It's always prettier in real life:

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:521834}}

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Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:521835}}

I wish we could grow good pears here, but I don't know anyone who has. Maybe this is a better image, showing how we've tried to make the house almost disappear from view w/o going completely feral. It's nice this way for shade (that's a SW exposure) and for privacy, but that arborvitae is out of control.

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That pine would look mighty fine if properly laced out. I like your front yard. Have you ever thought about adding a few boulders for some weighty structure to offset the pine & Arbovitae? Might be cool. The pine implies a slight Asian feel, a trio of large stones might add to that.

The local hills have greened up finally after what 3 years of drought? Last year the hill was grey. Not brown, grey. That all burned in the fall of '08. So then it was black, not grey.

There's one of the front Cercis, blooming well this year.

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That fire was scary! We were ready to evacuate.
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There are much better spots in the garden, but I'm focused on the ugly front slope. The front slope looks like heck, really bad. I pulled out all the Baccharis which just was not satisfactory for a number of reasons, and am replacing it with Aloes and Agaves. It's going to take a few years and spreading out of the Aloe pups to get it looking right. It's just going to have to look bad for a while. This slope is so dry I had to constantly water the first Agaves I planted last fall to keep them alive. The boxwood hedge which makes no sense (landscapers put that in) is hopefully going to be moved elsewhere. I like boxwood, but it doesn't belong.

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A great year for peas here too. Yummy!

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I was trying to get the golden afternoon light. Nothing is growing very well this year.

Here is a link that might be useful: My garden right now

Here's how my yard looks right now. The golden currant in the corner is about halfway to full bloom, and there are a few hard-to-see baby blue eyes and buttercups blooming as well. And there's a whole bunch of bittercress blooming all around the base of the golden currant, but I'm not sure whether to count that because it's basically a weed that I decided to allow to propagate itself.

My elderberry (that tall greenish stick with a few leaves on it, behind the deergrass) is just beginning to leaf out. My serviceberry (the smaller stick to the left of the garden hose) hasn't yet leafed out at all. I also have a pink currant, a snowbell, and a cherry that haven't leafed out (none of those are visible in the picture), and a redbud that has mostly leafed out (also not visible here).

Unfortunately, most of the ground visible in this picture has been under several inches of standing water all winter, so it's been difficult (read: impossible) to get anything to grow that stands half a chance of also surviving the dry summer. (You can still see a sizable puddle even in the photograph, which was taken on one of the drier days this week.) Most of my plants are growing up against the house because I mounded the soil higher there and managed to keep it above the waterline. The ground is also a little higher toward the left edge of the photograph, which is why some plants are surviving there away from the immediate edge of the house. I could probably plant a slightly wider border of plants along the house if the dogs wouldn't trample on the plants constantly, but no such luck.

Oh, and my cat is blooming! My cat blooms year-round.

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Dicot, I really like your pine as well. I've been wanting to add a dwarf mugho pine to my yard, but I honestly have no space for it!

Hoovb, those succulents will fill in really, really fast! I removed over 300 square feet of lawn and replaced it with succulents last year. This is what one of those areas looks like today:

The leafless tree in the center is a Jacaranda. There are lots of different aloes throughout this area, but it'll be a couple of years before they begin to steal the show in the wintertime.
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These are apricott blooms
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Lastly, here is a pot full of some sort of ice plant. Delospermum maybe? These potted ones are MUCH better off than their in-ground counterparts. Those in the ground might be getting too much moisture. These are super care-free. I probably only water my potted plants once every two weeks or so if I remember.
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For contrast, here's a picture of my garden in December. Where's Renee/hosenemesis? I took her advice and started putting in a rudimentary path to the left of the drainage ditch this winter. I had to move the drainage ditch slightly to fit in the path, but now the path has stepping stones and is starting to look actually path-like.

Over the winter, the two smaller deergrasses died (don't know why), and the sickly silver bush lupine shown in the lower right corner here drowned. But everything else visible here is still doing fine. Would you believe that six- or seven-foot elderberry was just planted from a one-gallon pot at the end of July? It's the fastest-growing thing I've ever planted.

