Happiness Is This, Is This...

It rained. Lovely, long, slow rain. Sort of between a heavy drizzle and a light rain, but it lasted about 40 minutes.

I sat on the front porch and just listened to it fall. What a nice front porch we have. It's got the two adirondack chairs Matt gave me for my birthday and Valentines and the fan we installed (which was good, because it wasn't a very cooling rain, but it was a very muggy one), and the landscape lights Mom & Dad gave us were lighting up the undersides of the crape myrtle leaves, and I turned off the porch light and sat in the dark, and it way very, very nice, very quiet, rather private, very nice.

Many people don't have a front porch, and many more have a sort of skinny fake front porch that's too narrow for actual use and is really just for show. This is a shame. A front porch, with a fan, and two adirondack chairs, and a big pecan out front, and a row of fat potted plants for privacy is a wonderful thing.

It pains me to acknowledge anything nice about this drought, but I have to admit three good things: (1) Fewer mosquitos (2) scarcely any tent caterpillars, meaning the pecans look unusually green and wholesome, and (3) on those rare occasions that it does rain, one really pays attention. People who live in Portland probably don't even look up from their newspapers, or Kindles, or whatever, when it starts raining again. But us, we cherish every grey cloud and worship every raindrop.

Drought Flowers

Either because our plants are just that badass or because we've been watering more heavily, we do actually have some that are attempting to bloom in the midst of the drought and the heat. Brave souls.

For the most part, they are strange, tortured versions of themselves, which is actually kind of interesting in its own way. For example, you would never guess that this was 'Lichterloh.'

The bleached and emaciated petals of 'Lichterloh' in July

Similarly, the normally delicate, genteel, and shapely blooms of 'Duchesse de Brabant' have become ragged and irregular.

A gasping, titanic effort from 'Duchesse de Brabant'

'Graham Thomas' conserves his resources by drastically reducing the number of petals he produces. Usually fat, golden, and fully double, he's become a pallid semi.

'Graham Thomas,' like Sir Eliot, reluctantly retrenches

The passionflower is bearing up well--it does indeed appear to be dark purple! Wonderful plant--so extravagant.

'Dark Purple' passionflower

The frill bursting from this passionflower bud looks like wayward bits of Silly String.

Interesting passionflower bud

And the most surprising and delightful news: one of the 'Ellen Bosanquet' crinums that we planted this May is actually already blooming. The buds are rather washed out, but the fact that it's blooming at all comes as a pleasant shock--I assumed it would take a year or two to get established. Of course, the bulbs Dad gave us were quite enormous--larger than softballs in some cases. They have an incredibly rich, heavy lily fragrance.

The precocious bloom of crinum 'Ellen Bosanquet'

Project Mesopotamia
(Simulating the Land Between Two Rivers) The irrigation project continues. Hopefully, we'll be able to hook several of the systems up to the computer this weekend. Getting everyone on a regular system is essential if we're going to survive August; otherwise, some plants will inevitably slip through the cracks.

We still need to hook up the shade garden and the two gazebo zones, change out the two heads by the pond, put mini sprinklers over the hanging 'Kimberley Queen' ferns and make the front porch a separate zone, and pipe the rose bed, mutabils, and blue and purple bed zones to the central location. We may also make the pole bed and pecan a separate zone and add lines out to the Eve's Necklace and the linden.

Irrigation Schedule
We also need to think about scheduling. I think all of the zones need twice-weekly watering until the heat breaks (~late September, I assume). The weeping yaupon (rose bed), baldcypress (blue-and-purple bed) and Montezuma cypress (pond/gazebo bed) probably need water three times per week, since they're in a fragile state.

If we start getting rain in September (as some people predict, pinning their hopes on El Niño), we can reduce everyone to once per week. If the weather really improves, we'll be able to take the rose bed, blue-and-purple bed, front porch bed, pole bed, and gazebo beds off irrigation altogether in November and just turn the system on manually as needed. I think we'll want to keep the mutabilis bed and shade garden on once-weekly water indefinitely, though.

Next March, we'll put everyone back on once-weekly to take advantage of the growing season and get everyone juiced up for summer. And if the summer isn't too brutal, we may be able to leave it at once a week the whole season. Imagine it: a garden robust with plump, healthy plants, getting enough water to actually grow steadily rather than just enough to stave off death, full of flowers and green leaves... a beautiful sight. And in the long run, very little need for watering at all, once the roots are nice and deep and assuming the current weather pattern is a hiccup, not a terminal case of climatic cancer.

Ug. I Did It Again.

