The Weekly Gardener Volume 13: January to December 2019

By Francis Rosenfeld

Collected articles from The Weekly Gardener - January through December 2018.
For current articles visit theweeklygardener.com
I wanted to assemble an informal compendium of the things I learned from my grandfather, wonderful books, educational websites, and my own experience, in the hope that other people might find it useful in their own gardening practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francis Rosenfeld
• Release date: Jan 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463811207

Francis Rosenfeld

I started learning about gardening from my grandfather, at the age of four. Despite his forty years' experience as a natural sciences teacher, mine wasn't a structured instruction, I just followed him around, constantly asking questions, and he built up on the concepts with each answer.As I grew older I applied this knowledge, experimented with new plants and learned a few things from my mistakes. That was fifteen years ago, and since then I was blessed with a thriving perennial garden. Half way through the journey, the micro-farm concept developed, a yearly challenge to figure out how much produce twenty square feet of dirt can yield.I started blogging in 2010, to share the joy of growing all things green and the beauty of the garden through the seasons. Two garden blogs were born this way: allyeargarden.com and theweeklygardener.com, a periodical that followed it one year later. I wanted to assemble an informal compendium of the things I learned from my grandfather, wonderful books, educational websites, and my own experience, in the hope that other people might find it useful it in their own gardening practice.The blogs contain many stories (I am a writer and couldn't help myself), but also practical information about plant propagation, garden maintenance, working with your site, making preserves and keeping the yard welcoming for beneficial insects and local wildlife.

Book preview

THE WEEKLY GARDENER

2019

WEEK ONE

December 31st - Welcome 2019!

San Francisco Streets

The cable car from Ghirardelli Square to Market Street is a little roller coaster ride. It makes a steep climb up the hill to the top of Lombard Street and then starts an even steeper descent which covers three quarters of the way down to Union Square.

Did you know there is a hill mapper app that color codes which streets go uphill or downhill in downtown San Francisco and how steep they are? It may come in handy if you don’t want to be surprised by, say, the 31.7% incline of Filbert street, or better yet, by a street so steep it was deemed impracticable for pedestrians and had to be turned into stairs.

Before you get too excited about this useful piece of information, let me give you a general overview of which streets have a notable incline: all of them. At least all those that lead to objectives you will want to visit - Fisherman’s Wharf, China town, Lombard street, Coit Tower, Nob Hill, Hyde Street, you get the idea.

Anyway, if you want to have fun and really see the city the way it deserves to be seen you will need either a good level of fitness or an incredibly stubborn personality, preferably both.

Sea Lions

I snapped a few pictures of the local celebrities at Fisherman’s Wharf. The sea lions draw sizable crowds, especially during winter, when they congregate on the docks in large numbers.

They arrived in San Francisco after the earthquake of 1989 and by 1990 they completely took over the K-dock at the Pier 39 Marina, which is now their habitat. Here they are now, enjoying the sunshine, noisy, gregarious and irresistibly adorable.

A few facts about sea lions.

They are different from seals, which are much smaller, quieter, and less adapted to life on ground, for instance seals can’t ‘walk’ like sea lions do, by putting one flipper in front of the other. Unlike seals, sea lions have external ears that protrude from their heads and use their front flippers for propulsion.

Their whiskers work as tactile sensors, like those of cats, but their distant ancestors are closer to bears and weasels.

Sea lions can dive to 600 feet and are able to stay under water for 40 minutes before they need to come out for air. They live around twenty years and you can tell their age by counting the growth layers on their teeth, which form rings, like trees.

Flowers in Winter

The flowers were in bloom on the Embarcadero in the middle of winter, so I stopped to photograph as many as I could. I got purple clematis, otherworldly sugar bushes, clumps of white roses, large variegated weigelas and stunning double camellias.

God I miss summer! On a happier note the plant catalogs are here, a month early, happy new year to me! Besides the hellebores should get started soon, winter was kind so far.

Chocolate, Cotton Candy and Sweets by the Bushel

On the last day of the year we took a pleasant stroll down the Embarcadero, all the way from the Farmer’s Market to Pier 39. 2018 ended with sunshine, blue skies and happy holiday celebrations.

The warm weather drew a lot of people to the pier, to enjoy cotton candy, clam chowder and the antics of the seals. The place where sweets come in bushels. That’s what New Year’s resolutions are for.

WEEK TWO

January 7th – Tinseltown

Digital Flowers

I can’t tell what makes this display so mesmerizing: four screens of colorful digital blooms sifting delicately from above. I guess you can take the gardener out of the garden but you can’t prevent them from noticing pretty flowers should they happen to be around. Even in electronic form.

