Monthly Bulb Log 2023

[Redmires]

Your garden is looking just glorious at the moment Ian!

I thought of the successive waves of plants you have on Sunday, when I went for a walk through some local woodland to check how spring was progressing. The floral highlight was  Oxalis acetosella - there were carpets of it and it has seeded into nooks and crannies in the tree trunks. I wondered if you've ever tried it in the garden? I've read that it's not very keen on competition, so I suppose it might get overwhelmed. It can't be all that delicate however, because I saw it growing with Chrysosplenium oppositifolium (covered in dainty yellow flowers and also looking very pretty just now) and elsewhere it seemed to be holding its own against the various other understorey plants. I wish I could post some photos, but until I can afford a camera or smartphone I can only offer a description.

[Ian Y]

Thank you, the garden is looking good with all the new growths and as you probably know my inspiration came directly from the wild and still does.

We have grown Oxalis acetosella in the front garden for many years where it grows in harmony with Gallium oderatum and between them the form a nice carpet. It is another of these  wild plants that grows without hindrance to the many other subjects we have growing through them.

[Redmires]

That's very encouraging. If I'm able to collect seeds I'll experiment with it in my own garden.

[Ian Y]

Not surprisingly Erythroniums feature in this months Bulb Log which along with Trilliums and many other subjects fill the garden with a mass display of spring colour.


https://www.srgc.net/documents/bulb%20logs/230517101704BULB%20LOG%200523.pdf

[Robert]

Hi Ian,

Thank you for another inspirational and informative Bulb Log. Your garden at its springtime prime is gorgeous. Maybe this is an understatement.

I have been implementing the gardening principles that you describe in our own Interior California garden. I observe closely our local native plants and plant communities here in California and then attempt to imitate what I see. My efforts seem like a folly, however nature takes over and the results are progressively phenomenal. As one might expect, our garden looks nothing like yours. Mass displays of spring annuals are completely natural here in our part of California. The “dry” appearance of summer is also part of the natural cycle and has its quiet beauty. The textures and scents of our native chaparral plant communities can be easily incorporated into our garden. As with nature, I avoid growing plants as isolated specimens. In our garden plants are planted out into the plant community and become part of the whole. Self-seeding is welcome and encouraged. With the autumn rain and cooling weather brings a new flush of green from the parched ground. As so the cycle continues.

Thank you again for all your efforts writing and posting your Bulb Logs. With nature there is always something new to learn and observe. It is never the same. The results of your efforts show in our ever-evolving garden that seems to increase in beauty with each season. Jasmin and I continue to benefit and learn from your Bulb Logs. Thanks again!

[Ian Y]

Thank you Robert and Jasmin you comments are always so thoughtful.

Knowing that my work can help others see nature and a garden as one and the same thing is rewarding and encouraging.

Taking inspiration from me is second hand far better going straight to the source, explore our local environments and learn from the master that is Nature.

[Ian Y]

There has been a lot of growth in the garden this month with the ground cover spreading and the emergence of leaf canopy and as always I am guided by nature. Plenty to see in this month's Bulb Log if you click on the link.


https://www.srgc.net/documents/bulb%20logs/230614090755Bulb%20log%200623.pdf

[Robert]

Hi Ian,

We thoroughly enjoyed your latest Bulb Log. As we understand and interpret your essay, it is more about HOW we view and use the plants in our garden, and less about WHAT plants we have in our gardens.

My (Robert’s) gardening perspective has certainly been evolving. There have been so many wonderful local native plants to get acquainted with and use in our Sacramento garden. They have been here right in front of me the whole time, but in the past it was too easy to get distracted by exotic plants from far away places. I could spend an infinite number of life times getting to truly know and understand our local native flora. With this perspective, each day in the garden is exciting and a new adventure. What will the plants be teaching and showing me today? There is always something new to see and wonder over in our Sacramento garden. For me this is gardening bliss and contentment!

More and more, I look to nature to guide me through the gardening process. Extremely noxious, invasive annual grasses have ravaged our native oak savannah ecosystems. Ripgut Brome, Bromus diandrus, is just one example. Our native perennial bunch grasses were once the dominant grass species in these ecosystems. Now they are rarely seen except in isolated locations. I have been following nature’s example and have been incorporating these native bunch grasses into our Sacramento garden with very satisfactory results. They combine perfectly with our native bulbs and native annual species. It is not surprising that following nature’s cue, the effect in the garden is perfect. At our Placerville property, native bunch grasses are being used to crowd out the invasive species and help reestablish something resembling the original oak savannah ecosystem.