We mulched and irrigated till 9 last night and till the afternoon today. I dug more trenches (I'm getting better at it). I laid metal edging. I bought miles of PVC. I'm actually slightly amazed at my own productiveness.

All of this virtuousness had made me headachy and disgruntled. Probably because while great strides have been made, nothing is actually complete.

I re-mulched almost all of our existing beds, but we need to dig several new beds around the trees and at the end of the kitchen patio. I pulled weeds, but there is still bermudagrass growing up through the rose bushes--I have no idea how we can ever get rid of that pernicious stuff. We've laid pipes, but the system still isn't automated. I mowed, but the yard won't look really tidy till it's weed-eaten. or -eated. or -ate.

And although the AC is on, I'm still hot. And it's 7 o'clock at night, but looks like it's about 3 in the afternoon--stupid planet with its stupidly tilting axis.

I can't even think of anything to take a picture of, if I were even willing to go outside in order to take a picture, which, in this heat, I bloody well am not. Everything looks crispy and stupid and stunted and joyless. We have a baldcypress that's warped, a weeping yaupon that's four-fifths brown, a '4th of July' rose that's bleached to pink instead of being a lovely deep vermillion, climbing roses that have stopped growing, an oak-leaf hydrangea that wilts every other day, and a bunch of herbicided bermudagrass that needs weed-whacking.

God, I'd better stop before I implode from the sheer gravity of my own grouchiness and turn into a little black hole, sucking happiness and light out of everything around me.

Hey--just remembered--the spider lily is in bloom. So that's a happy thing. Perhaps I can defer imploding for a few days.

Spiderlily. All that stands between me and the abyss.

But I Had Scheduled a Weekend of Utter Slothfulness!

Against all my principles and my better judgment, I worked outside this weekend. It started innocently: I just wanted to dump a few bags of mulch over the dead bermudagrass in the rose bed. Just to make things look tidier. It won't take a second...

But the new mulch was so much darker than the old mulch that one corner of the bed was black, while the rest was light brownish-grey. And thus one thing led to another, and I ended up buying 20 bags of mulch from our nursery-around-the-corner, Bloomers. So I spread a lot of mulch yesterday. And then today, I felt (grudgingly, unwillingly) morally obliged to help Matt out with the water on the 'Mutabilis' bed--my part of the effort took till around noon (his took till about 2:30). Among other things, I learned that I have no talent for trench-digging; mine meandered and veered all over the landscape, while Matt's cut from Point A to Point B with the precision worthy of a Roman civil engineer.

The whole thing was a massive pain, but we hope to see ecstatic, lush plant growth towering audaciously toward a harsh blue sky. And then it will have been worth it.

Some Blooms
In other news, our Mystery Pink Globes rose bloomed recently. The oddest little pink balls of flowers--unlike any other rose I know, yet also completely unidentifiable, so far. This is how they look at full bloom.

Mystery Pink Globes rose

Also, during one of my many trips to Bloomers this weekend, I happened to spot the same unknown plum-colored perennial that I bought at Finch's Farm a month or so ago. Its name is Angelonia, possibly 'Serena.' You know what's amazing about the Angelonia (and its buddies, the little leadworts)? They aren't dead, despite having been planted in May/June in our meanest flower bed. Good little Angelonia!

Our tough little Angelonia

Requiem for Four Pines
Finally, a refresher on why I hate drought:

Sad stumps of once-proud great big trees

This, of course, is not our house--it's an utterly adorable little bungalow "downtown" (i.e., two blocks away). Until last summer's drought, it had 5 massive, ~50-year-old pine trees in its front yard, of a stoutness that is pretty rare for pines in our area. Then four of the them succumbed to drought after surviving decades of scorching Texas summers. You can see the effect that the loss of those trees has had on the lawn, and you can imagine the effect it's had on their electric bills. It's drastically changed the feeling of that block of the street, as well, which went from a shady green tunnel to a bleak and exposed bit of desert. Hence our watering efforts. And hence the need to water even very established, adapted specimens in the midst of a really ghastly drought like this one. Do you have a tree that you take for granted, that's always been there, unobtrusively providing shade and cooling your yard? For the love of Mike, water it!

In the midst of prolonged dry spells (let alone a really vile drought like this one), I always think of the passage from Out of Africa, in which Isak Dinesen describes a drought that felt "as if the Universe were turning away from you...

Everything became drier and harder, and it was as if all force and gracefulness had withdrawn from the world. It was not bad weather or good weather, but the negation of all weather, as if it had been deferred sine die. A bleak wind, like a draught, ran over your head, all colour faded from all things; the smells went away from the fields and forests. This feeling of being in disgrace with the Great Powers pressed on you. To the South, the burnt plains lay black and waste, striped with grey and white ashes...

