Irises!

Last year at this time we had a lovely picnic with friends at the Hondo Iris Farm. After we finished our lunch, I could hardly wait to tour the gardens and pick out some iris plants to bring home. A couple of weeks later, I ordered some more rhizomes from their catalog for fall planting.

We set up raised beds between the house and the chicken yard, in a nice spot partly shaded by a huge old Chinese elm and well-serenaded by sparrows, finches, doves, and "our" mockingbird. Then the wait was on, dreaming of irises all winter.

All the early and midseason plants have bloomed with either single or double stalks of flowers. Next year there will be even more. I still have a couple of late season bloomers to look forward to, but I wanted to share the blossoms we have enjoyed so far.

Edith Wolford 

Fiery Temper

This is the same Fiery Temper in another light--quite an amazing difference, I think!

Florentine Silk

Best Bet 

Night Ruler

Spice Lord

Starship Enterprise

Spring in the Desert Garden

When we bought our little vintage adobe house in 2009, the yard was barren. There was a hot strip between the covered porch and the fence, and I was determined to fill it with color. 

It's been a learning experience for a gardener used to the abundant rainfall and loamy, rocky soil of New Hampshire. Here, we have almost no rain at all (maybe 8 inches total in a good year), blazing sun reflected off a south-facing wall, and hard clay soil. Some things work, like these flowering cacti. Some things do NOT work here, like the roses and irises I see blooming luxuriantly in other parts of town. 

Hollyhocks adore our yard and put on an amazing show every year. These older, short ones are just starting to bloom now. Our plants self seed, and I just move the seedlings around a little. My knitting friend, Diane, gave me a little packet of seeds from her plants up on the East Mesa part of town a few years ago, and the rest is history. I have sent my seeds, in turn, to gardening friends in Nevada, Northern California, and Washington state. 

I am hoping for great things from this scrawny-looking tangerine crossvine, just planted a couple of weeks ago. I would love to train it to drape from the porch roof. We'll see.

This brutal-looking plant is the kind of thing that really thrives here. It started from one cactus pad in 2010 and will soon be immense. I just hope we can control it, because you can't go near it to prune without heavy gloves and long-handled tools, and even then it will find a way to get you with its thorns (painful) and tiny glochids (stiff hairs, way more painful and very difficult to get out once they are embedded in your skin). Why do we put up with it? Well, it's here now, and is very beautiful in its way. It has many shades of purple and aqua in those pads, and it will be flowering soon, too. 

I should have taken these photos earlier in the morning. It would have been easier to see what I was doing and the photos might be in focus! The desert bird of paradise (known to us as The Bertie Memorial Tree) on the right and the Texas lilac out of sight just beyond it both provide some much-needed shade just three years after being planted. 

This was such a rookie gardener mistake--I thought that cacti would be slow-growing and planted these too close together. I like the sharp colors, though. 

These hollyhocks around the corner from the other, smaller ones may not look like much right now, but stand back! I'm expecting a wonderful show soon. The plants are at least 6 feet high and still growing taller ever day. They colonized themselves in a partly shady east-facing bed where nothing had grown before. There are some larkspurs down under there somewhere, which will add some more color to all the hollyhock pinks. 

There you have it, my April report for the garden. What's growing (or about to grow) in your garden? 

May Morning in the Garden

"Be like a flower and turn your face to the sun."
- Kahlil Gibran

“Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. 

Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.” 

- Betty Smith, Joy in the Morning

"The world's favorite season is the spring. 
All things seem possible in May."
-  Edwin Way Teale

In the October Garden

I have spent the summer planting--small trees, flowering shrubs, and perennial plants. I love anything that blooms and gives color, so by choosing new plants based on the flowers I have admired in other people's gardens around town I have been rewarded with a summer of color that has continued on into fall. I can't wait to see these plants next spring, after they've had some time to really take hold.

Right now, with our chilly nights in the high forties and our sunny days in the high seventies, the garden is hanging on and filling me with delight.

My pretty geranium, purchased at the Farmers Market. I will take the pot inside to winter over

Just as in my New England garden, the green tomatoes are trying to ripen before the first frost. This plant took forever to flower, but we have been harvesting ripe tomatoes for fresh salsa and there are still green ones aplenty

A chrysanthemum plant bought several years ago and transplanted here from a planter in Clovis is really taking off

I am such a fan of blue flowers, and these salvia blossoms, newly planted, please me no end. They are attracting a lot of butterflies, too.

Opuntia and hens & chicks. This cactus was the very devil to transplant and we worked at getting cactus spines out of our skin for days in spite of all our careful precautions (heavy gloves and layers of newspaper wrapped around the plant, which worked just fine with the other cacti). This tricky cactus has two kinds of spines: The big, easily seen ones at the top of this plant; and tiny glochids with backward-facing barbs that you can see in this picture as part of the polka dots. If you ever get stuck with these, here are some methods for removal. You can see just the tiniest blush of lavender at the top of the pad. When we move into winter the entire pad will turn this wonderful color.

A Little More About the Garden

This year represents my first real try at desert gardening. The plants and soil and climate are so different from what I knew back in New Hampshire. 

I'm learning to group plants by their water needs. The tomatoes and roses are near each other because they like being watered; the cacti, off in the background in the picture below, are baking up against the adobe wall of the house and rarely get any water from the hose. 

