The Hill Garden

If the color in this picture looks a bit blown out it's because it is. I suspect my camera needs cleaning for it seems to be stuck, or at least slow to respond to manual settings. I decided to use this panoramic shot after fiddling with it a bit because it does convey the arid, glarey, summer like conditions we're having. It was 85ºF here yesterday and there has been no rain since sometime in January. There are already four fires burning in California, none near us.

Our garden never really went dormant this year. There are  many cactus-like plants that never really change much over the course of the seasons. And this year John barely finished pruning everything for the winter before they were starting to sport spring blooms. 

Some plants, like the lantana on the far right never lost their leaves. A few of them are still blooming demonstrating the sense of confusion we're all feeling.The trees that still have their leaves are California Live Oaks. They have nice trunks and bark and keep most of their small very prickly leaves but enough fall to the ground that the dog won't walk on them.

The orange flowers in front of the live oaks are aloes which put up striking candle like blooms. The sap from the aloe plant is supposed to be good for cuts and burns and I have a friend who keeps a small one in her kitchen for just that purpose.

When we first moved here, the  patio was backed by a stark bare wall. One of the first things we did was plant several trailing rosemary plants. Clearly, they have thrived, softened the look of the wall and provided a safe haven for a lot of ground dwelling birds.

Rosemary has tiny blue flowers that bloom profusely for a long time and attract hundreds of bees. They also have seeds which harbor a number of different kinds of birds, including quail whose nest building skills leave quite a bit to be  desired. They basically line a shallow depression in the earth with some grass and call it done, but they are very secretive about where they actually make these nests. Underneath the rosemary in the back and underneath the olive hedge in the front are both favorite spots for quail nests. We look forward every year to seeing the proud parents lead their impossibly tiny fluff ball babies out from under the hedges in the spring.

On the top level of our hill garden is a flat space with an arbo with solar lights hanging from it, lots of rose bushes which will bloom later and John's garden shed and raised beds. They have been fallow for a couple of months but have kept John busy planting cover crops of clover and digging in compost. His current obsession is growing tomatoes from seeds. Right now they are in our garage resting on heating pads and sunning themselves under lights. They are just starting to sprout and I caught a picture of John watering the tiny shoots with his tiny watering can. He's a very detail oriented engineer, so he loves tending these little plants, moving them into bigger pots to promote stronger roots, and eventually putting them into the prepared beds, after the last frosts. Usually this is around the first of May, but it is so warm here now that frost is a mere figment of our imaginations....