Our droughts are a little different from Kenya's, I think, but the sense of joylessness and blight--we know that all too well.

CSA: What Do I Do with All This... Zucchini, Chard, and Beets?
I made another attempt at CHARD, the vegetable that loathes me. This time, I boiled it with a little red wine vinegar, browned some butter and then browned a cup of leeks in the butter, and then stirred in the drained chard (A variation on this recipe). Matt, when pressed persistently, gave this one 3/4 of a star out of a possible 5 stars. But, he hastened to emphasize, it's way better than my last attempt at chard. Well. Progress is being made.

Also, I'm making some ice cream cookie sandwiches as a treat to my hard-working Spouse, and I folded in a cup of finely grated ZUCCHINI. These were double-chocolate Andes Mint cookies (mentholated and adapted from here), and the zucchini gave them an interestingly cakey texture. We'll see how they react to being frozen and slathered with mint chocolate chip ice cream and then frozen again.

And this evening, I'll make my BEET-and-beef meatloaf (a beet-ified version of this). I'll let you know how it goes.

Global Warming SUCKS

Okay, a hot June in central Texas may not exactly be proof of global warming, but it's definitely a lot warmer than last year and I don't like it one bit.

I was getting my toes done with Cathy in belated celebration of her birthday (happy birthday, Cathy!) when Matt called to tell me, among other things, that every plant in our garden needed water and needed it bad. That one of my beloved red cabbagey mystery rose cuttings was crispy (but it was just fine this weekend!), and that the cypresses, so briefly stable, were in peril again. And it only got to 99.7 today. Imagine the struggle (and expenditure in water) come August.

I hate summer.

The 'Purple Robe' black locust is yellowing, and it's been happy as a clam since we planted it late this winter. The "stable" bald cypress is completely brown. The indigo, in deep shade, is drooping. The 'Moonglow' pear is crunchy. Matt's been moving the hose around all evening, giving each of our most troubled and cherished plants long, slow drinks. And we'd better get used to doing that every other day or (in the case of the cypresses) every day.

I feel a bit icky about this from several perspectives: Using lots of water is expensive. It's not environmentally responsible. It's not consistent with my personal ethic of laziness. On the other hand, I have no intention of doing this next year (well, except for the Magnolia x soulangiana, 'Forest Pansy' redbud, and bay laurel I plan to buy this fall). So it isn't like we're making this a lifestyle. Also, once these plants get established and start to grow, they'll be giving love to the planet--sucking down CO2, cooling the house, &c, &c. They'll also look pretty. So I think it's justified, even though it makes me cringe a bit.

And the good new is that the magnolia and roses appear unruffled. The former, we've been spoiling with water. The latter had a year to come to grips with life outside of a pot. Our fledgling oaks, all of last year's planting, are also unfussed. It's all about the roots, man. It's all about the roots.

I don't have any picture's of today's brown crispiness, but here are some pix of other recent happenings.

Matt & I got some cuttings of this neat yellow-flowered vine with long bean pods. We're trying several variants on cuttings--tip cuttings, woody cuttings, and serpentine cuttings. In this weather, I'm not terribly optimistic, but I've got them in the shade in the orangery.

Check out some of their interesting morphological features: leaves divided into just 2 leaflets, and strangely flat little buds.


Also, their tendrils narrow to a super-fine point that grab onto things very aggressively. They're able to cling to bare skin--they don't hurt, but they hang on tight.


Here are some tip cuttings.

And--wow, we're switching gears now--here's an olive salad I made to use as a dressing on a muffaletta salad for lunch all last week. Doesn't that look tasty?


...and back to the garden again: here's a better picture of 'Graham Thomas' (the David Austin rose).


Our Zephyranthes, tired of waiting for rain, burst irritably into bloom last week (rain lilies usually only bloom after a rain--hence the name). The crocosmias Mom & Dad gave us also put on a gracious show, especially accommodating of them as we just planted them this spring.


This is the now-sort-of-stabilized cypress on the SW corner of the house (a tough spot--but then, it needs a tough plant). Note how most of the leaves are still swept upwards. We thought they had just stuck that way as a result of having taken an hour and a half trip in an open trailer, but it's been a couple of weeks now and the leave are still upswept. I begin to wonder if we don't have a pondcypress (Taxodium ascendans) on our hands instead of a baldcypress (T. distichum). The one by the pond, inappropriately enough, appears to be a true baldcypress. I'm actually rather pleased about this development--owing to my great affection for the genus, I had hoped to grow both species. (Someday, I'd like to grow T. mucronatum--Montezuma cypress--as well, though we've pretty well filled our little almost-half-acre to the brim. We'd have to grow it up through the middle of the house or something.)


