Queen Anne Hill, Seattle, Washington

I just got back from a trip to Seattle for my boyfriend's dad's 80th birthday. We stayed in Queen Anne. Here are some snapshots selected from a two-hour walk around the neighborhood with an eye toward garden/landscape interest.

All the traffic circles have lovely plantings.





Are those the best containers for Phormium tenax? Probably not. But when everything is so luscious and summery, it hardly matters.



These people deserve some kind of prize.

UPDATE: Thumbing through an old issue of Pacific Horticulture (2002, Vol 63, No. 1), I find this garden featured on the cover! The article credits Glen Withey and Charles Price with the design.









I had this dahlia last year. I know. That dahlia is so last year.





Block after block of beautiful trees.





These huge rocks figure prominently in the Seattle's residential hardscape. I wonder what their story is.





A protest march sign cum landscape element.

















Those radio towers in the background loom over the whole neighborhood.









Cytisus scoparius, the dreadful Scotch Broom. It's naturalized around in and around Seattle. In California, we worry more about Cytisus monspesulanus.



Buddleja.









Conifer orgy.





Araucaria.









A lot of Seattlites use this Yucca. I like it best massed like this.





I'm happy when people let their lawns go. Good! Now, go ahead and plant something real there.



I love the juxtaposition of conifer, succulent, and fern.



Three planting elements are all you need. Baby bear, mama bear, and daddy bear.



Really nice color combinations.







Apple espalier.



I saw very little garden sculpture. This was practically it.



***

More coming soon, including my trip to the Bloedel Reserve.

A walk around my neighborhood here.

Garden To-Do list:

Buy:

1--Arctostaphylos pajaroensis (plant between Echium and Salvia clevelandii)
2--Acer circinatum (for corner bed. Buy two? Three?)
3--Lupinus arboreus ‘Blue’ and change out the ‘Yellow' (and do what with yellow? Plant it where Salvia ‘Pineapple’ is?—yes!)
4--Hibiscus for deck?
5--Holodiscus?

Do:

Move Achillea to other side of Coreopsis
Move Salvia spathacea to bamboo bed.
Plant grandad’s sedum w/ Princess plant?
Plant Lavatera in front yard planter? (What else?)
Change out Heuchera sanguineum for Heuchera maxima—wait until fall/winter.
Try to get more Monardella macrantha cuttings.

Things to figure out:

1) What to do with Salvia ‘pineapple’—foliage looks too much like Princess Plant.

2) Figure out new bed. Add soil to make rise in current bed. Before new bed, level out back of yard!

3) Figure out old bed. Need vertical interest. Small tree? Second Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’? Fremontodendron? Have Ribes malvaceum.

4) Plant lemon tree (and free up big container)?--Where? Keep/move D. imperialis?

5) Water feature—too tacky? If so, figure out what to do w/ fountain stone.

6) Brugmansia, Philadelphus, Lonicera. Happy?

7) Cotula vs. Epilobium.

Plant Epilobium canum in cotula bed?

Epilobium:
Pro: red flowers would look excellent next to Tibouchina. Silver foliage is nice. Native. Would combine well w/ Arctostaphylos ‘Howard McMinn’
Con: Short season of red flowers? Won’t take off until next year. Maybe get cuttings and plant the area next year. Might be better off right where it is, and more in Cotula bed would be too much. Do what with cotula?

Cotula:
Pro: great flower, nice yellow, spreads, it's already there.
Con: Foliage is too low and scrubby. Dead flowers need pulling (a minor con). Non-native. Underutilizes space.

Thinking outside the box: plant something else there. One of the salvias? Need something shrubby, not too big.

8) Do what with Cistus skanbergii and C. ladanifer?

9) Figure out situation w/ chain fern. Remove? Plant that cloud forest fuschia there? (if so, get seeds!)

10)

Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

He said an engineer was digging up bogland last week to create commercial potting soil somewhere in Ireland's midlands when, "just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something." Wallace would not specify where the book was found because a team of archaeologists is still exploring the site.

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

Link.

"It's early in the game yet, but it's becoming undeniable: Rudy Giuliani will run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 - as the clear front-runner."

Link.

"It's also potentially the only one-of-a-kind Warhol in existence."

Link (quote taken from the interactive feature).

I had a strange dream last night. Or rather this morning.

I dreamt I and some other people (Andrew Sullivan, the nursery manager of the Botanical Garden, and my father's godparents) had assembled to pickle Karl Rove's homunculus, and important evidentiary task that had somehow fallen to us.

Karl was in jail and his 12" little man who executed his master's "evil plans" had been found and needed to be preserved. With Karl in jail, the homunculus was inanimate.

