THERE'S A DRAGON IN THE GARDEN

There's a dragon in the garden and he's breathing his fiery breath over my plants.

The dragon was a chance find at an estate sale and as things are at the moment I thought he deserved a place over here.

Can it just be a 6 weeks ago that I was lamenting that 3" downpour on the day of the Fling visit to my garden. Since then we have been completely dry. While other gardeners were recently blessed with another 3" downpour, the storm passed to the north and left nothing here. My stock tanks are empty. This summer is wearing thin-wait a minute it isn't even summer yet. High nineties have been the order of the day for weeks now with a few 100s thrown in. The second flush of flowers, Monarda, Echinacea, Rudbeckia, day lilies have all had a pitifully short season this year. I'm sure I am partly to blame because the soil is poor and drip irrigation has minimal impact when it is so dry.

Who needs flowers anyway? Rocks look pretty good.

and there are plenty of the tough green plants.

The Liatris doesn't seem to need any additional water. In some places it is growing out of the rocks. It is growing everywhere in the front courtyard, having seeded freely, and will bloom with incredible purple spires in the fall........or will that be sooner this year.

Everything has gone quiet in the front courtyard. But that's OK. Less work for me.

Thank goodness for some very tough plants out in the front. These are the plants that manage without additional water although they may not look their absolute best.

And I have moved a few plants into the only shade I have in the side entry courtyard. Even cactus and succulents need a break and I shall be ready for one myself soon.

I have added a battery powered drip irrigation system in here for the summer to water a few plants that need a daily water when I can't be there to do it.

Including the asparagus fern by the garage door. Even the fish have moved into the shade.

There is rain in the forecast for this next week but then we know how that goes.

IT'S BEEN A HARD DAY'S WORK

And I was working like a dog!

Live oak leaves, live oak catkins, live oak sprouts. It's that time of year. When a live oak tree drops its leaves it is amazing the weight and volume. Cans full of the things. I see people in the neighborhoods with their oak leaves stacked in brown bags at the road sides. Fortunately for us we have plenty of room to dispose of them otherwise.
But the job of cleaning up in a dry creek is not an easy one. There was a time 20 years ago when I would not have entertained owning a leaf blower. Now, I couldn't do without one. Leaf removal took all morning followed by an hour of kneeling down clipping off the oak sprouts.
There was one bonus to this work. The flowering of my lace cactus , Echinocereus reichenbachii, right before my eyes.

As a cloudy morning turned to sunny skies the flowers opened all at once. To think I might have missed it.

Then I shoveled fresh gravel into the bare areas alongside the dry creek and took a few photos. And as that old Beetles song goes-Tonight I'll be sleeping like a log.

WHAT! ANOTHER ROCK

When David was out cutting down some trees a few weeks ago I spotted a rock that I knew I could find a place for in my garden. To my eyes it was a beauty; full of character and that perfect, weathered shade of grey.

If you have visited my garden you know just how many rocks have been moved from out there to in here. In fact our garden would be nothing without its rocks.
This is an area I redid recently. A corner by the pool; another layer of rocks to make this area more of a rock garden. Many plants have lived in this spot. I started with a rosemary plant that became to big. Then an Agave demettiana which succumbed to the freeze. Next came a soft leaf yucca which succumbed to the agave weevil. Now I am planting hardy natives such as santolina, blackfoot daisy, a low growing iris and scatterings of California poppies. I want to keep the plants low so the rocks will always take pride of place. Not so easy here as few plants stay small and manageable.

Rocks maintain interest in the winter garden when all that remain are the more structural agaves and grasses. No color to be found yet. That will have to wait for spring.

And they make a great transition from one level to another.

Not to mention their usefulness as a retaining wall. These rocks I collected during construction knowing I would build this dry-stone wall.

I like to take my cue from the land where there are some pretty amazing rock walls. I love this one, close by our house, over which water rushes when there are heavy rains.

You have to do something when you have terrain like this.

On the surface you may see nothing but underneath there is buried treasure.

