Visiting neighboring gardens is another important part of a head gardener’s duty. This should be done with a view not only to order and neatness, but also to good culture, intelligence, as to the state of gardening, &c.
—JANE LOUDON,
Loudon’s Encyclopadia of Gardening, 1830
I realized early on that commenting on your neighbor’s garden was an essential part of life here. We crowd up against each other in this old neighborhood, making it impossible not to look over the fence and raise an eyebrow. There were roses on one side of me, potted geraniums on the other, and across the street, a large and well-tended rhubarb patch. I began to know people by the plants that grew in their yards: There was the Trumpet Vine Lady up the street, the Cherry Blossom Guy a couple blocks over, and the Aloe Couple who just moved in down by the beach and inherited a front yard that was dominated by an aloe plant the size of a small car.
Each street is a hodgepodge of Santa Cruz history. The beach cottages all cluster together near the harbor, where they once provided a weekend home for wealthy Bay Area tourists who were brave enough to travel the narrow, treacherous highway down the coast. The gracious old Victorians perch on the bluff just up the hill from us, high above town, the place where some of Santa Cruz’s oldest families showed off the money they’d made from fishing in Monterey Bay. And then there is block after block of houses like ours: Craftsman-style bungalows from the twenties and thirties used as vacation homes for people like the doctor in San Francisco who took ours from a patient as payment and used it as a fishing place for twenty years.
Apart from driving through the narrow streets to go to work or the grocery store, I hadn’t seen much of my neighborhood so far, so one day I decided to walk around and check it out. It was a bright day on the cusp between winter and spring, one of the few sunny days we’d had so far that year, but already, young flowers were blooming up and down my street. Since we moved in during the winter, among the clouds and the rain, I hadn’t really noticed how vibrant Santa Cruz could be on a sunny day. Most of the houses here were painted bright beach colors: lemon yellow, mint green, carnation pink, and blues as varied as the colors of the ocean and the sky.
The gardens had a laid-back attitude, very appropriate for a beach town. Forget about manicured lawns, they seemed to say as I walked past them. Avoid anything that looks too much like “landscaping”. Life is short—plant everything. In just two blocks, I saw tomatoes growing in a rose garden, generous stretches of poppy and yarrow where anyone else would plant grass, and artichokes lining someone’s back fence, along an alley, where the silvery thistle leaves emerged between the nasturtiums. Many of the front yards were shoulder-to-shoulder flowers and blooming shrubs. Some people grew their vegetables in the front in raised beds, to take full advantage of the sun. The old Victorians had ancient, overgrown gardens shaded by enormous redwoods that never got cleared when the houses were first built. The gardens were mostly screened from view by tall hedges and tangles of climbing roses. As if in defiance of all that wilderness, a few houses had only geometric rock gardens, tidy designs laid out in minimalist red and white rock.
Of all the plants I saw, though, the one I noticed most often was oxalis. Everyone had it. I had decided to learn to live with mine, which felt like progress. I was taking a relaxed attitude, less like a worried parent and more like one of those beloved aunts who will let you eat ice cream for breakfast. Let the weeds come, I thought. There are more important things to do. I’ll tidy up later.
Not everyone took this approach, though. Some people had nearly immaculate yards, with only a few tiny oxalis sprouts. They seemed to be trying the “hand-pick every new plant before it can reproduce” technique, the one that requires that you take significant time off from your job just to keep ahead of it. I envied those people. I wanted to be one of them, but I knew that I never would be. I identified a little more with the people who ripped the plant up, but left the root and a bit of the stem in the ground. They just wanted to get something done. They wanted to see some progress, even if they knew that all the roots they left in the ground would sprout new weeds sooner or later.
I got advice as I walked. A few blocks away from my house, there was an ugly green duplex, completely out of place between the stately Victorians on either side. There was one small patch of yard in front, in an area about eight feet by ten. It was so completely packed with flowers that at first I didn’t notice the woman who was crouched down planting seeds behind a stand of tall foxglove. She looked wildly happy, there in her garden, in an old blue housecoat and a pair of hiking boots. I understood why she looked so joyous—her garden was brimming over, there was not an empty spot anywhere. Everything was in bloom, from the tiny primroses that bordered the sidewalk, to the pink and white cosmos, to the climbing roses around her front door. And not a single oxalis in sight. When I asked her about it, she told me that she used black plastic landscaping fabric to keep the weeds down. And lots of compost, she added, waving an empty plastic bag of it around.
Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get back to my own garden and start planting. I hadn’t realized a garden could be this far along so early in the year. I was beginning to feel behind already. I made mental notes as I walked, adding new gardening terms to my vocabulary: compost, landscape fabric.
I was within a few blocks of my house when I almost tripped over a pile of wrinkled brown bulbs sitting on the sidewalk, still covered in dirt, and a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read, “Crocosmia. Flaming Orange Flowers. Take Some Home.” In the yard, there was a newly dug bed planted with larkspur where the crocosmia must have been. The larkspur were blue and wispy, and I could see why the owner had dug the bulbs up: “flaming orange” would not have gotten along with larkspur at all. I looked around to see if the person who’d left them on the sidewalk was still outside, but there was no one around. I picked up a few of them and turned them over in my hand. They were round, flattened things wrapped in a stringy husk that looked more like a piece of burlap than anything that would grow in the ground. It was hard to imagine any flower emerging from those squat little bulbs, much less one that was too wild to share a flower bed with the civilized, pastel larkspur.