We all met at Karl's house (in my dream, Rove was presumed gay and lived alone) and the nursery manager brought the homunculus. I prepared the pickling solution, per label instructions, by diluting muriatic acid with water in a white plastic bucket and dropped in the homunculus.

[I want to say that in the dream, I was oddly insensible to the fact that muriatic acid (itself a dilution of hydrochloric acid, mostly used to wash concrete as I understand it--not really my field) is all wrong for pickling a homunculus. But when I woke up I was really bothered by this. Everyone knows you'd use formalin (aqueous formaldehyde), not acid. Acid would likely dissolve the homunculus.]

Anyhow, most of this process went fine, except for the part where the homunculus strangely filled with helium (either from its own source or from the acid) and floated to the lanai ceiling (we were outdoors--in my dream, Karl Rove lived in California hand had a very nice, very typical ranch house in Palo Alto) during which time I couldn't find it. I didn't tell anyone because this was embarrassing; I was in charge of the pickling process and here I'd let the supposedly inanimate homunculus vanish. "Rove!"

Something off-topic the nursery manager said about plants sometimes filling up with helium to better distribute their seed clued me in that that might have happened to the homunculus. So then I found the homunculus floating near the ceiling and I was like, "oh look" trying to play it cool like of course the homunculus might fill with helium and float to the cieling. So we got it down.

The only other thing I really remember is going to see Karl Rove's greenhouse because Andrew had heard Rove grew a lot of California native plants. We were interested to see if Karl had anything interesting. On the way to the greenhouse in the back of his yard, I had a jealous flash of "Ugh, rich people and their greenhouses!" When we got there, the place was *mysteriously* cleaned out of California native plants, but was otherwise well-stocked. This really piqued Andrew's and my interest. Who cleaned out Karl Rove's greenhouse, and why? It was very suspicious, and we'd have to report it to the independent counsel. (The greenhouse itself was really a lathehouse and it was rather dark.)

After this we had a banal conversation about plants and I woke up before finishing business with the homunculus.

***

I don't know where to go with this one... I don't have any strong personal feelings or ideas about Rove or Sullivan or even politics and of course I've never met Sullivan or Rove (but I have a friend who's met Sullivan on a number of occassions in DC--but that doesn't seem relevant at all) so I don't know where they came from. I'm definitely not sure about the conflation with political shenanigans with my personal but amateur interest in horticulture... My dad's godparents were English gardeners, so that's why they came.

Link.

Near the center of the crater, the volcano is rebuilding itself, churning out a cubic yard of rock per second — a rate that could see the volcano return to its pre-1980 size in just 100 years.

As the cooled lava reached the top of the bulging dome, it fractured and fell in rock avalanches that sounded like crashing glass.

Link.

Pumping carbon dioxide through pipes into a North Carolina pine forest, Mohan found that poison ivy grew at 2 1/2 times its normal rate, an increase five times the average gain for trees. The noxious vine grew thicker, used water more efficiently and became far more allergenic to humans.

"Poison ivy is fascinating, with its medical implications. But what's really important scientifically is these woody vines have been increasing in abundance all over the planet [and] inhibiting the growth and regeneration of the forest," said Mohan, who released her findings last month.

Link.

"1 Dead, 100 Sick From Carbon Monoxide Leak in Virginia College Dorm"

Related.

Someone should go to jail for that. Carbon monoxide alarms are very inexpensive.

"Even if this is a complete exaggeration, could you imagine finding even a single dahlia fancier [on Wall Street] today? The only blowzy, florid, long-stemmed things Wall Streeters are likely to be interested in these days are strippers.

So, the question is, what happened to our culture to make it so unlikely that any powerful person uncurls in the evening by puttering among his or her vulgar but wonderful dahlias?"

Link.

From an article about meerkats: "The lack of evidence for teaching in species other than humans may reflect problems in producing unequivocal support for the occurrence of teaching, rather than the absence of teaching." Link.

Do you watch Meerkat Manor? I do.

"In his paper, due to be published in Climatic Change, Crutzen argues that it might be possible to cool Earth by injecting sulphate particles into the layer of atmosphere that starts about 10 kilometres above the ground. This would artificially enhance Earth's reflectivity to bounce a larger portion of solar radiation back into space."

Link.

“What happens in the backyard is their business,” said a 40-year-old high-voltage lineman who lives down the street and would give only his initials, Z.V. “But this doesn’t seem to me to be a front yard kind of a deal.”

Link.

I wish the worst for this "Z.V."

I really do.

Awesome!

Quick Change Artists.

A walk around the neighborhood.

Bernal Heights, San Francisco, California.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006.
Approximately 11:30 a.m. through 2:00 p.m.