The bender-board is almost complete, but there are a lot of weeds in the garden. We will need to pull them soon.

I am still trying to figure out what to put on the paths. If I plant grass and irrigate, weeds will grow like crazy, but hard surface such as gravel—is expensive. I am still trying to figure it out. I will be going to a rose conference in April and will talk to people there about what they have done.

Today—the first day of Spring—was one of those heart-stoppingly gorgeous spring days, cool, clear and stunning. It warmed up respectably in the afternoon but stayed clear and calm.

Kai got us another load of bender-board, so more beds in the rose garden are being defined. My assistant took off half a day for the holiday but has gotten a lot of weed-whacking done this week.

We got a load of straw, which we will use for mulch. This truckload is half the order of 100 bales. Luckily, the bales are only 50 lbs. or so when dry. We will get them very soggy and let them rot a little before we use them as mulch because the straw stays in place a little better that way.

My assistant managed to get the road below the dam cleared earlier this week, which meant we could take the straw down below to store it. Before the weeds were cut, I would have been worried about the truck skidding or starting a fire.

Here is a view up toward the lower gate from the road going across the front of the dam.

Here is the gully end, which as you can see, shows signs that it has been funtioning correctly as evidenced by the wet earth, wetter near the entrance to the pipe. I think the best solution in the future, is to dig this silt pond out deeper and put in a larger pipe to the pond above this one. If the water is running very hard, it could flow through the larger pipe if the silt pond is full of water instead of overflowing and running across the path.

I won’t tackle this until next year, at which point we will also clean the dirt from the blow-out in 2006 out of the pond as well.

Here are the last two daffodils below the house. There are a few yellow ones mixed in with the white Early Cheers and they bloom a little later. Once these are finished, the dafs are done for the year.

Hopefully, I will be planting herbs in this area before next spring, so there will be more than weeds there for them to come up through.

Here is one of the standard roses—sometimes called a rose tree. A standard is any plant which is not normally a tree shaped plant, that is made into a tree. You can do this with quite a few vines—such as wisteria—or train some shrubby plants this way.

Rose standards are actually made with two grafts. A “trunk” is grafted onto root-stock. The trunk comes from some type of rose which particularly makes strong, thick, upright canes. Once that join is growing, the top is cut off the cane and several buds of the desired rose are grafted on the end.

Rose standards serve several purposed in a garden, but a main one is to vary the height in a bed—basically raising one of the roses to a different level—to add visual interest. I hadn’t really thought about where I would put the standards when we moved the roses, but ended up putting them in an informal line out from the center ring—always according to color, of course.

More bender-board was installed in the rose garden, but we ran out again. I am guessing that it will take as much as we have already installed to finish it.

We are also going to cut the weeds down on the east side, so we can see what we are dealing with in order to the arbor.

The ghostly grove . . .

Here are our redwood trees backed by a glowing fog. I typical fashion, I did not even see the orange fence in the frame and so ruined a great photo. However, in my defense, it is awfully hard to see the preview screen on the camera in some lights. I often just point the camera and push the shutter button and hope for the best.

New country, new weeds.

The weeds here are MUCH tougher and more virulent than than the city-dwelling weeds I am used to. I thought they were bad, but the ones here are much, much worse. This one is kind of pretty, though. I wonder what it is.

Here is one final view of the shed and water tank taken from the road below the house. I like this picture because of the great view of our rocks.

I want to plant cacti and succulents above the rocks but don’t want to junk them up. I plan to look at the rocks a long time to get a feel for them, then, one of these days, I will just start planting. This is not a very deliberate way of gardening, but often, I get a great result by doing it this way. I find this way of designing much more grounded and less fraught than a planned garden like the rose garden. It seems to flow naturally from the heart and the connection with the earth rather than the intellect. Besides, with a garden, you can always move things if you don’t like how they look.

Here are quite a few shots of the rose garden. Putting in the bender-board was the right decision. We had to have something to define the edges of the beds because the paint on the cardboard won’t last for long.

Here we are standing on the west side looking northeast toward the house—which looks much less obtrusive covered in black stucco paper instead of white Tyvek.

This shot is from the same path, looking southeast toward the pond.

I want to put something on the path surfaces but I am not sure what. A hard surface, such as pavers or stone would be nice, but extremely expensive. Also, I received advice from an old hand in this area not to do hard surface or gravel paths because when gophers undermine a path, gravel falls into the hole and stone sinks and becomes a trip hazard. His advice was to do grass paths or some other groundcover.

And we have GOT to move that dirt out of the white rose section. I had planned to use the dirt for the vegetable garden I will put in up by the house, but think that I may use it here on the paths instead and then plant seed in it.

I have heard of a native yarrow, which can be mowed and used as ground cover and might plant that. If I do that though, it would have to be watered and have a sprinkler system set up for it separate from the roses—which would be a big pain.

You can see from the above rambling that every decision in the garden has many consequences, all of which must be thoroughly contemplated before one takes action.

From up by the house, the garden is taking shape.

When we first bought the property, I wanted to put in a labyrinth below where the rose garden is now. I had been interested in them since finding a book on garden labyrinths in the early ’80s. I don’t know if I will ever make one, but this rose garden looks a little like a labyrinth from above—so maybe this will be my version.

I took a close-up with the zoom lens and fortunately, you can see it in this shot. The bender-board has been partially installed (we ran out) and shows the pattern of the beds. Eventually, there will be a central ring of arbor in the middle for climbing roses.

I can’t resist shots of the daffodils each week. There are a lot of daffodils along the road on the way up. The County has planted them on the banks of freeway entrances, where they have naturalized.

On the road here, there is one farm gate which is totally unprepossessing, set in a bare field with a long gravel road stretching away from it. This time of year, it is totally transformed by thousands of daffodils ringed in a semicircle on either side of the gate.

I haven’t taken a good picture of our bay tree for a long time. This stands below the dining room and a lot of people would have been tempted to remove it to improve the view—I know that was my first impulse when I saw it. But it is about 70' tall and quite magnificent to look at, growing out of, what seems as if it should be, a barren cliff. We will keep it.

However, I do not feel the same way at all about the poison oak underneath it. We will get rid of that at the first opportunity.