RE: Re: Kansas City National - Spec & Spec-X #5

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-----Original Message-----
From: iris-photos@yahoogroups.com [mailto:iris-photos@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of Jan Lauritzen
Sent: Monday, May 25, 2009 11:38 PM
To: iris-photos@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [iris-photos] Re: Kansas City National - Spec & Spec-X #5

Hi Jim - You can come visit So. Cal.  We are very different from San Jose.  I assume that you know we are hosting the 2012.  At least you could get here then. 

Sorry, I guess I forgot to attach the picture.  Here it is.

Thanks for the info on the bamboo thicket.  We have a couple of kinds here - one is the black bamboo.  It is happy but increases quite slowly.  The other bamboo is a larger variety with stalks about the same thickness as yours.  Ours is abut 20 feet tall and grows extremely rapidly like yours.

The farm sounds fantastic.  I am sorry that it wasn't on the trek but I understand completely.  We do have to consider safety but it would have been great for some of us.

Hope your spurias, etc. are still blooming.

Have a good day.

Jan

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From: Jim Murrain <jimmurrain@gmail.com>
To: iris-photos@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, May 25, 2009 1:26:45 PM
Subject: Re: [iris-photos] Re: Kansas City National - Spec & Spec-X #5

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Jan Lauritzen
<j*@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I was in your garden on Saturday.
> Your garden was fantastic!  Really loved the bamboo hideaway - a great
> idea.  Can you ID the two types of bamboo I noticed there?  One was very
> pink and the other (surrounding the sitting area) I believe may have been
> Black Bamboo.
>
> All your plants were wonderful, including the sand box with the great very
> tiny succulents.  I took a ton of pictures around your place.  So many of
> the plants were ones I was not familiar with.  My climate in Southern
> California being so very different from yours.  Last night the weatherman
> said that we were still 8 inches down for the season (which is over already)
> and we only average 13-15 in a normal one.  All your plants look so vigorous
> and lush.  Ours are very unhappy with our tignt water restrictions.
>
> Thank you for letting us visit your fantastic place.
>
> By the way, can you please identify this plant from your yard?  I believe it
> may be the seed pods forming on a peony but I am not sure.

Hey Jan, sorry you were here after the 4 inch rain, things looked much
better before that. The hide-out is mostly Phyllostachys bissettii
with a little bit of Phyllostachys aureosulcata 'Spectabilis' mixed
with it. Black bamboo, Phyllostachys nigra, is not quite hardy here.
By the way, the new 'boo shoots are already 6 feet taller then the old
ones. A good year. I wish the farm could have been on tour, that's
where most of my iris are growing, a 2 acre pond full of LA's and
pseudacorus. Spurias, historics, and species scattered all over the 80
acres. But, it's very rustic and would need much grooming to be safe
for a tour. The bamboos are much larger there too.

The sand box has been a successful experiment, I need to build a
series of permanent ones to replace it. I. arenaria, the sand iris has
a seed pod there now.

There was no pic to ID in your message, but I'd be happy to give it a
try. It's fun to go places where you don't know every plant, last time
I was in San Jose I was stumped by many things and amazed at the size
of others. Haven't been to SoCal in many many years, last time I was
only 21 and hitchhiking across the country, Florida to Washington, to
California and back to Florida.

Jim Murrain
Kansas City, Missouri
Zone 6A-5B