Tag Archives: pansies

Frosty with ceanothus.

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The sun shone in a blue sky, so I braved the chill to walk the creek path this morning. It wasn’t too cold at all. But when I got back, I saw that the fountain was still iced over. Behind it you can see the newly pruned pomegranate and plum.

January is progressing pretty much as usual in the garden, with the typically surprising, commonplace glories. Most of my landscaping does not go into dormancy, so every day reveals something showing its aliveness by a changed feature. A few asparagus had sprung up in the last week, so I cut them to put into soup for breakfast, along with a portion of those greens I harvested last week.

Dan the Landscaper added to the collection of new plants that arrived in nursery pots in November, and quite a few went into the ground last week, including the first-ever ceanothus that has lived on this property. It came with buds, and they are starting to open. Ceanothus is a genus of 50-60 species, sometimes called California Lilac, and I never remember their names, but we had a large one on our former property in another town, “long ago.”

ceanothus
Yarrow flowers of this morning.

When I type that common name it reminds me of my first encounter with this plant. My late husband and I had only been married a year when he returned from a backpacking trip with a friend, bringing me a flowering branch of white ceanothus that his hiking buddy had told him was California Lilac. The fragrance of those blooms imprinted itself on my mind. I think most of the blue or purple varieties are not that aromatic.

One plant I am most excited about having in my garden is Clary Sage — and I have three of them just planted. These are the white ones, which I haven’t had before, but I expect to love them as much as the purple I’ve had in the past. Clary sage is a biennial, so I have to remember to have new ones going in every year, if I want to have it blooming regularly in June. This picture below is from the back garden, in ’23. My little starts only have about ten leaves each at this point, and can’t be expected to bloom until spring of next year.

Clary Sage in 2023

While I wait for the new landscaping to get installed and to grow up, I put in various bulbs and annuals, so that when I go in and out the front door I can be cheered by their colors. I see the leaves of muscari and anemones poking up, but right now it is the wholesome faces of the common pansies that greet me every day. This one is saying hello to you right now.

Infant pines, and other p-plants.

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Little pine trees like this have sprouted all over the place under my Canary Island Pine tree. I don’t remember this happening in the previous 30 years I’ve lived here.

The snow peas I planted in the fall are blooming purple flowers! All the other peas I have grown over the decades — the varieties that are grown for food and not flowers — had white flowers, so this is fun.

I am thrilled to see that my ever-languishing Dutchman’s Pipevine has two flower buds and many leaf buds presently. We’ll see if that is enough scent to attract the Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly. It would be awfully exciting to see one of them in person. This is what they look like in pictures:

Maybe this year I’ll get the other Swallowtails that like parsley; I have a good crop of that, too. And at church, I’m the gardener of a very small planter, which requires little work. It’s on automatic irrigation, so my only task is to plant and deadhead. This picture was the Before Deadheading this week:

The last couple of days we have had a cold and fierce wind blowing through. It makes me want to hide indoors, but I managed to buck up and work a tiny bit outside today — mostly in the greenhouse, where I intend to plant seeds tomorrow! (They don’t all start with P.)