The tomatoes were slow to grow and slow to bloom, but they suddenly took off and spread across the path, engulfing the roses, the crape myrtle, and the little hollyhock plants. Next year I am hoping for some spectacular hollyhocks, as they will shoot up and bloom in the second year. 

I had never seen vitex trees in bloom until this summer, but I loved their color. Ours was three feet tall when I planted it in June. I learned that if the first blooms are cut off after they turn brown, you will be rewarded with an even more abundant second blooming. I love their color with the pink of the crape myrtle, petunias, and geranium; and with the lavender-blue of the sage (not shown in these photos). The little tree fills the porch and the front yard with its spicy fragrance, which comes from both the flowers and the leaves.

Here is the Texas lilac (vitex) when it was planted in June; it only had a few blossoms, and just came up to the top of the fence

The Texas lilac in mid-September is full of blossoms and is a lot taller than I am. I love looking through it at the mountains. 

Cactus Garden Update

When I planted the beginning of the cactus garden back in mid-June, we all marveled that I had to remind myself NOT to do anything to it except for a light watering every three weeks. I cancelled a couple of those waterings because of our summer rains. In spite of what seemed like neglect to me, the little plants have been thriving. 

Here they are in mid-September, after three months in their adobe soil (with half sand mixed in for drainage). I've put in "before" pictures, too. 

Echinocereus triglochidatus (good grief!), "White Sands" before

... and three months after. Although the camera angle was different, you can see that there are maybe twice as many rows of thorns on the sides, indicating lots of growth. I'm glad I have these photos for comparison. Cacti are like kids, they grow, whether you notice it or not, from day to day

Mexican fire barrel cactus, before...

... and after. Not such dramatic growth as the first one. 

Euphorbia? It was really small in June...

You have to look hard to see the original part of the plant. It's grown so much that it might actually needs staking, although  I've never seen that done with a cactus. I like the way it throws its shadow on the adobe wall. 

Chastity via Vegetation

A month or so ago, we started noticing some lovely medium-sized trees around town that were blossoming in a wonderful shade of blue. The tree in the left foreground is an example, although I don't think you can see the blossoms very well, but the photo does give you an idea of the size of the mature tree.

I checked with my favorite plant guy down at the Las Cruces Farmers Market and found out that the tree is called a vitex. I bought a small one from him and planted it out front in the full sun.

Here is a close-up of one of the blossoms.

I wanted to know a bit more about the tree, and found that it is also called chaste tree, chasteberry, or monk's pepper. The leaves look a bit like cannabis, and, together with the flowers have a lively peppery fragrance. I like a plant with a bit of a story to it, and this one will add a lot to our gardening conversations: The Greeks used the leaves to "cool the heat of lust," and the plant parts were used as "anti-libido medicine by monks to aid their attempts to remain chaste."

Never mind what they say about older people; perhaps having one of these in the garden might add even more to our reputation around the neighborhood.

The Beginnings of a Cactus Garden

Golden Barrel Cactus

We live in an adobe house in the Chihuahuan Desert, so of course we should plant a cactus garden! However, this kind of gardening is very new to me and the rules are the opposite of everything I've learned about planting and gardening, which is to dig deep, add humus and other goodies to the soil to help it hold moisture, leave a little well around the plant to help water go right to the roots, then cover the area around the plant with some nice mulch, to slow evaporation and to keep the soil cool and moist.

Mexican Fire Barrel

Not so with a cactus garden. Here, you drill into the rich, but adobe-hard clay soil; add one part sand to one part chopped up soil, even out the soil around the new transplant to discourage too much water getting to the roots; then spread some nice hot-in-the-sun gravel around the new planting.

Of course, I've left out the part where you must persuade the very user-unfriendly spiny plant to leave its container and maneuver it into the hole that you have prepared for it. The man who sold us the cacti was most helpful with this part: He suggested making a kind of collar out of a piece of rolled up newspaper to wrap around the plant while tilting the pot on its side and gently sliding the thorny fellow out and into place. It worked!

Some kind of Euphorbia? Help! I've lost the little label

Now comes the hard part for a former New England gardener who has always equated abundant water with plant love. I will be watering the new cacti so few times until they are established that I have had to schedule the waterings on the computer. It will be weeks between waterings, and this is the right thing to do, as the most common cause of garden cactus failure is overwatering.

Bosque Gardens

Beez is a good, good man. Even though there are games on (basketball? soccer? I really don't pay much attention) he will take the time to go for a walk with me through the hummingbird and butterfly gardens down at the Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park.

These are fairly new gardens and the plants are just getting started. The butterflies and hummingbirds act like they don't mind at all, and were just waiting for this special place to be built for them.

Eventually, this arch will be covered with honeysuckle

The little orange flags show where more new plants will be going in (planted by volunteers)

One of my favorites, the desert willow tree, with its lovely orchid flowers

I've been seeing these red yuccas in bloom all over town; they are so striking we just bought one down at the Farmers Market for our own garden

Red yucca blossom detail--no wonder the hummingbirds love them

There are just a few more days to vote in the New Mexico Days of Enchantment Photo Contest. You can vote as many times as you want, but only once per photo per day. See my photos here (they are under clairz in case that link doesn't take you to my entries). Your votes are really helping! The response to this contest has been amazing, and the views of New Mexico you will see there are really incredible.