And finally, a little bit of Austin out here in Elgin. There is this one spot of the house that has remnants of a strand of Christmas lights from some long-vanished tenant still nailed in place. In Austin "Christmas lights" is a bit of a misnomer since people leave them out (and on) year round in some of the more bohemian sections of town. Our little patch of lights is not likely to be removed during our tenure in this house because they are between the house's power lines. So they stay up perpetually, like a little bit of Austin funk out here in the country.

Demonstrating Progress & Decline

It was another mulch-intensive weekend. The pole bed had an inadequate layer of mulch (and some very chintzy weed barrier--more of a minor weed stumbling block than a barrier--if you use weed barrier, don't get the thin stretchy plastic kind--it works as badly as common sense suggests it would) and had been colonized by bermudagrass. That stuff is inexorable.

The stripy rose bed was the last major existing bed to have no mulch whatsoever, so we fixed that, too.

Also, many of our trees were mulchless and needed little dirt levees built around them to hold water. The 'Purple Robe' black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), the 'Tuskarora' crape myrtle, and the two baldcypresses were of particular concern.

Here's why. This is the better of the two baldcypresses when freshly planted.

Slightly traumatized baldcypress by SW corner of the house

And here it is a few days ago.

Deeply traumatized baldcypress by SW corner of the house

Not good. We've been watering it every other day (sometimes more often), and when we water, we water deep. But the tree is miserable. It does still have some green leaves, and the stems are green under the bark, but overall, it's in a parlous state.

So I took down its old levees and rebuilt them farther out with a compost-dirt mixture (so it will hold more water and leach yummy nutrients into the root zone), and Matt mulched. We may stretch a shadecloth tent over it, too. This will look silly, but we do what we must.

The other cypress looked kinda sad from the outset, but it seems to be stabilizing. We planted it under the sugar hackberry that it will ultimately replace, and I think that protection from the sun has made all the difference. Still looks twiggy and emaciated, but I think it's going to live.

Scruffy but stable baldcypress under objectionable sugar hackberry--by pond

On the other hand, our oaks from last year are doing great. The picture below was meant to demonstrate how much more genteel our yard looks now that Matt has pulled down the hurricane fence and is able to edge along the fenceline. However, you can also see that our red oak (according to an arborist, it's Quercus buckleyi [AKA Q. texana], not Q. shumardii) has lots of nice, healthy green leaves.

Quercus buckleyi & gentrified back fence

We didn't mollycoddle those oaks at all last year--no little dirt levees, no mulch, no mini-beds to protect them from the depredations of the lawn--and they're all flourishing. The bur oak is covered in big, healthy leaves. The white oak (actually Q. polymorpha, not Q. alba) in our front yard has put on a second big flush of leaves this spring. This is the fruit of last summer's crazy nonstop rain. At the time, a mixed blessing--roses died, the abelia wasted, and these same trees got a whole panoply of leaf diseases--but those that survived it seem to have really robust root systems taking them into this (so far hot and dry) summer.

Our cottonwood is still blowing fluff all over the place. You can see how thick they are on the ground. Isn't it neat how the burst hulls look like little stars?

Cottonwood fluff in the crape myrtle bed

Other Follow-ups
I bought some Crinum macowannii seeds from a seller called bulbsnmore on e-bay. Click the link to see a picture of the flowers--pretty fabulous, no? Check out these crazy seeds, though. They're huge. And I can't tell which end is up. One end has a slightly pointy spot that is blackish, but I can't tell if that's for roots or shoots. I got 15 seeds, so I planted them in all different orientations, in the hopes that some of them will work out.


And at this point, two of the three surviving red cabbagey mystery rose cuttings have bloomed. The color is a bit off--it's much lighter than its parent. But that's probably just because it's young. And the main point is, The red cabbagey mystery rose lives!

Red cabbagey mystery rose cutting in bloom

And some of last year's shrimp plants are thriving--look at all those nifty apple green and pink flowers. (That's super-chic--and rather rare--cultivar 'Fruit Cocktail.') The ones in the rose bed aren't doing so hot. Three or four of them didn't come back after last winter, and those that have returned are much smaller and unbloomy than the ones pictured below, which never did die back, despite our many and hard freezes last winter.

Justicia 'Fruit Cocktail'