Garden Activities: December 3, 2024

It was fun getting together with the Tuesday Crew and sharing our Thanksgiving stories prior to getting started with our work day. Dale Harshberger, Beverly Kemmerling, Irene Rowland, Daryl Stutley, Nancy Taylor Walker, Janet Wall, and I started out in the Native Section to see if there were any changes to the Ironwood tree found to be dying two weeks ago.

Back then, it was dull green and crispy; today it was brown and crispy.  So today, we chopped it off to the level of the top of the wire cage. We’ll see what happens. Janet looked on the web for possible causes of sudden ironwood death, and one of the more likely culprits was the heat blast we had late last summer. Why it or any other weather-related event resulted in only one of 3 succumbing is a mystery:

From there, we passed the coulter pine that had been rescued last time, and found that Jim Cyr had nicely staked it. Hopefully the bright green stake and tape will be sufficient to protect it from inadvertent trampling.

Following on from 2 weeks ago we continued our effort to line the paths in the Trail of Trees with cobbles. Looking  west toward the tunnel formed by (I believe) a young live oak and a shoe string acacia which have grown together (and trimmed) to form an arch. Sometimes such happy accidents occur in a naturalistic garden such as ours when ultimate growth patterns are not fully planned for when allowing natives to grow where they’ve seeded themselves. Below is the “before” picture:

Irene with a bucket of cobbles:

Dale with an arm full:

Daryl between two still-vibrant-with-fall-color Chinese pistache trees:

Dale, Beverly and Irene in the path:

And below is the “after” picture:

Hopefully we left enough room for the club car to negotiate the path.

After finishing that stretch of path, we made our way up the hill doing some cleanup along the way. Yours truly and Nancy cutting away some dead from a live oak sapling:

Daryl clearing some rosemary from the unseen bench in the upper Rare Fruit Orchard:

Finally, spring is fighting with fall.  The brilliant fall colors of the pistache and ginkgo trees vs. the first spring leaves of the forest lily (Veltheimia bracteata) and blooms of paper white narcissus. Forest lily (and someone’s finger!):

Paper white:

In between are winter bloomers such as red hot pokers which are in their full glory in the KAG and S. African gardens right now:

Thanks to Beverly and Nancy for their images.

Enjoy the garden!   KMM