So exactly what did I do with that rock I found. Actually, I put in an order for more! I decided to redo the area in front of the large window in the front courtyard. Originally there were 3 white Indian Hawthornes. I had never pruned them and they grew rather straggly, never flowering. A flowering Senna seeded there. It was lovely but if you know much about those trees you are lucky to have one grow with a nice shape. They tend to send out branches at all angles. But they are pretty when they bloom. It was leaning forward trying to reach more sun.
This area never warranted a photograph so I have none to share of how it looked but I knew it needed to be redone. One day I just let loose with the pruners and saws and by the end of the day the area was bare. Now I could begin to think about what I was going to do there. Of course with the dry creek running alongside it was going to involve rocks and that rock was going to find a home right there. That is why I needed a few more rocks.

The first job was to remove all the river rocks and clean out all the debris. This is something that has to be done every few years because plant material builds between the stones. Then I started to position the stones along the edge of the dry creek. This is always trial and error and these rocks are very heavy. First attempt failed but here's that nice rock placed on the second attempt.

The final ledge and river rocks replaced.

I plan to plant along the edge to soften the look of the area and add new gravel. I was also thinking of getting a new pot until I looked at the prices of large ones at the nursery today. (Unless we win the lottery tonight!) This old pot works quite well and it will be a matter of deciding what to plant in it. Also maybe a few grasses to soften the area around it. My other thought was to make a rectangular water feature which would be poured in place. But that would be more work.

For now I am playing around with ideas.

ONE AREA OF MY GARDEN GETS A MUCH NEEDED OVERHAUL

If you don't care for rocks then you may not want to read on because this week I added more rocks to the garden. Working with rocks is one of my favorite thing to do.
One area of the front courtyard garden had been sadly neglected. A couple of years ago we worked on the right side of this area extending the dry creek up into the corner of the wall. This past week I made a tributary dry creek on the other side. Looking at the French doors, on the left were two yaupon hollies planted by the mockingbird, lots of inland sea oats and ruellia. An untidy mess.

 One of the yaupons has now been removed along with all the sea oats. An extension of the original dry creek terminates in the left corner.

This summer I found myself casting frequent glances through the door at the large Whale's tongue agave, in the rock garden beyond, which was slowly dying (now removed). But at the same time I realized that it was imperative to make some improvements in this area. So, after cleaning out the plantings I created the creek. This time it involved a trip to the stone yard for $25 worth of New Mexico river rock.

Its a difficult area to plant. It faces north. One corner gets absolutely no sun and the other gets only sun later in the afternoon. That is why I decided to leave the yaupon on the corner so that the tree would temper the summer sun. For now I dug up some seedling Gulf coast penstemon and lyre leaf sage and planted them along the wall. I have a couple of hardy agaves that might look good in this area too. The soil is poor and I have no plans to amend.

Nature has planted a flowering senna tree in this corner. It doesn't get any sun so is not likely to bloom but the birds seem happy to perch there before and after visiting the bird bath. Ruellia, columbine and sea oats do well even in the poor soil but I shall be looking for some similarly undemanding plants to add to the area.

IT'S EASY TO GIVE THE WRONG IMPRESSION

It is all too easy to make it look as though your garden is nothing but perfection. The tight shot of that beautiful blooming plant belies what is going on around it. The same is true of wider shots of the garden. They may not be all they seem. At least to the owner/gardener.

Take this shot of the dry creek taken from the driveway. Your eye might pass over all that green growth in the gravel. It is a mixture of zexmenia, feather grass and oak sprouts with a few rain lilies thrown in. It will probably take a whole morning to clean up to my satisfaction. If you have live oak trees you know the oak sprouts just keep coming back and have to be trimmed time and time again.The granite area you see at the top of the picture is another story.

When we took out the two large Texas sage bushes that had seeded in the granite I felt quite relieved. I loved the cleaner look. Well, I learnt something new about this plant. If you leave a little piece of root behind it will grow into a new plant. So there were 15 new Texas sage growing up, clustered together. I should have just taken a few pieces of root and stuck them in the ground in a place where I would like this bush to grow. Of course, I have potted them up until they make a good root mass and I can put them where I want them. It took an hour of my gardening time this morning.

