OMG! I can't believe this.....I've been worried about the Poker Primula. I have collected seed, but.....even being as mild as it is here, think he needs some shade. He went belly up, couldn't seem to get enough water.....I just looked and, this is magnified, he's really about 1/4" tall...coming back and is intent on flowering. I need to go pinch out his flower, sweet thing...lol.














Queen Anne's Lace is blooming everywhere and it looks like I have one coming up in what 'used to be' grass. Think I will transplant it.....

How diverse and different our gardens are, but how different our climates are, too. Sherry, you mentioned not liking palms. I like palms. They remind me that I'm not in Kansas, or rather, Pennsylvania, anymore. The neighbor across the street has two queen palms that dance in the wind. I like watching them. I like the plant life in this climate, I just don't like the summer heat.


Speaking of not in PA, pineapple progress

And I don't like Queen and King palms, I do like the big old Mexican Fan palms and the Canary palms...and quite often our likes and dislikes and tastes change with time. Things that I grew years ago don't interest me now....but may again at some point. I sometimes think that our gardens are windows on our lives, of what we need or are longing for at the moment...suddenly a certain look or feel will strike a chord.....and perhaps it's for something missing in our lives, or being longed for. It's usuaally very difficult for us to understand the likes and dislikes of our fellow beings....a friend had a neighbor who had installed a chain link fence between their two properties.....becky quickly planted shrubs to hide it and the neighbor who installed it informed her that she did not want those shrubs hiding her fence, that they'd "paid good money to put it in and they wanted to be able to see it...."

I listened to a person one day tell me how she did not like trees or even overhanging eaves on her house, needed everything "open" and I'd never heard anyone say that before. To me, trees are protecting and sheltering, buffering....kinda floored me that anyone would think that...lol..

I look across the road and there is my neighbor's house...it does have a creek ruuning behind the property and huge Sitka Spruce along the creek, so, thankfully I see those when looking out my windows....but the rest is grass, just grass mowed to never more than an inch in height and a 12" foundation planting around the house....and she does not much like being outside, but does like being able to look straight out at our house...that's what my solid front border and tall shrubs have been planted for. If they would let me plant just two trees, two maples to frame their house, I would be so happy. I do have hopes for the husband who is retiring soon and is the one who mows that grass with every ounce of OCD that he has. He's going to need more than that to occupy his time and has mentioned the maple that was in front of his mother's house in the upper midwest somewhere....and she is finding things that I'm growing that she likes...so I'm giving her things to perhaps enlarge that 12" foundation planting.....

Still, it's rewarding and comforting to find others who like the same things that we do, but doesn't always happen that way...............

Palms remind you of your icky years in Fallbrook, I'm guessing. (Are you a native Californian? I think palms tend to appeal more to people from out of state. I'm just guessing again.)

I am native Californian...I miss the past here, hate to have seen it disappear and I love things that capture the images of that era. I found it upsetting that I could no longer drive into downtown L..A., Chinatown, Philippe, the garment district, Santa Monica, the arboretum, etc. without several hours of traffic just to get there. I love Long Beach, but missed the seedy old Pierpoint Landing and The Pike, missed old TinCan Beach after it became state park and charged money to get in, the same with Salt Creek where the old guy used to take a dollar for parking and then it became the Ritz Carlton, Dana Cove for surfing became a marina.

Having spent years also in the San Joaquin Valley, I found it distressing to suddenly find the advance guard of tract housing going in where there were orchards....this continuing to this day. I like the old houses in Modesto, Stockton, etc....bungalows, farmhouses. I noticed on Houzz recently a newly built small, architectural type 'cabin', whose dominant feature was a classic valley watertower and it made me homesick for that also.....a large acreage of peaches, or apricots, grapes, whatever with a two story white wooden house, often with a large pine (or more, maybe two) to one side...and the big wooden watertower alongside. I think the mental image I carry of that comes from maybe one house in particular along Hwy 99 down around Turlock.


