fring at last!

After three consecutive days of rain, fring (that spring-like season brought on by fall rains) is here at last, and the narcissi are blooming on stems as tall as thirty inches. Fring is two months late this year, but well worth waiting for. 

I must revise some of my optimistic forecasts for fring. Calla lilies are nowhere near ready to bloom, and I've not seen as many freesias and hyacinths as expected. None of these well naturalized beauties received any supplemental water, however. Just maybe, now that I've worked out an easier way to save laundry water, I won't be so stingy when the dry seasons start (generally in that  month when certain eponymous showers are supposed to "come your way").

When our earliest and most inconsequential rains came, I had sown buckwheat to stand as a freesia cover, but it did not start sprouting until last week. Then it looked very much like the volunteer nasturtium seedlings that are coming up everywhere. I went on line but could not find a close-up picture of buckwheat seed leaves, and so Steve and I visited the nearby garden where buckwheat had been blooming last May. Sure enough, there were identifiable sprouts bearing their first true leaves as well as the original pair of seed leaves. Now I can tell the difference -- nasturtiums are the ones with the white dot on each leaf (a characteristic retained by their largest adult leaves).

I feel very lucky to have any buckwheat at all. Several on-line sources talk about planting the seeds an inch deep, whereas my seed packet recommended a mere quarter of an inch. With 200 seeds on hand, I had just thrown them on top of the perma-mulch,  hoping that a sufficient number would find their way into cracks between Chinese elm leaves and stay viable during the weeks without sufficient rain. I still have about 50 seeds, and will plant them one each deep if all else fails. But if the buckwheat follows our nasturtiums' fine example, it will also be volunteering next year.

In spite of being so preoccupied with buckwheat, I have noticed that some of the tallest freesia leaves are sticking up through a clump of dogbane which is covered with fuzzy buds. This will create a lovely mixed bouquet if both are bearing flowers at the same time. So the same kind of effect I want to create with buckwheat and freesias is happening right under my nose. Maybe I should start some dogbane cuttings to fill in when the freesias fade.

Other stars of the fring garden include a promising bromeliad 'pup,' scads of volunteer sweet peas, refreshed succulents, violets sending out runners, and the inevitable oxalis -- daring me to weed it out of the parking strip to make room for the sweet alyssum that's on its way.

an embarrassment of freesias

Early last week, I thought I spotted a weed in our bulb bed, but closer inspection revealed it to be the first freesia of fring, a spring-like season triggered by Southern California's fall rains. The rainy season started very early in October of 2010 and 2011, but this year we're well into the second half of the month, with nothing but a couple of brief sprinkles.

Now that our front garden beds are virtually free of weeds, a single freesia sprout looks very lonely as it emerges from thick brown mulch at the foot of a lavender tree. The appearance of three more sprouts hasn't helped much, and, having reached a height of about six inches, they look even weedier. I hope someone doesn't decide to 'help' me by pulling them out!

The freesias will not bloom until March, and up to that time their grassy-looking foliage will continue to look out of place. As soon as they reach a height of about nine inches, they will start to flop over and lie along the ground. Blossom stalks will rise rather dejectedly from this mass of green, but when at last they begin to open and release their spectacular fragrance, all this early ugliness will be forgiven.

This year, I hope to mask the ugly-duckling phase of freesia development by planting buckwheat, which stands about a foot tall and bears clusters of tiny white flowers. It draws phosphorus from the earth and nitrogen from the air. Thus it is an ideal green manure crop and should be adaptable as a bulb cover for my freesias and hyacinths..

I had never thought of planting buckwheat until last spring's garden tour featured a nearby garden surrounded by a circle of blooming buckwheat. The plantings at this site (a lush mix of flowers, herbs, and veggies) were designed to draw bees and butterflies. Will 'my' bees welcome a change from their steady diet of lavender? Time will tell.

Unable to find buckwheat seeds in our local nurseries, I ordered a packet of 200 on line. Last week I probably jumped the gun by sowing about half of them. The rest will wait until "fall rains heal all.*"
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* Last line of a poem I wrote several years ago about Santa Ana winds.

one bug's nectar, another bug's poison

Jim, the Garden Club speaker last Tuesday, talked about insects. Some thought his topic would be 'Beneficial Insects," but he disabused everyone of this notion at the outset. It was just "Insects." His point of view was purely aesthetic. 