Of course there is no shortage of real blooms in Hollywood, where the temperatures rarely drop below fifty degrees, but they are all brought from somewhere else and carefully tended to in order to keep them thriving. The local flora is thorny and rogue, clinging to the bare sides of the hills with stubborn defiance.

You can’t miss the fact that you are experiencing an arid climate, especially in winter. Seen from above the valley glistens in the sunshine, an uninterrupted sea of roofs dotted only by rare places by small patches of greenery.

There is one thing that made me very jealous however: the roses! It seems to be the perfect climate for them and they are all thriving and blooming abundantly. Must be nice not having to worry about blackspot, mold and shade. Ah, the white roses at UCLA...

Public Art

More HeART art, publicly displayed in a restaurant downtown.

Healing gardens have long been accepted as an important component of the recovery process. Having a quiet place to connect with nature and relieve the stress of a physical ailment can be almost as important to the patient outcomes as the treatment itself. There is something hopeful and reassuring about a garden, especially one designed to address all the senses, not just sight alone.

Maybe creative expression will become an integral part of the healing arts too, to the betterment of both body and soul, although watching all these artifacts sneak up on you when you least expect them and in the strangest of places has a slightly different emotional impact.

They are everywhere: the subway station walls, the parks, the sides of the buildings, on giant billboards, there are even little poems etched in glass and embedded in the sidewalk.

I didn’t know what they were when I first saw them but they do command attention, you can’t pass them by without taking notice, especially since most of them are rendered in the official Wear Red color.

Heart in LA

Right on the corner of Pershing Square is one of the numerous art displays sprinkled all around LA, created as a part of the Heal My HeART campaign. It is an art therapy program fostered by UCLA in concert with Marymoutn High School that aims to give a creative outlet to patients being treated for heart failure at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center.

It has been proven that providing artistic means of expression can relieve the mental strain associated with heart disease. Creating art speeds recovery, promotes healing and improves transplantation outcomes.

Dress Emporium

A display worthy of Gone With the Wind, right in the heart of the fashion district in historic downtown Los Angeles. The old city is an eclectic mix of old Hollywood elegance, complete with gilded decorative patterns of acanthus leaves and a rather sober and subdued contemporary architecture.

As we turned the corner to Pershing Square I glimpsed a miniature garden of Semiramis on top of one of the tall buildings that surround it. Mostly palm trees, of course.

WEEK THREE

January 14th - Disney Magic

Color Me Enchanted

There is something magical about Disney, something that is specifically designed to spellbind you and make you happy. I remember watching the midnight fireworks on New Year’s a few years back. I was sitting on the front lawn of Cinderella’s Castle at Magic Kingdom and they burst out suddenly, completely surrounding me and filling the whole sky. Such delightful excess, everywhere, for everything - the sights, the smells, the music, but most of all, luxury of luxuries, snow on Main Street in the middle of summer, just because.

Nothing is done half measure at Disney, the parades go back to back all day long, the shows are displayed on screens five stories tall and there is enough candy around to build a small village. Everything is joy, music, light and delicious cotton candy in pastel hues. A child’s paradise.

Sometimes an unexpected detail is enough to remind one that happiness is easy.

Christmas Decor

It is always a little weird to see Christmas decor surrounded by lush tropical foliage, especially at the height of noon and in bright sunshine.

Disney is the place of perpetual celebration and they really take their task very seriously here, with endless spectacular and over the top parades, daily fireworks shows that will blow your mind and fantastic productions of light and sound that will humble the most hardened cynic.

You definitely remember your child like wonder, whether you want to or not. This magical land of fairytale fantasy will find it and let it out for you, don’t worry about that.

Some say that this retreat into pure fantasy and suspension of disbelief, this desire to exist into a hand made utopia that is purposefully shunning every hardship of reality is turning us into passive consumers and feeding us an idealized utopia, innocent of evil and imperfection, it turns us all into dwellers of never-never land.

Aah…sure! Wasn’t that the whole point? Giant Mickey chocolate chip cookie? Don’t mind if I do!

The Village of Hogsmeade

Butterbeer? Chocolate frogs? Wizard wear? A new broomstick perhaps? Find them all here, in the village of Hogsmeade, which is as cozy and cheerful after dark as it is during the day and which is swarming with people at all times.

I couldn’t help but notice that the Gryffindor cloaks were everywhere. The class of 2019 at Hogwarts must be very large.

Disney at Night

Disney is a festival of lights at night, especially during the holidays, when it thrives on excess. Due to the season we had the opportunity to experience a few extra hours of this lighting extravaganza.

As always, once you get past the park gates you are in a different world that smells like sugar and looks like a dream and