I have mixed feelings about this scenario. Bluebonnet seedlings. Do they really have to clump together like this. I feel the need to save them from strangling each other. There are so many other places I would like to see them. The good news is that I am going to need some extras having discovered this morning that the decollate snails have a taste for the the seed leaves. They have eaten every one in my front garden. So having discovered this I spent an hour searching and removing every snail I could find. It's rather difficult for a snail to dig itself in in the gravel. Its broken cone is always sticking up in the air.

Down on my hands and knees I noticed this little plant beneath the Weber's agave. Is it a ghostly Eryngo? I have never grown this plant so I have no idea where it came from.

I also spotted something else growing and I am hoping it is standing cypress, Ipomopsis rubra. Will it send up that gorgeous red flower stalk next spring?

I couldn't possibly remove this frost weed, Verbesina virginica, even though it is crowding out the rose and spineless prickly pear at the back of the pool. You don't get to see the wide shot! In previous years it was on the berm outside the walls. I may never get to see the frosty stems when we have our first freeze because by then it will be long gone. For now the bees and I will enjoy the pretty white flowers.

The potager may look reasonably tidy but you should see all the weeds. It's a nightmare!

THE RIGHT PLACES TO SIT IN THE GARDEN

" The right places to sit in a garden have to be discovered. They cannot be decided in advance." So wrote Elizabeth West in her book, Hovel in the Hills.
This is my favorite place to sit in the garden but it wasn't always this way. This seating area was created when we began to realize that the two seating areas that came with the house didn't fit all our needs, which were to find a pleasant place to sit at all times of the day and year.

It's not that there is anything wrong with the seating patio at the back of the house. It is the perfect spot for early morning cups of tea, evening entertaining and a log fire is more than welcoming of an evening when there is a chill on the air.

There are splendid views of the sunken garden from here but this is not the place to sit to catch the warmth of a sunny winter's day. That was why we decided to make a seating area in our front courtyard.

Protected from the north wind by the high wall and facing south it is quite the little sun trap. I am sometimes lulled into sleep mode as I sit here listening to the sound of the water trickling over the sides of the water feature and the hum of bees on the sweet smelling blackfoot daisies.

Then I am reminded of something I need to attend to out there and the spell is broken. But as I said it was not always like that. To begin with there was nothing.

The plan came to me fairly quickly the first month we were in the house. It was a rainy July night when I looked out of the window and saw a swimming pool forming. When it rains in Texas it really rains. The small drain the builder had installed, with a few bull rocks around it, and which was to take water to the outside, had blocked. That was when the idea for a wet weather creek came into my head. That involved digging out the creek and bringing in the rocks to form the banks of the creek. We had plenty of those to hand. hen we hauled a ton of New Mexico river rock into the creek. We built a block wall along the back edge so that a rose could be planted there.
The slightly sunken area of gravel above the creek acts as a trap to slow down the rain. I notice that at the time I had already put a bench alongside the walkway from garage to house which brings me to my next seating area.

This spot catches the late afternoon sun. You wouldn't want to sit there in the summer but what a lovely place to sit in the winter. A cup of tea and a book! Ah, if only.
Returning to the back of the house we have a small dining are off the kitchen. It is a nice place to eat breakfast but only on cloudy summer days. The sun shines right in. We needed a place to eat our summer breakfast. There was a garden we hadn't even begun to tackle; the English garden. It already had a name because of the drystone wall I was building to create a raised bed around the curved outside wall. This garden was just crying out for circles and what better than a circular patio. And so the area went from this..

  to this and...

more recently, with the demise of the patio table a little refurbishment. Once again we can have breakfast in the English garden.

Just one more place to sit. The once Spanish oak garden has had a makeover too.

and I well remember what this looked like.

Now I think we have the whole seating thing just as we would like it. It took time and thought as to what we wanted and where we wanted it. As Elizabeth West said, none of this could be decided in advance. We needed to watch the sun, the weather and the seasons to find the best place to place our chairs. No more sitting on the driveway for us.