New Pictures of My Backyard!

Here is the sorrel, now in bloom. I don't believe you are supposed to let sorrel bloom, but I didn't have the heart to cut off the tall pinkish-red stalk that it sent up. Besides, I was getting a sick of eating so many sorrel greens.

This cuphea verticillata is one of the first plants I planted in the spring. It was just a small shoot back then, but now it's spreading like crazy. Beside it is a creeping germander, and in back of it are the poet's jasmine and the formerly almost dead camellia.

This is the invasive species corner of my yard, with spearmint, artemisia vulgaris and a cardoon. They may be thriving because I also have an unintentional gray water recycling system here. When the sewer line on my house was replaced (before I moved in), they forgot to attach the pipe from my bathtub. So eventually, my bathwater ends up in this flower bed. You can see a rivulet of the water flowing down the sidewalk at the left. I'm glad it's only my bath water! The good news is that sewer line should be under warranty, so I won't need to pay to have it fixed.


The hop vine is beginning to send out a bunch of shoots. As it gets more sunny, the leaves are turning back to their vibrant green-gold. The wormwood I transplanted next to the hop is doing really well, too.

Here's a close-up of the thriving wormwood. Can it be long before I attempt to make homemade absinthe? Or beer?

The Santa Rosa plums are beginning to ripen.

I planted some sweet peas in early March, and I didn't think they were ever going to do anything. Now they are clambering all over the place and producing fragrant blossoms.

This is a haworthia coarctata, one of two I bought. They come from the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and turn red from green when they get a lot of sun.

This is my vegetable garden, which still is a work in progress. Lettuce plants are in front looking straggled -- because as soon as I planted them, Morgan dug half of them up. The four salad burnet plants at left I grew from seed. I tried planting sorghum at the right, but it never germinated. I may have discovered that Oakland is too cool for sorghum. The good news is I have gotten several harvests from the chard in the back. In the middle are three hutterite bean plants. I put two wallflowers and the boronia megastigma in the old incinerator, with a mugwort growing to its left.

I was warned by several nursery workers not to try to grow a madrone. They said I should try a similar tree from Ireland (the strawberry tree) that is much easier to grow in cultivation. But because the madrone is native to Oakland, I thought I should give it a try. I bought the small plant above one day while I was at work, and I left it in the car for the afternoon. When I drove home, I noticed that a quarter of the top leaves had been burned by the sun. I tried to plant it in a partially shady section of the yard, water it once and then leave it alone, in order to mimic its natural habitat. But it got so droopy this weekend that I had to water it again. One thing I haven't fully worked out is that if it does survive, it will grow into a forty foot tree and shade out most of the rest of my yard.

This is the old pond in the back of my yard that was filled in at some point. On the right side is where I planted the Countess of Haddington rhododendron in peat moss and perlite. It seems to being doing well, so far.

And behind the old pond I planted this giant impatien from the Himalayas.

The corrugated sage plant in this picture used to be in my front yard, but it was slowly dying. I transplanted it to the backyard, where it's doing a little better. I thought sage liked things dry and sunny, but this one seems to prefer damp and shady.

I'm still guessing this vine that I found growing by the fence is a wisteria. I put a stake in the ground which it is quickly twining up.

Morgan's wondering why I'm taking so many pictures of the yard. Stay tuned for part two -- the Front Yard!