THE TEXAS OLIVE

When we first moved into the house I was chatting with the neighbor and asked him if he knew what the large bushes were between our property. He didn't know the name but he did say they were filled with lovely white blooms during the summer. Little did I know that I was looking at Texas Olive trees. The only other Texas olive I had seen was at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin where a lone tree grew just outside the auditorium. It was a nicely shaped tree but only ever had a couple of blooms. It succumbed to a hard freeze and was removed. 

My neighbor was right about the flowers. Around April the tree began to bloom with these gorgeous papery white blooms with yellow centers. The plant bloomed constantly through November. 

It isn't hard to see why someone, seeing this tree in bloom, wouldn't immediately fall in love with it, and find a place for one in their garden. We have nine!

Also known as the Anacahuita ( a much better name for this tree growing in the Arizona desert) Cordia boissieri, can be used in the landscape as a tree or as a shrub. Of the nine that the landscaper planted eight were pruned as shrubs and one was left to grow as a tree. Their main purpose was as a screen between the houses. Training as a tree requires careful pruning by hand. As a shrub a power trimmer makes quick work. You can imagine which was chosen by the landscaper. Below are my attempts to train the plants as a tree. You can imagine the pressure that these plants were putting on each other as bushes. 

I am doing a similar pruning to the Texas mountain laurel. Eventually, as they are pruned up I will be able to utilize the filtered shade beneath to add small plants.  

Every time I look at the plantings they did along the edge of the driveway my blood boils. They planted so many different plants giving them no room to breathe. No chance to be themselves. We have already taken out 1 tree and 2 bushes and even now I know there are more that need to be removed. Just to give an example here are 3 trees. The Anachuita, an Anacacho orchid and a photinia all within 4' of each other. 

And on the other side we removed 2 little leaf cordia. It breaks my heart to see them planted this way. This is a well-known landscape company who proudly left their file with information on the plants. I decided I would try to prune the Anacahuita as a tree, taking some pressure off the orchid tree. Brave little soul has bloomed its head off this spring but you can see the horrible growth pattern from constant cutting back. 

 In the end I feel I will only be able to keep the Anacahuita and will have to pull the other two plants. They just don't fit well together. 

despite their beautiful flowering at the hottest time of the year there is a downside to the Anacahuita. It produces a lot of fallen litter, both fruit and leaves which are slow to leave the tree. This is particularly true after a freeze although in the low desert they may behave differently.

It is only now that most of them are free from last years leaves. I find myself going out ever morning and helping them along. The litter isn't all bad because it dries out very quickly and I go around and crunch it up and leave as mulch. The fruit are another thing. They attract the javelina so I find myself collecting them up or cutting them off before they fall. It is a prolific fruiter and every flower seems to produce a fruit. 

Flower buds.

I was told by a local that something can be made of the fruit but it appears to be a long drawn procedure and the result is probably an acquired taste. I will be snip, snip snipping into a bucket all summer.

There is another cordia which was a favorite of the landscaper. The little leaf cordia, Cordia parviflora, I see lots of theses bushes along the roadsides where they are allowed to grow to form an arching bush covered with white flowers. Pruning is not good for them as it results in the branches growing every which way. But the flowers are certainly pretty. It seems my garden is a sea of white with the cords and the bauhinia. 

I am in the process of seeing how well they perform after being cut back to a foot. There is much work to be done. 

FROM CLAY TO GREY

The stucco on our house is grey. The previous owner chose everything grey, inside and out. It would never have been my choice but the expense of changing it is not on the cards. Furthermore the house is very angular with large square pillars which support the patio. My clay pots no longer worked. We purchased several square pots which work well. They were 50% off which made them affordable.

 They are planted up with succulents and cactus which need little in the way of water and seem safe from predators as long as raised.  I brought with me only two of my homemade hypertufa pots. One is planted with succulents, the other with desert mammillaria. All are set up on pedestals because of the pack rats and pocket mice and desert squirrels..  I learnt that lesson early on in our desert life.

 

One of the pots we bought resides in the front entrance way. A difficult place which gets no sun until  the afternoon. If I tell you that the handle on the front door requires an oven mitt to open it you might imagine what a hot corridor this is in summer. We searched high and low for something suitable to but in it and finally settled on a metal plant. Mr roadrunner came with us from Austin. I bought it from my neighbor when she left the house.

 Here's another clay pot that got a paint job and the masonry block that supports it. 

As shade is at a premium it seemed the perfect place for these kalanchoe, beneath the shade of the Texas Mountain laurel which I am pruning as a tree. I once got a surprise from a Gila monster when I was pruning all the lower branches. Now I can see clearly if there are any snakes or monsters hiding there. This is a Gila monster who crossed our path on the trail yesterday. He was about 18" long and considerably smaller than the one who visited our garden. 

 

 

If they do bite they will often not leave go and the venom will penetrate deeply causing serious symptoms. It's best not to let that happen. 

I myself am a dangerous person when I get a pot of paint in my hand. Slowly I am painting all the pots grey. I use craft paint in different shades of grey and a touch of black. Here is a clay pipe repurposed as a pedestal for one of my spheres.

 The planters I made from styrofoam coolers were already grey and didn't need painting.

When it comes to grey rocks this is a different matter. The 9 large grey rocks that came with the builder's package ( requirement of the neighborhood) just didn't look right against the brown coronado riprap rock they used to create the drainage from the scuppers. Plus, I needed more large rocks to create a rock garden. We managed to find some on a building site. They had been jack-hammered out of the ground to put in underground utilities and could not be replaced. Not the right color but I had a plan. I would give them a paint job. I had done this successfully in my Austin  garden with a dilute solution of grey acrylic paint. But those rocks were limestone and absorbed the paint easily. My rocks here are granite and it didn't work. I was aware that iron chelate must be used with caution around paving as it would cause permanent staining. Maybe it would work work with my grey rocks.  It did, and I had good success with toning down  the grey so the rocks looked more at home alongside the riprap. Until I ran out of the product.

 

 I went out to buy some more, only to find that they have changed their product and it no longer stains. I'm still on the lookout for a product that will stain my granite rocks. They all need a second coat and there are more rocks that need the treatment. 

 Maybe the treatment won't be permanent. After all the surface rocks have had thousands of years of weathering to reach the color they are today. Sometimes you can see layers that have flaked off revealing the grey granite beneath.