Front Yard Update

These first two images are from the backyard, actually.  The persimmon tree now has two blossoms, so if all goes well, it will also have two persimmons this fall:

Below is the cardoon, now almost as tall as the garage.  You'd think people would be knocking down my door for the tasty cardoon stalks, but I can barely give them away:

Moving to the front yard, here is the hedgehog holly, growing next to a veronica, amid the slender shoots of gladioli cormlets that were scattered when I dug up the callistemon stump:

This Zauschneria californica is one tough plant.  A car ran over it after pulling into my driveway to turn around and jumping the curb.  But the Zauschneria seems to have bounced right back:

Here's the latest update on the Daphne genkwa.  Over Memorial Day weekend, I removed all the gravel from the strip around it, and made a new area to plant stuff.  This seems to have pleased the Daphne; if you look closely, you can see it's putting out some new shoots:

This is what the area around the Daphne looks like now.  Much better looking I think:

Next to the Daphne genkwa, I put in two western blue flax plants, named Linum lewisii after Meriwether Lewis.  Flax seeds always remind me of my dad, who once attempted to grind them in an old coffee grinder: 

As readers of the IOP will remember, I referred to the tree peony below as a Paeonia lutea var. ludlowii.  And that's what it was identified as when I bought it at the Magic Garden Nursery in Berkeley (this is strike three for them, so I'm not going to go back there anymore).  But when it bloomed this March, the flower was pinkish white rather than the yellow it should have been (see bottom picture below).  Now, I'm thinking it's a Paeonia suffruticosa 'Renkaku', but I'll never know for sure.   I do know that it's still a very handsome shrub.  In fact, somebody stopped me as I was walking into my house and asked me what it was--and complimented me on how beautiful it was.