Roses, Fruit, and Trees

I got to the Tilden Park plant sale this morning just as it opened, and as predicted it was a zoo. (It was not, however, raining.) Fortunately, I was most interested in things they had plenty of, and of course several plants they weren't selling.

I bought a Cercis occidentalis (my attempts to start one from seed have resulted in stringy seedlings or nothing at all), Blechnum spicant (a fern that makes you wish the people who name species had been a bit more creative when it came to humans), and a Wooly Blue Curls, which I am reliably told is a pain in the ass to keep alive, because it hates any summer water (not a problem, as I have very little irrigation installed). This being a native plants garden, all are California natives. Ferns that can handle our dry summers are hard to come by.

Things are busting out in flowers on the home front. Mme Alfred here is covered in blooms.

And Cecile Brunner, as predicted, is an explosion of pink. (There is a wisteria under there, I swear!)

The buds on Cecile Brunner are really very delicate, even though the vine itself is a beast.

The roses out front, mostly having been heavily pruned, are all in bud but not yet really blooming. I was sort of hoping to come home and find the trellis covered in roses, but not yet.

And now the horror story: my St. Cecilia roses are covered in rust. I am just going to douse them in chemicals, I guess. Such a pretty rose, too. If they are unable to recover, I will have to just remove them.

On the fruit front (hee hee) we have ripe strawberries already, which is somewhat of a surprise.

We also have fruit setting out on the trees. Here are the Asian pears:

Nectarines:

and Peaches:

I'll thin them when they get a bit larger, but I'm hoping for a decent crop from the garden this year.

Here's one of my more recent impulse purchases that I almost can't believe. It's a variegated weeping willow, a natural dwarf that you can train to be maybe 10 ft tall. Now, keep in mind that I really dislike willows in general, and you may begin to wonder why I now own two of them. The short answer is that I am a sucker for weeping dwarf trees.

In the back garden, the brugmansias are coming back, thank goodness. I was hoping they would have survived the frost down under the surface, and they did not disappoint. If it's that cold again next winter I'm going to wrap my childhood quilt around them (just kidding, mom!).

And our back neighbor took Noel's suggestion and chopped the trumpet vine down to the ground. Around here, trumpet vines are near-invasive, so if he wants it to stay he need only let it regrow. But he seemed pretty happy with the extra space in the garden.

Technorati Tags: fruit, native plants, roses, strawberries

posted by ayse on 04/21/07