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That central conifer (I believe it's a stone pine) has been through a lot -- it started life as a living Christmas tree and stood in a 2nd year too, sat in a West Marin lot untouched and moisture starved for 3 years in its 5 gallon container, got transplanted here and stayed dwarfed for another 2 years and then finally broke through and started expressing its basic genetic nature and growing like a normal tree about 12 years ago. I'm sure we'll get to a 2nd pruning soon, but it still seems wet for it now.

I have thought of landscape rocks too, even a rocky recirculating waterfall. We'll see, my main focus now is healthy, draining soils, for the reasons Queerbychoice described with root drowning. I lost a lot of plants and cash to that in the previous El Nino,

Queerbychoice, I'm glad to hear that the pathway is working out. It looks like you need a boat, though, with that amount of standing water. What a bummer! That soil looks awful- like it would just stick to your feet.

That elderberry should grow into a beautiful big green shrub there. I have several of them (actualll, they are in neighbor's yards and grow over the fences) and I love them. They attract phainopeplas, one of my favorite birds.

Yes, the mud does stick to my feet. In fact, I never go out in the yard during the winter without switching to gardening clogs, because it would completely destroy my regular shoes. Even walking on the stepping stones doesn't entirely spare my shoes, because somehow the mud always ends up on top of the stepping stones. It also always ends up on top of the mulch, so no matter how much I mulch, the mulch all disappears underground in no time at all.

I keep hoping that if I can get enough plants established that are thirsty in the winter but can survive summer drought, the plants themselves will help drain the seasonal lake. The elderberry is a good example of the kind of plant I'm counting on, though it hasn't really seemed to lower the water level noticeably so far.

I don't know if even the dreaded tamarisk would lower that water level. Have you considered fish?

that is a great idea, hosenemesis! a koi pond there might be a good fit. only problem being that the cat might take a liking to the koi too :(

A couple of comments...

Safest to prune pines in California in winter, to avoid attracting bark beetles and getting pitch cancer.

Some California natives that tolerate wet winter soils while also fairly drought tolerant would include various Juncus species. Not really a Calif native, but Berkeley Sedge/Carex divulsa is also broadly tolerant of soaking wet soils in winter and dry in summer, and can be mowed/weed whacked to keep it as a walk on lawn/meadow.

That slope with all the succulents/Aloes/Agaves seems very appropriate for your conditions. I'd be tempted to mass some cuttings of fast growing things like Bulbine frutescens or Senecio mandraliscae as a filler ground cover between larger plants to cover bare spots until the others fill in. Certainly ground cover succulents such as various Lampranthus would also work. A couple of shrubby succulents that I really like as filler plants would include Drosanthemum bicolor which can be purchased mail order from Annie's Annuals, check it out at:

http://www.anniesannuals.com/plants/plant_display.asp?prodid=1441

I do have some Juncus balticus growing under my faucet, and Carex praegracilis and Carex barbarae elsewhere. My yard dries out completely in the summer, though, so a lot of riparian plants don't survive except in a few unusually wet spots like by the faucet.

My cat stays indoors and couldn't catch a fish anyway if her life depended on it. But since I'm just renting, there won't be any koi pond installation here.

It's just starting to come into bloom in my flower garden. Here's a pic of Sam the cat on a new walkway:

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Weeding like crazy, smashing snails, and filling up the greens cart for city composting with just an hour or two of work. This is our front yard as of Monday 3/16:
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Full set of photos was posted in the Cottage Grdng forum where I usually hang:

Here is a link that might be useful: Spring marches on (bad pun intended!)

Curse all you people with proper yards!

Here is my "garden" today. Hopefully some day soon I'll have an in-the-ground garden again.

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Oh, cry me a river, Santa Monica resident.

Renee

Such beautiful gardens! Thanks for sharing! Even the little garden of pots looks lovely.

I'd be tempted to mass some cuttings of fast growing things like Bulbine frutescens or Senecio mandraliscae as a filler ground cover between larger plants to cover bare spots until the others fill in.

I do have some Bulbine hiding behind the Mariana sedifolia, and S. mandraliscae in there, I was thinking adding some more would be a good idea, though it's bone-dry already-- may be too late in this rainy season to get them going. South-facing, silty-sand. I had to hand water even the agaves last summer and fall to keep them alive.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Here are a few of the photos I took this week:

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If the photos don't work, you can see them on my blog too, along with a few others in the link below.