Jim likes to watch insects in all their metamorphic stages, and listen to their distinctive sounds. His slides were beautiful closeups of insects. He accompanied them with appropriate clicking and buzzing, while using his arms and head to mimic the movement of mouth parts . 

Every picture of a butterfly on a flower was balanced with that of a caterpillar eating the leaves of that same plant. When milkweed and buckwheat were touted as host plants for butterflies, I thought lovingly about the little holes I'd seen in some of my buckwheat plants -- now nearing maturity and starting to show tiny white buds.

By revealing his love for mosquitoes, Jim laid to rest anyone's expectation that he was going to focus on beneficial insects. Evidently Jim's wife empties vessels of standing water whenever she finds them around the garden. Jim patiently refills them so that mosquitoes will have a place to breed. Next, I heard shocked whispers of "termites!" all around me when Jim advocated having a woodpile to provide nesting places for insects. He also uses wood to build homes for mason bees, one of my preoccupations from last year.

Less flagrant ways to attract insects were also described. Evidently bugs eschew mowed lawns and prefer a diversity of plant sizes, colors, and flavors, along with a carpet of decaying leaves. Plants that taste 'nasty' to one insect will be the favorite food of another (hence the title of this post).

A few of Jim's slides showed lifeforms other than insects. Spiders and hummingbirds, attracted by insects, were also featured. This prompted me to ask about legless lizards. "Legless lizards are wonderful," Jim replied, but he didn't want to go on record as saying that they would eat snail eggs.

After the presentation, I talked with a lovely woman who told me that she has to "go inside and lie down for a while" when she encounters a spider in her garden. I was on my good behavior, so didn't mention spiders' "noiseless, patient" attributes.

wring buds

The Vernal Equinox will officially usher in Spring on March 20, and until then Steve and I will enjoy wring, the spring-like days that occur during winter. Winter will assert itself from time to time. I remember once when March 17 was the coldest night of our year, and the record low temps for this current week are in the 30s.

Meanwhile, our white azalea, the 'anchor' plant at the southeast corner of the garden, is covered with buds. One west-facing blossom has opened. At first glance I thought there were two azalea flowers, but then looked more closely and saw that the second was actually an African white iris* poking up through the lower branches of the azalea. 

A couple of fat freesia buds are showing hints of their purple and white colors, and look ready to burst open any day. Unfortunately, this is not true of the buckwheat for which I had such high hopes last fall, but sweet alyssum has stepped into the breach thanks to my shaking their seeds hither and yon when the flowers faded last fall.

Calla lilies are starting to unfurl against the background of creeping fig that's finally filling in the width of our chimney, as so hopefully predicted in my first blog post back in January 2010.


In the cactus and succulent bed, a tight bundle of buds is barely visible at the center of a thick leaved aloe.** Clusters of bright orange flowers will emerge at the top of a tall stalk and will last far into spring. I am especially glad to see these buds, since several years ago I almost exterminated our dense clump of aloe and saved only this one specimen.

I am surprised by some of the plants that are not participating in this virtual frenzy of budding. None of the volunteer sweet peas or hyacinth beans is showing anything like a bud, and the Idaho daffodils, though they produced a few blossoms last year, show foliage only. 

In Nothing Gold Can Stay, Robert Frost talked about how the leaves of deciduous trees look like flowers when they first emerge from their tight golden buds:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.

The buds of wring give us the SoCal equivalent of that shining hour: a week of promise on the verge of full-blown spring.
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* The white iris is an evergreen and blooms intermittently year round with flowers that last for only one day. Years ago, Kay gave me a small clump which has spread to form a dense border along the south side of the garden. I am surprised that this plant has not been declared invasive, but the University of Florida Extension website claims that it is "not known to be invasive." Obviously they never saw how it filled Kay's north garden in spite of dense shade, or spread unkempt along a neighborhood alley.

** This is not aloe vera but a pricklier, thicker leaved cousin which I hope to identify soon.