That's a large part of why I am so at home here, there's a timeless quality to it, so simple. I am sorry that the old wooden storefronts in town were wiped out in the 60's tsunami...although, if I'd known them, I would be missing them.... this way I can appreciate 'downtown' as still from another era, the 60's which even now is long ago...lol..

I like seeing the old things, too. Even down in Oxnard farms are giving way to housing developments. I'm sure they'll be 3,500 square foot cookie cutter McMansions standing cheek-by-jowl with only room for a queen palm in the yard, not a real shade tree.

It is rare that we go over the Sepulveda Pass for entertainment. The traffic is so bad. We tend to go to the west but even going that way is bad on a weekday. The freeway itself isn't bad but getting on is a long wait. There are way too many people in southern CA. Of course, as a non-native, I'm part of the problem, I guess.

Well, the West has always been a magnet, either for work or whatever various dreams people may have. I found it interesting, while living in Washington...I think it was a Canadian radio station I was hearing, when it was mentioned that the PNW had a lot of 'lemmings'. You have people who were drawn to the West Coast looking for 'something'...seekers...and when they didn't find it in California, were drawn farther North, with a lot ending up in the far Northwest reaches, and, still not finning what they were seeking, became like lemmings and we would get a lot of alcoholism, depression, wife beating, 'cabin fever'. Whidbey Island, though in a rain shadow, and getting much less rain than we do here, at that time seemed to be gray and drizzly every day except for the month of August. We built a house and stayed 3 years...I must admit having mentioned to Jer that if he did not get us out of there, I would have to kill him in his sleep. He paid attention...I did love it there and perhaps was having problems with SAD that I don't have now, but our weather here is much more variable and the last two winters here have had a lot of nice days, not the constant gray. That may be due to climate change also. My neighbor who is from SoCal has been here maybe 10 years now and said that it has always been that people would come in the Summer, love it, move here and then Winter would hit with 60 inches of rain and they would leave. However, the last two Winters that I've been here have had 30 some inches of rain and I think that will affect our population again. I don't mind as long as the people who want to re-create Disneyland don't come here and see it as an opportunity.

Hoya shooting star in blooming mode once more! Like stars landing as always

So pretty!

The solid pink Naked Ladies appeaar to have finished blooming and now it's time for the white-throated Naked Ladies.....
For future ref....I have some alongside the garage in a narrow bed of soil...while I'm cleaning that area out, I find that the piece of retaining board and the dirt are actually sitting ON TOP of the paving...the soil is really about 6" deep and 12" wide and the naked Ladies have been sitting there, barely covered and with no root room to speak of, for many years, and doing just fine. Mine have not started flowering just yet......

I know they're tough. They'll survive in the wild out here. They aren't invasive or anything like that, just found at old homesites. I know of some that mark the foundation where the house burned down.

Hmmmm...this is interesting. Hydrangea, yes...but which? What's it going to look like?

I didn't know they bloomed this time of year. I thought they bloomed like May-ish. My grandma had a snowball bush which I think is a type of hydrangea and it only bloomed once, in spring or summer, I don't remember which.

There is Snowball Hydrangea and, I believe, a viburnum called Snowball, also...

Lots of hydrangea blooming here right now...

Do they bloom continuously all summer?

Most of my hydrangeas are small, but....yeah, I think they have been blooming and I think all the others I see here locally have been blooming.....I don't seem to pay much attention to when things bloom...they just do...I only know it's August when the Naked Ladies bloom because Zuzu said so and it stuck in my mind.

A NOID pannicle hydrangea in my "Please Hurry and Grow Tall" front border. It is finally shooting up in height and finally flowering, but I'm not happy with the pale yellow coloring of the bloom...it does, however turn to white / pink....

The lace cap hydrangea I have is on about it's third bloom cycle this year. I think it depends on weather.

Oh, I had a really beautiful lace cap, variegated.....oddly enough, I think I've only seen one here, on the road behind us...and it's not rerally a very striking one.

I love hydrangeas too..I saw this one at Filoli when we visited last August, so lovely!