Here is a link that might be useful: http://hanburyhome.wordpress.com

Ack! A yard AND chickens. The two things I most want right now!

Some very pretty pics and yards indeed! I like your blog too, Lianne.

I had my friend's son going about how I have a secret cloning laboratory in my backyard where I refuse to feed any of my subjects and they get only a steady diet of warm water and chamomile tea. It's harder to say if he was more upset my what his imagination thought I was doing ...

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or when he just found out I meant I was rooting cuttings in used plastic bottles. 2-3 weeks in (not all cut at same time) with a bicolor pelargonium and a few different sages, S. Winfred Gilman, mellifera, leucophylla, elegans, semiarata, brandegeei, clevelandii and microphllya (Hot Lips) and I'm optimistic, most of the cuttings look promising. I'm pretty casual about it compared to most: no hormone, just a 3% peroxide dip after being cut, set where it gets 2 hours of a.m. sun in 2/3 vermiculite and 1/3 sand, with a daily watering of water, sun tea weekly.

I'll go about another 2-3 weeks and plant each salvia in a 1 gal container, nurse them through the heat of summer and hopefully have at least 7-10 to plant out in late fall.

hang in there santa monica- your pot garden is lovely. i once lived in a place where i couldn't even have pots. would it help to feed the wild birds out there and have some feathered friends around you that way? min

I've thought about it min but I already have a neighbor down on the 2nd floor who feeds the birds and attracts a ton of piegeons. Even though I know there are ways to discourage pigeons from my own feeders I don't want to add to the ridiculous amounts of pigeon poop I sometimes have to wash off my littler plants. I'm happy enough getting daily hummingbirds to my Salvias and other hummingbird plants.

Plus just having a balcony is better than living back in NJ where I am from. Today my Geranium maderense in a great big pot has buds forming. Not something I would get back in my old yard back east!

and attracts a ton of piegeons

Plentiful birdseed attracts rats, too. :(

Thank you everyone for sharing the photos

jkom--your yard is spectacular. You can be proud of that.

lianne--chickens! How great! Do you have plenty of eggs? Do you worry about cats?

Here's my shade garden. A little skimpy yet. The hosta is popping up, so I'm on slug-watch big time! I replaced the gartenmeister fuchsia with a little one, but it will grow. I guess it looks a little messy, but I enjoy it.

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Here's something new to me that I just got--"sisyrinchium." They close at night.

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I really love that sisyrinchium. It looks like a meadow wildflower. It's going on my must have list.
Renee

I got them at Armstrongs, Renee. They don't seem to like too much water, which is great.

dicot - Thanks for the compliment of my blog! I am always adding more photos.

socks12345 - I don't worry about cats. When the chickens were little my own cat would have loved to have gotten closer, but the chickens were always carefully protected until they were about 12 weeks old. Once the chickens were big, cats weren't an issue and they will go after a cat if given the chance. However, I have to be cautious about preventing problems with many other animals like hawks, raccoons, rats, and neighbor's dogs visiting the yard, and more.

clematisintegrifolia - Your pots are beautiful! I can tell you are a good gardener!

I kill potted plants due to neglectful watering practices. I had an apartment before we lived here without even a balcony, then a duplex with a small patio and couple of boarder to plant in. Now that I have an actual yard, I dream of even more space to garden. I wish I had an acre now because I have run out of room.

Chickens will destroy a pretty garden if you give them the opportunity. Mine have the free run of the orchard area, lawn, shrubs, and a couple of beds. I keep them locked out of the vegetable garden until a growing season is over usually, except for a the occasional supervised visit for pest control because they like to eat the same foods we do.

Lianne25 I could take a few classes from you an how to border a lawn.

Last year I decided to make my back yard more productive. A year before I started gardening by pots. It did well so I kinda got outa hand after that.

I started by making a garden with a fence to keep out my dogs, then I started the fruit trees. Now I have many in my yard and it is so hard to keep myself from buying more.

This is the yard as of today.

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The most advanced fruits so far are the Katy Apricots and the Cot-N-Candy Apriums.

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The next ones starting are the Santa Rosa Plums and the Dapple Dandy Pluots. Here are the Pluots just starting.

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I have a lot more including a raised blueberry bed that is full of berries and a garden that is just starting.