Taken today, here is a scene from our Sacramento garden. An off type of Eriogonum umbellatum ssp. polyanthum is blooming with the long arching spent inflorescences of our native Purple Needle Grass, Stipa pulchra. In nature, Western Needle Grass, Stipa occidentalis var. occidentalis, would be a more likely companion, but this works. Arctostaphylos, Heteromeles arbutifolia, Rhamnus ilicifolia, other Eriogonum species, Primula hendersonii, and Brodiaea elegans ssp. elegans all share this garden space. They are all extremely common native plants, nothing rare or exoctic, yet they create such a natural and pleasing ambience in our garden.

I am certainly not an artist, but this does not mean I cannot be creative with plants. For me it is the creativity that makes gardening so infinitely pleasurable. Thank you for sharing your garden. It is so different from our Sacramento garden. I am very grateful for this. I learn so much from the infinite and ever changing creative gardens out there.

[Jasmin]:  Through your past and present bulb logs I hear a kindred spirit.  Robert does not think he is an artist.  However, what is the definition, what is the meaning of art and artist in the first place?  What is poetry, or any creative endeavor?  Is the only acceptable definition Monet?  Does Picasso have no place?  What about those ordinary arts of spinning, weaving, sewing, cobbling shoes and other handicrafts?  Is not home made bread art?  In our denatured and disconnected technological age, such skills hold the potential to reconnect us with our humanity, and with the planet just as gardening can and does.

Our stands of home grown grain are beautiful, and it is humbling to my core that such basic sustenance has nurtured humanity and our endeavors to the point we have lost this vital connection with our own survival.  Our ancestors did not have so much knowledge when they began domesticating these grains, and evolved them into the varieties that nourished and continue to nourish us.  When we make and break bread, or whatever our cultural legacy to these grains, we connect with all that has come before.  Returning to some of this heritage is more than symbolic, it is remembering to humble myself before their wisdom, and the beauty and art of life, the gifts they and this planet have bestowed.

I might not want the roe deer in my garden, but I think all our ancestors would have welcomed the addition of venison, the bones, sinews, and pelt into their diet, clothing, and sewing.  Nothing would be wasted, and taking too much would not happen—Principles we would do well to recover in our search to aid our ecosystem, for without the earth and her bounty there is no survival for us either. 

[Ian Y]

Robert and Jasmin I always love you comments - they are always considered and thought provoking.

That you understand and are absolutely on the same path is evidenced in your words "We thoroughly enjoyed your latest Bulb Log. As we understand and interpret your essay, it is more about HOW we view and use the plants in our garden, and less about WHAT plants we have in our gardens."

Everyone can be an artist if they put into practice their inner creativity in what ever medium or performance they want.

Thank you both while art comes naturally to me words do not so my replies will never be so erudite as your lovely posts.

[Ian Y]

Click the link for this months Bulb Log but beware there is an artist loose in the garden.


https://www.srgc.net/documents/bulb%20logs/230712173915BULB%20LOG%200723.pdf

[Carolyn]

Wonderful combination of Lilium pyrenaicum and Thalictrum species. Any idea which one it might be? Thalictrum minus, perhaps?
I have a similar looking thalictrum - which I think I will try to dig out. It has been in the garden for a few years - maybe 5 or 6 yrs, but this year has suddenly shown signs of wanting world domination. It looks lovely in flower, but is now overwhelming its neighbours…. And I think it might be spreading by stolons….

[Ian Y]

Sorry Carolyn we never had a specific name for it we grew it from seed just marked sp.
It is certainly not thuggish here it makes a very good plant neighbour. It has not shown any willingness to increase by seed and I would welcome more of it round the garden.

[Carolyn]

Ian, do you ever get seed from it? Some thalictrums, such as dasycarpum, are dioecious. The male plants produce the more spectacular flowers. My cunning plan for this species is just to have one female plant in the garden, to provide just enough seeds for the seed exchange and to prevent mass seeding all over the garden.
I wonder if your plant is dioecious?

