Do you ever feel guilty

==>>> only for a moment... and then the spot is an opportunity for something new and exciting ...

im not going to wallow in the past.. when the future is so bright ....

ken

heres a blast form the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C3FzjIIkEg

Did you take a pic to commerate the 25th anniversary?

It depends on the plant. I took down a similarly aged Norway Maple a few years ago and felt like throwing a party afterwards. If had been a native oak, the feelings would be much different.

Well I guess I’m a softie for feeling sad about killing the Very Handsome Bergman’s Gem. I think it might have been my first dwarf conifer. If not the first, one of the first and I guess I get a little attached to a few. Actually, I kill a lot of plants! St Peter is going to greet me at the gate by telling me, sorry, we can’t let you in, you killed too many plants hahaha..little joke.

The good news is I do have quite a large new planting area in my otherwise crowded garden and I am celebrating about that. I decided the Cornus will get too big but I can fit three small dwarf (mini) conifers along the edge and something bigger/larger in the center.

I have a nice Picea omoriko ‘Pimoko’ that I could transplant this fall. Also, a mini Picea pungens cultivar and a yellow Chamaecyparis pisifera cultivar and I’m sure I could find a third.

I feel your pain. So, do you have a pic of the’Bergman’s Gem’?

tj

Tj, that’s where I was going with it. If you have to take out such a large plant take a pic as that is a very old specimen to show off.

As Maack mentioned sometimes you want to throw a celebration for invasives.

Oh NO St. Peter??? !!!

I wish I had taken a photo, but I didn’t.

Speaking of photos , sounds like you have lots of plants in your yard ,,,

how about a tour ?

ron

I have twice spent about an hour putting photos together only to have the message disappear after I hit the submit button. Is there a limit in the number of photos?

I believe it is 10 pix and you have to wait for each pic to go from its grey phase to clear before adding the next pic.

tj

Hey Lane , is this your 'Gem' ?

ron

post about pruning

Yes, that’s my Bergman’s Gem, and before it pushed out almost 12” of new growth this spring. That made it almost 2’ larger in diameter. My sprinkler system was also compromised, so that was another factor in deciding to move on. The area is still unplanted. I’m waiting for fall when I can more safely move some plants.

Trying again with some photos.

i live on a back lot, sometimes called a flag lot, with a long narrow driveway opening to a rectangular lot wirh my rectangular house 20’ from the front and back property lines and a nice side yard of perhaps 70’ x 60’. I think I have every square inch planted! Well, except for hardscape.

The driveway has a small 2’ wide planting strip along it’s almost 200’ of length and I had roses planted there for many decades. They have looked worse and worse over the last few years with the neighbors increasingly larger plants providing root competition and shade. Then last year they got hit with rose sawfly, a very disfiguring problem. I became a plant killer again and took out many roses. I did it in such a way that I left three planting bays where I planted many Eriogonum fasciculatum var foliolosum and some Eriogonum grande var rubescens which continued a developing trend for planting California natives.

Here are a couple of examples

La Marne

Molineaux (David Austin)

A couple of my favorite grasses or grass-like plants

A big Restio, Thamnochortus insignis. I grow several but this one is a real show off.

On a smaller scale, Little Bluestem, SCHIZACHYRIUM scoparium ‘Standing Ovation’. I’ve just been growing this and the cultivar ‘Blue Heaven’ for three years, but they rival my long time favorite grass Pennisetum alopecuroides and cultivars. They have a gorgeous blue color with burgundy highlights and in the fall they become very colorful with the burgundy highlights turning red and dominating the foliage.

I love ornamental grasses and I have grown LOTS of them. My favorite has long been Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Hameln’ but now I have a new favorite among them, the smaller cultivar Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Piglet’.

A third favorite grass is Muhlenbergia dubia. This Photo is not from my garden because I just can’t get a good photo of my several plants, but perhaps you can see why I like it.

One more favorite grass is Calamagrostis foliosa, a California native which never has a bad hair day. Seriously, this is a grass that never needs maintenance. It’s evergreen and looks good all year. It doesn’t need shearing because the old flowers just age away gracefully and the new flowers are show offs for the rest of the year. This photo was taken in mid-spring with the flowers new and I think it is just spectacularly attractive. I have lots growing all around my garden.

Continuing around my garden this is a view just past the entry to the house and this part of my garden contains one of my oldest plants, a Rhododendron and several azaleas left over from when I first started gardening in 1973. It now has mostly dwarf conifers with a sprinkling of other plants like Pieris and Skimmia and Hydrangea paniculata, Manzanita Dr Hurd in a dry corner, Ceonothus Concha in a dry background spot.

Most interesting is an unusual Spiral Aloe, or Aloe polyphylla. Unlike the usual succulent aloes, this one comes from the mountains of Lesotho in Africa. It is hardy and requires regular water. I bought it 25 or 30 years ago for it’s unusual spiral and about 5 years ago it bloomed for the first time. Two years ago, it began to give birth to offsets, three of them, which quickly grew in less than two years to almost the size of the parent plant and very early this summer and much to my amazement all four of them bloomed.

I wish I could find my earlier messages on the Garden Web on this plant to show off what it looks like as a single, which I much prefer. In the photo below you can see the flowers forming.

In bloom late spring/early summer.

Showing off its spiral. Some spiral clockwise, others counter clockwise.

echo , it was not that hard to find

aloe

nice plant,,,nice garden ,,,,thanks for the tour

is that your 'Little Gem ' 4 pics above this ?

I love grasses , agave , yucca ,,,but mostly conifers

ron

on your page , click activity ,,on left click posts,,,scroll etc

No, it’s not ‘Little Gem’. I’ll have to look its name up later when I’m home. It’s a plant I am sentimentally attached to, the only survivor of a business trip I took in the mid-80s to the Seattle area. After work I visited a nursery that said it had a good selection of dwarf conifers. I picked a selection of dwarf conifers in 2” or 4” containers, found a suitable box with a lid to pack them in, and brought them home with me on the plane. I have long since forgotten what the others were but they‘ve long since outgrown their spaces. The one you’ve spotted is finally outgrowing its space and I’ll have to do something.

’Little Gem’ is in the first photo of the front of my house. It’s the biggest round conifer in the lineup of conifers. There’s a very small blue Picea pungens cultivar, then Pinus ‘Mitsch Mini’ then ‘Little Gem’.

Thanks for the tips on finding my previous comments :).