Even after a few years of trying most of the seeds available from Renee’s Garden Seed catalog, my niece still wants to grow them all every year. Sadly, her compact garden and landscape designer father who thinks he owns it can not accommodate all the seeds that she wants. She is therefore forced to limit selection to her favorites and those that she has not yet tried.
‘Cupani’s Original’ and ‘Perfume Delight’ are still her favorite sweet peas because they are so very fragrant. The big softly blushed pale yellow flowers of ‘April in Paris’ are a close second. Although not as fragrant, I wanted her to try ‘Electric Blue’ for its shaggier darker green foliage and smaller but refined deep blue flowers.
Perhaps as a strategy for an alliance, my niece’s oppressive father planted ‘Buttercream’ nasturtiums, which was a new variety with semi-double cream colored flowers. She rebelled with the brilliant red shades of ‘Copper Sunset’. The softer orange shades of ‘Creamsicle’ was a diplomatic compromise.
Both could agree on the soft lavender and pink shades and white of ‘Gulf Winds’ alyssum, the rich deep pinks of ‘Mountain Garland’ clarkia, and the traditional ‘Mrs. Scott Elliot’ columbine, since all three are so complaisant with mixed annuals and perennials. Taller and more vigorous cosmos got their own space. ‘Dancing Petticoats’ provided a mixture of cheery pink shades. ‘White Seashells’ looked sharp against the deep green privet hedge.
Since utilitarian vegetable plants are inconsistent with such a designer landscape, my niece grew vegetables that are as flashy as foliage plants. I suggested richly colored ‘Scarlet Charlotte’ chard, with a bit of ‘Italian Silver’ that exhibits distinctive white petioles and veins. She went for the more colorful ‘Garden Rainbow’, ‘Neon Glow’ and ‘Bright Lights’.
Some (but not all) of Renee’s Garden vegetable seed mixes have a distinct advantage of color coding. The various seeds withing these mixes are dyed with different colors so they can be planted separately if desired. Since seed packets usually contain more seeds than are actually needed, vegetable seed mixes are a practical way to get fewer but enough of a few different types of seed in single packets.
More varieties of seeds are available from the online catalog of Renee’s Garden Seed at www.reneesgarden.com than at retail nurseries. Yet with so many fun varieties to try, the retail seed racks certainly have more selection than any garden really needs. If it were at all possible to try them all, my neice would have figured out how to do it already.
This landscape is nothing fancy. It is out in front of a fast food establishment on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz. It is low maintenance, and starkly simple. It would be nice if the so-called ‘gardeners’ would cut back the African iris and English lavender a bit better, but they may have left them like this so that they are less likely to get trampled. The colored chips get replenished regularly, and the trash gets harvested quite efficiently. As I said, it is nothing fancy. The only remarkable feature had been this exemplary crape myrtle in the middle.
If there were lawns and fences in this neighborhood, the grass would likely seem to be greener on the other side of the fence. In this situation, the greenhouse probably seemed to be more comfortable than being left out in the storm. This tall Douglas fir tree dropped in to find out. It did not go well. What remains can be seen in the middle of the picture above, just to the right of the fallen fir, and in the close up of the picture below.
What is this? It looks more like hail now. It was softer and squishier when it fell out of the sky only an hour or so before this picture was taken. There was a slight bit of snow up on Summit above Los Gatos. It will probably melt as quickly as the clouds clear to let the sunlight through. Snow sometimes appears on the higher peaks around the region, but is rare in lower elevations. Forty three years ago from today, on February 5 in 1976, snow fell in the Santa Clara Valley. It was about half an inch deep in some areas, an inch and a half in others, and was the last snow to fall there.
It may not look like much, but before all the rain started, the San Lorenzo river was shallow enough here to walk across. The water was clear and barely flowing. It is impossible to guess how deep it is now. It looks like cafe au lait, and is certainly flowing better than it had been. The watershed is less than a hundred and fifty square miles, so all this water is not coming from very far away.
