Spring Garden Takeoff
It’s a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and I’ve been outside enjoying it. This year’s wet spring has caused an botanical eruption in all of my gardens. Check it out.
The front terrace. When Heather and I moved in, this had been a dehydrated little green lawn. We tore it out and planted pineapple sage, rosemary, thyme, lavender, cycads, an orange tree, heather and morning glories. The three rosemary plants along the front are flowing over the front of the terrace like waterfalls and are ready to take over. (In case you’d been wondering, we’ve been developing a combination of Mediterranean and semi-tropical gardens front and back.) This terrace now takes a tiny fraction of the water the original lawn did, thrives in the blazing sun, and unlike the lawn, it’s beautiful.
This is in the side alley next to the house. We planted this sapling Mexican lime tree just a couple months ago, and it’s covered with tiny blossoms. We planted the surrounding clumps of lemon thyme the same afternoon, and each is now easily twice the size it was that day. We haven’t watered it; it just grew. The thyme is delicious.
This is the back patio, just behind the pool. When I bought the house in 2006, these queen palms were hardly shoulder height, and the dwarf palms were thin little things hardly a foot tall. Now the palms are 2-3x taller and the dwarf palms are so lush you can hardly see the terrace anymore.
This year’s basil crop in the herb garden. I planted it in March, but only three plants. Another seven germinated unattended; I just noticed them growing all over the place. (See the tiny ones in the back?) Presumably they came from seeds produced from previous years of basil. I expect we’ll be having a whole lot of pesto with seared ahi this year, but we can’t possibly eat that much basil, so I’ll give a lot away. The plant at the bottom right is garlic. It germinated by itself as well, I found it growing in the compost–it had been discarded from dinner one night–and seeing its success, transplanted it. Aside from that and a little watering it now and then, I’ve done nothing; and it’s tripled in size.
When we moved into the house, this strip of land out front was encased in severe, soulless concrete. I asked Brutus to jackhammer it off and then planted a line of seven fan palms. These were originally growing as tiny weeds along Scott St. in Point Loma, so I dug them out with a spade, took them home and grew them in the herb garden till they were big enough to thrive on their own. I have room for two more at the end and a couple more I can transplant; I may do that another time. I can’t believe how much nicer this is than concrete.
The valencia orange tree. We brought this with us when we moved from Solana Beach. For years it had struggled, producing no oranges. And this year–bam! I see the start of at least 10 oranges.
Cycad, lavender, and a monster rosemary bush. In the back, the pineapple sage and a pine tree that I discovered in the terrace out back a few years ago.
You know, until I took that botany class a few years ago as I pursued my philosophy degree from UCSD, I really had no idea what a green thumb I was blessed to have. I love watching these natural, evolved, elegant machines build themselves with such subtlety and grace, reacting to the environment, follow cycles of light and dark, wet and dry. As yet there is no engineering or technology as sophisticated as a single cell of these plants, nothing nearly capable of taking photons from the sun and applying them to dirt and water to build and reproduce themselves. I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge, but the full breadth of photosynthesis is still not fully understood by science, and no one is capable of building a truly photosynthetic technology. Think of that. I’m surrounded by literally mind-boggling beauty.
