Tony Tomeo

While so many of us in the Northern Hemisphere were contending with unusually warm weather, our weather here had been unusually mild. The weather only recently became warm for the past two weeks or so. It did not get unusually hot here like it did in so many other regions, but the warmth developed suddenly enough to damage many of the flowers that were blooming at the time. This included many of the new perennials that we happened to be installing at the time. Consequently, there were not nearly as many flowers to get pictures of as there had been in May, and some of the flowers in these pictures show damage from the sudden change in the weather. I am sorry that I neglected to participate in Bloom Day in June.

These pictures were taken at work, on the Santa Cruz County side of the Santa Cruz Mountains above…

This is the opposite of the ‘right plant in the right place’. It is something that horticultural professionals should neither promote nor tolerate when feral plants appear in landscapes that they are getting payed to maintain. This example looks like it is more relevant to the topic of ‘Fat Hedges’ from https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/horridculture-fat-hedges/ , but there is more to this feral pyracantha than that. Yes, it is shorn too frequently to bloom or produce colorful berries. Yes, it looks like an upside-down and halfway buried Christmas tree. Yes, it contributes nothing to the landscape. What is worst of all is that it does not even belong there. It was certainly not planted there on the edge of the curb. There are others nearby, but they happened to appear in spots where they could have actually been assets to the landscape if they had not also been shorn into this weird upside-down…

This really is the best climate here. Winters are just cool enough for many plants that require a bit of a chill, but not unpleasantly cold. Summers are just warm enough for most plants that need warmth, but the weather does not stay too unpleasantly hot for too long. Warm weather here typically lasts no more than a week, and is accompanied by light evening breezes and cooler nights. Minimal humidity typically makes the worst of the heat a bit more tolerable.
While much of North America and parts of Europe were experiencing abnormally and uncomfortably warm weather earlier in summer, our weather somehow stayed relatively mild. For a while, it was significantly warmer in Portland than here. It certainly was nothing to complain about. Vegetable plants that crave warmth were not too inhibited by the mild weather. Flowers that typically deteriorate in warm and arid summer weather lasted a…

This sort of weather pattern does not happen very often. Late spring is normally pleasantly warm, and the weather gets progressively warmer through summer, which typically includes a few unpleasantly warm days. It rarely gets too hot here, and when it does, it does not last for more than a few days, and tends to cool off at least somewhat at night. The air is normally arid. Humidity is uncommon in a chaparral climate.
While so many in the Northern Hemisphere were experiencing unseasonable warmth, the weather here was unusually mild. When the weather became warm, it did so suddenly. There was nothing unusual about the warmth. It was well withing the normal range for this time of year. The suddenness of the change was what made it unusual.
Humidity complicated matters. Again there is nothing too strange about humidity. Although rare, it does sometimes happen. The problem was that…