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introducing myself

Well, since Tim has suggested that all new members introduce themselves, I
thought I would take up the gauntlet and do so.

I garden in San Francisco (USDA zone 9/10; Sunset zone 17), where I've
lived for two years since moving south from Vancouver. My garden is behind
the apartment building in which I rent. Unfortunately, I can't see it from
my windows as I am in the front of the building, but I know it's there.

When we first moved in I dismissed the idea of even trying to garden out
back, because the area was completely choked with blackberry brambles,
algerian ivy, and hybrid poplar seedlings. But after a winter of feeling
garden-deprived, I impulsively went down to the local hardware store on a
warm February day and bought a pair of pruning shears, a pair of gardening
gloves, a small trowel and a box of lawn and garden bags. This, of course,
turned out to be far less armament than I would require, but I was
optimistic (and poverty-stricken) so I just started in anyway.

This has turned out to be the kind of project that, if you had understood
what you were getting into, you would never have started, only you don't
find that out until you have already invested so much time and energy that
you refuse to quit.  Besides digging out the root systems of about 45 young
hybrid poplars--about half of which I had to chop down first--I have
removed sheets of tar paper, crumbling gypsum board, a used car battery,
bales of rusted wire, rusted copper pipes, many, many gallon cans full of
broken glass (according to a long-time resident of the building, most of
the back windows blew out in the earthquake of '89), several large garbage
bags of just plain trash like soda cans, snack wrappers and laundry
detergent boxes, a large group of semi-empty paint cans, random broken
crockery, a defunct beeper, a bullet (!), and several dozen buried slabs of
concrete from the former foundation of the building. I did actually break
down and buy a proper shovel a weeks into the land clearing.

Most of the soil out there is really bad as it is actually subsoil removed
when the back of the building was excavated for a new storage area. It's
not so much clay soil as actual clay.

To make a long story interminable, I now have a garden, although it's never
going to be mistaken for Tintinhull House. There are still six hybrid
poplars in one corner of the 18 by 30 foot space, which some neighbors in
the back of the building won't let me remove because they're "beautiful."
With some of the trunks from the poplars I did cut down I built trellises
for a couple of Solanum jasminoides and a Jasminum polyanthemum, and an
arbor, which will one day be covered in Rosa 'Opal Brunner' (no relation to
Cecile, apparently.) Since my landlord doesn't like it when the water bill
goes up I have tried to concentrate on mediterranean plants, although not
all of them are happy because the garden gets no sun at all between the end
of October and the end of January. It is also at the base of a 9' retaining
wall, which means that the land above drains down into it.

Okay--plants: I rely on various kinds of geraniums (phaeum, macrorrhizum,
and even palmatum, etc.) as ground covers in the shadier areas, along with
Lamium maculatum and Clivia miniata. All of these are tolerant of dry shade
and soil which, despite my hauling tons of steer manure back into the
garden--a few pounds at a time--remains utterly miserable. A Rehmannia
elata is spreading like crazy under these same conditions and will be
divided soon. I have been less successful with Galium odoratum, which
always seemed unkillable in Vancouver but really resents the summer-long
drought here. My next experiment will be with Euphorbia amygdaloides--I
think it will work. Various ferns that don't mind dryness are doing fine
too, particularly Polystichum munitum, Nephrolepsis cordifolia, and
Dryopteris arguta. There are also lots of volunteer arums, which must have
been lurking since the last gardening attempt out there. Nicotiana
sylvestris and langsdorfii, both grown from seed, are proving perennial
here and the sylvestris is even seeding itself around a bit. I also grew
Digitalis lutea from seed for these dry, shady areas, and it is doing fine
although even the two year old plants have yet to bloom. Maybe this
spring...

On the sunnier side of the garden my ground cover/edging plants are
Geranium incanum, Erigeron karvinskianus, and Stipa tenuissima. All of
these are spreading around and seeding and generally becoming
nuisances--which I think is great, because just under two years ago I was
looking at bare dirt. Other successful plants include Euphorbia characias,
Saliva leucantha, Phlomis fruticosa, Penstemon 'Midnight', Salvia
transylvanica, Salvia sclarea (two last from seed), Cobea scandens (ditto),
Salvia uliginosa, and Leonotis leonurus.

Plants on the wait-and-see list include Cephalaria gigantea, Lespedeza
thunbergii, Rosa 'Gloire de Dijon', Salvia nubicola, Miscanthus sinensis
'Variegatus' (which is now in its second year of sulking), and a Hydrangea
arborescens someone gave me as a potted plant and which doesn't appreciate
the summer water situation. I am trying out Nectaroscordum siculum and
Gladiolus byzantinus this spring along with some other supposedly
Mediterranean bulbs, so I will watch what happens there.

So that's about it.  Nothing too unusual or thrilling, but then until I
actually own the land I garden on I'm not so sure I want to invest in
unusual and thrilling, unless I can grow it from seed!

Good digging & apologies for any nomenclatural spelling errors
Laurel




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For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
   -- Christopher Smart
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