Too broad a topic? How about in this one particular yard? OK, I can narrow it down further to just a few plants.
Death first: there's been a bit too much of that, predictable considering we just finished our second year of severe drought. When your average yearly rainfall is 8", and two summers in a row are "nonsoons" instead of monsoons, it tends to get critical. None of that is news to those of you who follow this. Or live here.
We've had agave deaths in the yard, desert-hardy as they are, and not just after blooming which is normal for them. The little octopus agave babies I plucked off the parent stalk last year and raised have gotten enough attention that all in the yard have both survived and added a few more leaves.
A few of the fancier short aloes, supposed to be rabbit proof after a year or two, have died. Not from lack of watering this time, but likely from watering, making them tempting targets for hungry bunnies. Protective cages that had been removed were replaced in those instances where I noticed the damage while the plants still had some there there. When newer aloe replacements were planted this last year, they were instantly caged, just like every other new planting. I'm determined to win the rabbit battle! It doesn't matter whether I went to a garden center and bought / split a couple clumps from pots, or adopted a box-full of drying plants removed from the side of her house by a friend to widen her driveway: TLC all around. Of course, the drying out freebies don't have cages, but they aren't the fancy kind either, and coming from poor local soil, rabbits actually avoid them.
The dead plants which broke my heart this year were mail ordered, from Benson, AZ it turns out. When we bought the house in 2012, it came with a Mexican Bird of Paradise. The orange kind. It's well established and is thriving despite our typical level of care. While I'd like to claim credit, much of its care came from ignorance. It's sturdy. Plus, I certainly wasn't watering it those first semi-normal years. In the meantime, out and about the wider neighborhood with my eyes and camera, I spied a blooming plant I fell in love with, a yellow Mexican Bird of Paradise, one of at least three varieties of the genus which are used in landscaping around here. This one has large yellow blooms with long red stamens. I researched, made phone calls, and finally found a local nursery which supplied what I wanted.
Or so they said. It's blooming right now, but all the blossoms are about the size of nickels, only yellow, and nothing to fall in love with. Lest you wonder, yes, I'm taking care of it properly, and as soon as the current crop of flowers have finished, or just before we head north, whichever is first, it will get pruned and shaped better. Right now branches poke out in varying directions, but that's where the blooms are. When I purchased it, there was a single flower bud on it, well hidden for a couple weeks, finally opening into disappointment. This was not the plant I wanted.
Not to be deterred, I did some online shopping, now that local possibilities were exhausted. That's where the Benson plants came from, and by now I was so frustrated that I ordered two, just in case. They got planted in the same spot. Are you familiar with the term "failure to thrive"? They were getting watered regularly, the ground had been well prepared for them, but still. They bravely sent up a few small branches each, say about an inch long with very teenie leaves. What started red became an indifferent green, fading to brown before whisking away in the smallest breeze.
I kept watering them anyway, just as if. My heart was really into having these particular plants, and by now I was into watering in general, hitting the big pine tree in small segments, with a detour over to the fence where two short grey thready twigs remained, about 4" tall. I'd thought their spot along the fenceline was open enough to provide adequate near-full sunlight, until actually studying how long the shadows of surrounding plants and trees reached in winter. Had they been a foot taller, no problem, but these were still hugging the ground. With some help from Rich, pruning back one tree and several flowering bushes opened up the pathway for the sun to reach. But it was too late. No leaves left.
Since it was past the window for any new plants to get established before summer, I went back to online research of suppliers for possible planting next fall. Two of them are still on my eBay watchlist. All that emotion turned into energy for continuing to get the yard into shape in other ways.
I was surprised a couple weeks ago to see the large - this time blue and very spikey - agave next in line from the one which had supplied babies last year was now sending up its own flower stalk. Since another one right down the line from it wasn't doing anything but making another leaf, this one must have benefited from the extra water the octopus was given last year, all other growing conditions being equal. I've been watching that one stalk stretch up, finally today pulling it out from where it was trying to invade a space between pieces of the roof. Being in the same planting line with the other ones, it was therefore also coming up too close to the house. That part is fixed now, and I'm waiting to see what kind of flowers it produces. Will it be a straight stalk surrounded all over with single blossoms? Or one of those which branch out above 10 feet or so in a giant version of an asparagus pattern?
The camera has been busy, of course. This is the kind of aloe where each leaf holds the imprint design of the one(s) it was wrapped around, giving a white ziz-zag down the center length of the blue leaf. Sometimes there's a double zig-zag. Like all agave plants, once the stalk started growing the parent plant started dying. In this case it doesn't mean turning brown yet. But the leaf tips lost their blue and added green, yellow and red, very subtly, reminiscent of fall foliage. The stalk, as it outgrew each small leaf which formerly enclosed where the tip had been, left behind unique patterns in those leaves as well, mostly yellow-green with whiter striations, not always in the same design. Now that it's reached roof height, those bottom leaf colors are changing to brown on their edges. Watching it has cheered me up considerably, nearly making up for losing those two yellow Mexican birds of paradise along the back fence.
A big decision awaits however. Once this plant reproduces, whether by seed or plantlet, do I want to try to grow some more? Yes, it is beautiful. But it's also so damn spikey, not just along the leaf tips but all up and down their edges. If I try to grow more, life is going to be literally quite painful for months. There will not be a poke-free spot on me anywhere. But, sigh, beautiful. We'll see. If it produces seeds, my information says they are often sterile. So maybe no decision.
Meanwhile, my previously mentioned friend delivered that box of aloes. I decided to plant them all along the fence where those two little plants died. There is plenty of sun there now, and as the surrounding bushes and tree fill back in over the next few years, there would still be enough sunlight to keep them growing and blooming in season. They can do shade. Their cousins grow and flower on the north side of the house. Rich got to do the planting since that was when my back was complaining. I had him leave the area open where I'd done all the ground prep earlier, in hopes of getting a second attempt, more successful this time. I could still tell where that had been, just because I was so familiar with the spot, even though after giving up I'd removed the cage protecting them.
In order to mark the spot I brought the cage back and Rich put tent nails around to hold it in place. We had been plagued recently by disappearing cages around the baby octopus agave plants, and found that once away from their protectees, despite each bearing a neon green fabric tie on their tops to shout "I'm here, don't step on me!" to the world, it took days of hunting to track them down again for replacement. This is even knowing they were confined inside a 6' chain link fence! They had to be somewhere! While looking at the spot now, cleaning debris from scattered dead leaves out of the area, I thought I saw a bit, just a very tiny bit, of red on one of the twigs I hadn't quite brought myself to pull out yet.
The red had fooled me before, holding on for weeks before turning brown. I kept watching it, hoping against hope, taking a close up shot with the camera and cropping it beyond reason to enlarge whatever was there. It turned into two teensy leaves! Since I'm out there watering nearly daily making sure those aloes get established, that spot in the line gets well provided for as well. Today I looked down again, and it wasn't two leaves any longer. It was three! And the new one was green!
Now I'm sitting out on the patio writing this, the sun just down and still 80 out, and today is also the first day of orange blossom perfume giving its own blessing to spring. I almost wonder if it's too soon to start celebrating the symbolism of Easter.
However, there is no way I'm going to go around hiding dyed eggs! None!
No comments:
Post a Comment