casa coniglio

red form (red stem)

It's always a surprise and a bit of an annoyance when I read in catalogs or on the web how boring Nolina texana is. It is evergreen (sigh!), it is grassy (yawn!), it is a tough native that needs no irrigation but not very impressive (snooze!). Yes, it is all of these, but boring? I beg to differ.

white form (purple buds)

What plant in this climate is evergreen and grassy? Grasses here are either brown in the winter (dormant), or dead (annuals or dead tropicals). I suppose you could claim that Yucca glauca is evergreen and grassy, but I think that calling it grassy is a big stretch.  And before you claim that pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana) is evergreen and grassy, I'm just going to stop you with a "no." Enough said.

blue form (flowers open)

In the winter, when there is so much brown, you have to appreciate its green. It is a perfect textural counterpoint to the other evergreen native plants that don't need much if any irrigation, opuntia, juniper, oak, and pinon.

red form (green stem)

People seem to ignore the flowers of this plant. But it does bloom, for a couple weeks in the spring, with 2-3 foot spikes densely packed tiny lily-like flowers.

blue form, open flowers

 These spikes are attractive from their emergence, to the dried finished stalks (although you may want to trim these if they start looking untidy).

white form curly leaf tips

white form

Granted, the flowers don't last very long only a couple of weeks, but we have bulbs that bloom for only a week and then we put up with the dying foliage and bare expanse of ground for the summer. And sure, from a distance the flowers are not as impressive as a tulip, but they have a beauty of their own.

blue form, flower detail

 
Nolina's evergreen leaves have structure throughout the year. The flowers come in a range of shades as shown, from blue-purple, to reddish to white, although the buds are the most colorful, usually opening to white.

purple form, in bud

Perhaps best of all, the leaves of many plants end in a cute twisting curlique. Not boring at all.

blue form curly leaf tips

To a plant freak like me, any discussion of light and my thoughts turn to exposure and microclimates. What plants prefer this type of light? What about that type of light? It is only after some time contemplating that, does the landscape architect and photographer in me turn on and I think about design and form and structure and composition.

Early evening light on Crocus speciosus.

Early morning light on Cistus x aguilarii

So Gardening Gone Wild's discussion this month is how light affects how we perceive a garden. Light affects the mood of the garden. Which had me thinking that although we can't control the weather, we can design for light in the garden.

Scotland's long summer days make for sunsets that last for hours and light the landscape.

New Mexico's intense light is ideal for lighting up delicate seed heads and translucent thorns.

New Mexico's White Sands are all about light and form.

 
This is particularly important in New Mexico, where light is so important. The light is what brings so many artists here. And it is not just the visual aspect of light, but the significance of light here in bringing heat, savored in the winter, and shielded from in the summer.




We can design for it in the garden by designing land form to capture light and to sculpt light. Controlling heat of course is an issue, with shady ramadas being commonplace here, but how about places for capturing winter heat? So then I return to the plants, and with these, New Mexico is an ideal place to recognize light.


There are so many plants that create delightful experiences with light, from the contrast of light on sculptural plants like agave and yucca, to the glitter of the tails of mountain mahogany in the afternoon light.

Yucca rostrata

Cercarcapus breviflorus seed tails sparkle in late afternoon sunlight with fairy-dust quality

Yucca faxoniana's curling filaments capture the late afternoon sunlight.

Despite having had all the leaves frozen off, one of my Trachycarpus fortunei (Windmill Palm) decided to bloom. I guess that since last year was so good to it, the wheels were in motion and it couldn't stop. I've decided to cut off the flowers since blooming might deplete whatever last reserves the plant might have and do it in. The leaves are growing back, although slowly, but that's better than dead.

When the tulips bloom, a flower bud emerges from the center of the leaves, grows and develops in an easy sort of way. With deciduous fruit trees, the buds formed from last years growth are hanging out on the twigs, and when spring comes, they swell and burst open.  But when the claret cup cacti bloom, it is not the gentle cuddly process that you might imagine. I had imagined that a tiny bud would develop at at the junction among the spines. But instead, the plants have a smooth, protective waxy epidermis that shows no sign of a bud until it is ruptured open in what appears to be a most painful brutish way to allow for growth of the emerging bud. It seems similar to the process of giving birth, although even with that process, there is a predetermined channel. This is more like a c-section. Or Ripley's Alien birth.

I thought this E. reichenbachii var. baileyi had an easier time of it, until I looked closer. It's hard to tell. Maybe it is just smaller and harder to see. Or maybe they just have it easier.

It's hard to express just how eye catching these flowers are in the landscape.

The first of the claret cups opened today.

 I was afraid we'd get snow last night, as was in the forecast. It was just a dusting, but might have been cold enough to damage some emerging flowers. I hope the eremurus is okay.

 My neighbors have been ooh'ing and ah'ing over my redbud tree this year. It's an eastern redbud, Cercis canadensis, which I guess is pretty enough, and surprisingly floriferous after this past winter's miserable cold.  I myself have been sighing over the Oklahoma redbuds around town, which are a much more vibrant red-purple, and to be honest, this past winter I'd been thinking about taking my redbud out. I don't think that I would replace it with an Oklahoma redbud, just opening the space and allowing more sunlight to reach the plants below, which have become light starved as the redbud tree grows. 

I think that clusiana is my favorite tulip. I love the soft colors, the delicacy, the graceful arch of the stem, the crimped leaves. With today's cloudy weather, the flowers stayed closed, but this is when I love them the most. Although last year I lamented the yellow form (below), I'm appreciating the warmth of the yellow petal edge. I still don't really like the yellow of the open flower, though.


In the previous years that I've had this tulip, the leaves were close to the ground and crimped in a pie-crust fashion. This year, they are more upright, taller, and almost smooth. The flowers also began to open while the colors were still quite pale (below, 2 days ago) but now they have colored up.


It has always been a major bummer to me that tulips don't last longer. For me the flowers last a week, tops. This is why people plant at least several varieties, so some bloom early, midseason or late.



I'm happy to notice that as clusiana has clumped, the bulbs have staggered bloom times. Although there are some flowers open, some are just developing. Maybe I'll get as many as two weeks out of them this year.


My other tulips don't seem to do this. When they form clumps, the flowers all open within a day of each other. This makes for a more dramatic show, even if it is not longer.

My radishes are coming up.

Tulipa batalinii 'Red Gem' is starting to bloom. Interestingly, even though they are the same name, the batch that I bought a year or so later is blooming at a different time (earlier) than the first batch, which doesn't even have any buds out yet.