[Robert]

Hi Ian,

We enjoyed your recent monthly Bulb Log and garden tour immensely. It is such a positive pick up and has a genuine positive impact especially when we need a lift. In particular, we enjoy your gardening perspective through the reference points of all the different ways in which you approach art. In some ways it would never occur to me (Robert) to view gardening through the lens of sculpture or other art forms. We have our gardening perspectives, which in some ways are very different; however seeing gardening through many perspectives and reference points can be enlightening and certainly primes our creative gardening endeavors in a positive way.

BTW – This morning I read the June 2023 Global Climate report published monthly by NOAA - National Centers for Environmental Information. Other than June 2023 being the warmest June for the globe in NOAA’s 174 history, I found this bit of information: “With an average temperature 2.5 C above average, the United Kingdom had its warmest June since records began in 1884.”

There is evidence that many species in cultivation and in the wild, including Meconopsis, are at risk as global climatic anomalies increase in magnitude. The mid-Holocene warm period was so different from what we are experiencing today. One significant difference is that 8,000 years ago the steppe-grassland ecosystems of the Sahara and Mesopotamia were still intact providing a buffer from the summertime heat extremes occurring during this time period. (The impacts of the mid-Holocene climatic optimum were a bit stronger in the Northern Hemisphere, and were primarily a summertime event caused by predictable changes in the Earth’s orbit.) I hope more gardeners will consider species and varietal stewardship as part of their gardening practices.

Thank you for providing information on how climatic changes are impacting specific plant species. I am keenly interested in this type of information.

[Jasmin]:  I particularly enjoyed the “found” art—driftwood combinations, and the open spaces of meadows with wildflowers.  The sight of the mown land was a shock, the lovely herbage given no time to seed out.  Your garden is really lovely and restful.     
    The heat finally arrived here, with over 40 C for some time to come.  We will see if we get anything akin to last summer, with that 46.7 C.
     I also find rest in your garden submissions.  It has been a difficult time for me emotionally and spiritually.  I have not been diligent working on my bird care guide; rather, caring for precious Dariya in particular has been my focus.  She is not recovered.  We keep praying for a miracle, and the answer we keep getting is the gift of time—It is now a little over 10 months.  We are thankful.
     As with the garden, nothing is forever.  All we can do is pause to appreciate and savor the precious moments, and the miracles of life wherever we encounter these treasures—and they are around us all the time if our eyes and hearts are open to them. 
     There is so much in life we cannot change, and it is too easy to fall into learned helplessness as we are bombarded with all we cannot do or change.  Somehow when we pause with these miracles whatever their size or location, suddenly all becomes well in the world.  Right now Dariya is napping on my lap, Friede and Naomi are nearby on my shoulder and other leg, and Tovi is sitting on the window frame as sentinel, calling out all the exciting things he sees.  There is an extension of the wild into our home.  They will never let me forget they are not domesticated despite their breeding, especially when they see the goldfinches and hummingbirds outside, or hear Mr. Dove--or the various hawk species.  What the birds outside in the garden do, they do inside our home too, regardless of species.  They do make their own artwork.
     Through the Forum, you are a neighbor with whom I can visit and the world feels more kind, more beautiful, and more wonder-filled because you encourage me to keep opening my eyes and heart to all the wonders to behold, even when my eyes are bleary from tears and age, and my heart feels trepidations and broken from the many sorrows that face us all in life.

[Ian Y]

Thank you once again Robert and Jasmin for your thoughtful comments.

Yes Robert I was worried we were going to get another prolonged hot (for us) dry period the same as last year but fortunately that changed. The heat dome that is causing such high temperatures over southern Europe has stalled the weather system over us so we are getting sunshine and rain most days. The temperatures are moderate on 14th I recorded another video and it was 14.5C much more amenable to a northern Scot.  Never mind the plants I could not cope in temperatures into the 40'sC which I know you are likely to experience.
I am pleased to say the Meconopsis are making good leaf growth so I am hopeful they will be with us again and produce more flowers next year.

Jasmin I love the idea that we can be neighbours it is one of the positive sides of digital technology.
I have always employed found art with seaside driftwood and washed up objects being especially attractive to me sometimes they are already complete such as the fish below. The eroded and sea worm eaten bit of wood suggested a fossil fish - I also found the bit of wood used as the base on the beach I just added the dowel to bring the two together.


If you have not already seen it you may enjoy this Bulb Log from 2017.
https://www.srgc.org.uk/logs/logdir/2017Oct251508925749BULB_LOG_4317.pdf

Keeping our eyes and minds open is something we should all practise across all of life.