns that have coopted the Republican Party. Tonight, however, my wife asnswered an 'out of area' phone call (she has this needy streak) and said that they wanted to talk to me.

It was someone calling for Mike Reagan wanting money to put out negative ads on Hillary but he started by asking who I thought could beat her. Frankly, I think she will beat herself, but I rose to the bait and told him that all the Republican candidates were a pack of fools and loosers and that I wasn't prepared to throw any money to any of them. He came back manfully with names. Did I like Sam Brownback? Now all I know about Sam Brownback is that he is a Senator and from Kansas and those two facts alone are enough to convince me that he is not the man for the job. He tried Gingrich, Guliani and on. I told him that I didn't really care because even if you elect a Republican, he turns Democrat as soon as elected so I might as well vote for Hillary because then I really would get what I voted for.
He seemed surprised by the hostility that came flowing out of my mouth and, to be truthfull, so was I. But it felt good to tell somebody that I was through trusting Republicans to stand on party principles. The Democrats may get me killed but at least I will always know where they stand.

LA on My Mind

I had a business meeting in Southern California. There was supposed to be a social event Friday night which was cancelled due to household illness so everything got turned around. As a result, I left Sacramento mid-morning and drove to LA with less urgency. I usually prefer 99 to I-5 because there is more going on. Little did I know that the new bond money is already at work rebuilding the non-freeway portion south of Merced. It was about 5:00 when I reached Valencia when I would have preferred an earlier, or later, entry to LA traffic. With KJAZZ on the radio I was ready for the traffic and my next choice was the route to my hotel in Torrance. I picked the Hollywood and Harbor Freeway route through downtown LA over the San Diego and it was a good choice. The traffic never stopped although it slowed at times and it was good to see LA again and relive the commute that had been my daily experience for twenty-some years. There didn’t seem to be any new buildings other that construction of something near Staples Center but what I found amazing was that the names at the top of the buildings were difference in many cases from those I remembered just 5 years ago. Rush hour on the Harbor Freeway is not a good time for sightseeing so I was not able to make a complete survey. I guess that putting your name on a building is a more tasteful kind of advertising that buying a billboard. There were new buildings crowding the freeway at USC which seemed to be some sort of concert hall complex from the decorations on the slab facing me. After USC, the traffic gradually lightened and I got to my hotel by 7:00.

Saturday morning I was free so I slept until I wanted to get up. I returned to the Harbor Freeway and continued the path of my old commute to the house where I lived until two years ago in Palos Verdes. We sold it when we moved to Sacramento and the buyer had done some needed improvements before selling it nine months later. Part of his improvements includeed a complete clearing of 40 year-old trees which had sheltered the studio we built for my wife from the street. Now the new owner has curtains on the French doors which open onto a grass lawn and the street. It’s no longer our house – in more ways than the legal sense – but it is still a lodestone for me every time I get back to the area.

The drive through San Pedro to Palos Verdes Drive South was much the same but The Donald’s golf course had caused some improvements on the Drive. There are now several parks along the road which overlook the golf course and the ocean. The slide area is still sliding but from the condition Saturday, the last road renovation must have been recent. I noticed a new sign for the ocean side neighborhood just past Abalone Cove. I never knew it had a name in all my years in Palos Verdes. If I had to tell anyone how to find it , I would tell them to look for the Fire Station. Now there is a sign proudly proclaiming the Neighborhood of Abalone Cove. Who knew?

Next I passed the apartment complex where my wife and son lived for the six months between selling our old house and moving to our new one in Sacramento. It looked the same. I did not have much emotional attachment to the apartment but I did love the ocean and Catalina view from our third floor balcony. When we lived there, goats grazed on the open field between the complex and the Marineland site and the exteriors for the Movie, Fun with Dick and Jane were being filmed at a false front residential street over the fence. I had heard that construction was finally started on a resort hotel on the old Marineland site but I saw nothing different.

On to Golden Cove where the ocean view Starbucks has been joined by a Subway. The Starbucks represents an upgrade from 25 years ago but the Subway is a step down from the old Golden Cove Deli. The Starbucks was there before we moved but its neighbors were still under construction. Not an improvement from my perspective.

Then on to Lunada Bay, my old neighborhood and the place my kids call home. When we moved in, I was living my dream. When I first came to California, I stayed with an Army buddy in Gardena and he first showed me Palos Verdes and I began to dream about someday living there. It took me eight years and a detour to Manhattan Beach but we purchased a home three blocks from the cliffs (no view). Number one son was nine months old and number two came along 6 years later. They have never lived anywhere else while they were growing up.

LA's the Place

Nearly everyone has forgotten but LA used to have a slogan. LA City Nerd says bring it back.

News You Can Use

Nearly every lock you have is worthless.

Global Warming Update

Bill has been very good at identifying the flaws in the studies that claim to prove global warming.



Now, some anecdotal data on record cold temperatures this year starting in Florida.

Bush Channels David

W and the Democrats

Some Advice for Democrats

From the 'Conservatives' at LA Weekly.

So Democrats better hurry in coming up with some immediately stirring proposals for both the economy and the war. Better start searching, as well, for at least one or two compelling national leaders who can articulate those ideas in some way other than Kerry-speak. A small raise in the minimum wage, and the obfuscation built into the very word “redeployment,” aren’t nearly enough. The mood of the American electorate revealed on Tuesday is one of angry impatience, an intense distrust of the establishment, which just happened to be recently occupied by Republicans. Democrats, take a few days off to savor your victory. And then take good notice of the way the electorate shook off such reprobates as Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum and Kurt Weldon, Montana Senator Conrad Burns, Arizona Senator J.D. Hayworth, and a few dozen others as if they were nothing but a bad case of fleas. That they were Republicans was only serendipitous.