breakfast on the grass

Posted on May 2, 2012 by paridevita

Here’s the blue grama I sowed a few days ago, coming up. This is “native” blue grama sold by Plants of the Southwest and, in my opinion, it’s just as good as the named varieties.

Then I took a stroll next door (about as far as I could walk after this morning’s exercise with the dog), lay down in the grass, and took a picture of it. I am very good at lying down.

This is ‘Cody’ buffalo grass. It’s been green since March. It has not been watered. It’s been mowed once, to get rid of the old dead grass from last year. No chemicals or fertilizers have been applied.

Weeds are visible in the background. Dandelions. (I could have cropped the top of the picture if I knew how, and felt like it.) I’m going to hire one of the neighbor kids to weed out the dandelions. This seems to me to be a better way of coexisting with other people than to spray some chemical which will make the lawn stink. (I have a very sensitive nose….oh, I’m way too sensitive everywhere, but I’m working on that…. and let me tell you, there’s nothing I dislike more than visiting a garden that reeks of chemicals.)

I installed this lawn. I had some extra plugs left over from a project in the garden here, and when my neighbor said she would like a buffalo grass lawn, I started, uh, plugging away. I got plug flats at Timberline and plugged all during July, until the plugs were gone. That was two summers ago. Last summer no plug flats were available, so I sowed seed. (I tried making my own plugs, sowing in flats, but greenhouses do exist for a reason. I did get little feeble plugs, which survived, but barely.)

Yes, there were weed problems. More weeds than anywhere else on the planet. I weeded. Weeding is said to build character, and while I managed to get most of the weeds under control, there is still the character issue. I read up a lot on all the chemicals now available for both buffalo grass and blue grama, some of which can only be used with a license.

I don’t really do the chemical thing, and, anyway, doesn’t hiring some kid to pull weeds sound like something directed toward a more positive outcome? (That is, if the kid does a better job than I did when I was hired to pull weeds.)

Well, it does. The weeds are pretty much under control now anyway; a healthy lawn will outcompete weeds every time. It’s in the nature of grass to be ultracompetitive.

As I know from my constant struggles with smooth brome, cheatgrass, etc., the grass always wins.

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peonies, again

Posted on May 1, 2012 by paridevita

Supposedly, when one attains the title of Sophisticated Gardener, all of the “traditional” garden plants are ripped out of the garden kicking and screaming, to be replaced by the more “refined” species.

Maybe it’s true, I don’t know. If I said I wasn’t an admirer of multi-colored triple-headed echinaceas, or heucheras with leaves other than green, or hybrid tea roses, some people would take this personally, which I find to be a very strange reaction (as though the people were the plants), but I won’t say anything of the sort. Pretend I never wrote this.

One of the activities demanded of the Sophisticated Gardener is admiration for the ephemeral, even if this means complete trust in perfect weather and being in the right place at the right time, year after year.

I do like peonies–in other peoples’ gardens (which is where most of mine now reside)–especially the old Saunders hybrids. I gave my sister ‘Requiem’ and ‘Nightwatch’, the latter a dark, dark single red; her plant might be the only one within a thousand miles in any direction. When it blooms, it is stunning. For a week, or less.

The species peonies are something else again. I can definitely see the attraction they hold for some people, you know, wild peonies and all that, but really, the flowering period is so short that they’re best appreciated by a person like me, someone with nothing better to do than wait for a flower to open.

I took a photograph of Paeonia anomala this morning. I’ve acquired a DSLR camera, but by the time I read all the instructions (gulp) and get the software loaded, the flowers will have been gone for weeks, so, behold.

According to the monograph by Josef Halda, this is subspecies anomala, the carpels being glabrous. (Yes, I looked.) I got the plant from Wrightman Alpines who sells some species, grown from seed collected by Halda.

I grew a species from seed, too. One of my gardening pen-pals, now gone, sent me a baggie with four of five dark blue seeds, of maybe P. obovata, with the instructions to plant them immediately, right smack in the ground, which I did.

Just a few minutes ago I looked around for the little plant, found it (damaging one of the leaves lifting it out of the sea of sweet violets and dead nettle), and took its picture. I bet this peony is ten years old. Maybe in another ten years, it will grow to be a flowering plant, and I’ll sit in a chair watching the buds open, the flowers unfold, and then disappear on the wind.

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