I didn’t have such conflicts to worry about in my own garden, at least not yet. I could start out with crocosmia and take it from there. Everything else I planted would just have to learn to get along with them. I took a few of them, left the rest for someone else to find, and walked home, savoring the rustle of the papery bulbs in my jacket pocket. I felt welcome. It was better than a casserole, this housewarming gift from the neighbors.
MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR CHARLIE was outside pulling weeds when I got back. He and his wife, Beverly, lived in the white stucco house on our right. A row of pink ivy geraniums bloomed in front, and behind it, a bank of fragrant star jasmine. His garden looked orderly, cared for. It looked like someone was tending it, taking it seriously, and in fact, someone was. Charlie glanced over the fence at my pile of brown bulbs. “What are you planting?”
I tried to sound confident as I pronounced it: “Crocosmia.” Then, in case there were several varieties, I added, “Flaming orange flowers.”
He nodded. “Yes, I know. You mean these?” and he pointed to a clump of young, spiky leaves, just pushing their way out of the ground. Half of them stood in his yard and the other half in mine.
“That’s crocosmia?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Yep. It grows along the alley, too. If you want some more, you can go out there and dig some up.”
I had already begun to rip out the African daisy to make room for them. I sat down among the mess I was making in my front yard, feeling a little foolish. I should have known better. Who would leave anything but the most common plant out on the sidewalk, free for the taking? Everybody had crocosmia, apparently, which was why you couldn’t even give it away, except to newcomers like me.
One advantage of living in a neighborhood where everybody talked to everybody else was that it didn’t take me long to continue the cycle of giving away unwanted plants. The Trumpet Vine Lady came by the next day and asked if she could have some of the African daisies I’d ripped out to make room for the crocosmia. I felt a little silly, digging around in my pile of wilted, ripped-out plants to find something to give her, but it made its own kind of crazy sense, trying to get rid of my unwanted plants so I could make room for somebody else’s unwanted plants. Sort of like holding a garage sale to make room for all the stuff you bought at other people’s garage sales. She gathered up the African daisies and headed back to her house. I sat down on the porch steps and watched her go. The ripped-out plants in her hands looked like two giant, grotesque flower bouquets, the kind of thing Frankenstein’s monster might pick out for his bride, with flowers sticking out in every direction, scraggly brown roots hanging down almost to her knees, and clods of dirt falling to the ground.
After she rounded the bend in the road and disappeared from sight, I jumped down from the steps and stood in the street to take in the full effect of the work I’d done so far. The oxalis was cleared away, at least for the moment, and where the African daisies had been, a neat square of earth was now planted with bulbs and raked smooth. Any day now, the crocosmia would start to push tiny green sprouts through the dirt, and the hummingbirds would hover nearby, waiting for the flaming orange flowers to bloom.
Sharing plants is one of the best parts of living in a neighborhood full of gardeners. It is a way of passing on not just plants, but advice, too. “I’ve got extra artichokes,” a woman down the street once said, handing me two sturdy young plants. “Take them, you’ll want them in your flower arrangements come fall.” It wasn’t until I left an artichoke on the stalk one October and watched it open into a bright blue thistle that I knew what she meant. People give plants away as insurance, too: If you’ve passed out a few iris rhizomes every fall, you can be sure that some neighbor will have a few to give back to you should yours get nibbled by gophers. The problem was, I was not always sure what to do with the vines, twigs, and clumps of roots once they were handed over the fence to me.
As it turns out, there is an entire science devoted to taking cuttings and making them grow. To do it properly, you need equipment, powders and potions, and plenty of patience. Here’s a basic list of ingredients, along with some instructions, to get you started:
Rooting compound, powder or liquid (available at most nurseries)
Fungicide
Slow-release fertilizer
Scalpel or garden knife
Alcohol and candle for sterilizing the knife
Seed-starting tray
Growing medium, such as a mixture of half peat moss and half small bark
Mist sprayer
Fill a seed-starting tray with growing medium; mist thoroughly.
Sterilize your knife by dipping it in alcohol and passing it quickly through a candle flame.
Take a cutting just above the leaf node, and remove all side shoots and lower leaves with your knife. Then make a “wound” near the base of the stem by trimming off a sliver of bark, which will expose the part of the plant in which cell division takes place.
Dip the base of the cutting, including the wound, into the rooting compound, and insert it into a seed-starting tray filled with growing medium. Spray thoroughly with fungicide. Repeat the applications of fungicide every two weeks, keep the growing medium evenly moist, and feed regularly with a slow-release fertilizer.
Rootings can take several weeks to several months.
There is another method, one that I’ve used when I was short on time and patience: I thank the neighbor for the cutting, stick it in the ground, water, and wait. Some of the cuttings grow. Some of them don’t. I just hope the neighbors never ask to come over and see how their cuttings are doing in my garden. So far, I’ve been lucky; they haven’t asked.