How to Lasso a Yucca Rostrata

I thought for various reasons (mainly a nasty bout of insomnia) that I wasn't going to get to the Northwest Flower and Garden Show this week. I had planned to go on Thursday but didn't. And on Friday I had to wait for the contractor who is working on my front garden and building the greenhouse to come and finish up, so I didn't think I would have enough time.

Well, the contractor was done by noon, and for the first time all week I was well rested. What to do? Hop in the car and zip into Seattle to the show, of course. Which is what I did. I was only going to have the afternoon to check everything out, so it was a bit of a whirlwind.

The first thing I did when I got into the show was go to the Small Space Showcase on the Skybridge. Go here to find out exactly what the Small Space Showcase is. I often find these small quirky container gardens to be more interesting and full of take-home ideas than the big fancy displays. You should read The Outlaw Gardener's post about them here.

Anyway, here are some vignettes from the Small Space Showcase gardens. I zipped through them at lightning speed, so I neglected to take overall photos of each of them.

I've been looking for interesting ways to display Tillandsias

These vases are such a great shape!

Love the plant in the apron pocket

This was a striking display. Isn't that a great pot?

I love these pyramidal containers too

A closer look at the plants in the shorter of the two

I'm sure you're wondering about the title of my post -- How to Lasso a Yucca rostrata. Well, did you see it? In the picture above.

Maybe it's more like a garrotte.

I guess those suckers are top-heavy.

Mahonia in the Snow

As I looked out the slider in my kitchen into my snow-covered back garden, the graphic quality of Mahonia x media 'Charity' drew my eye.

I thought it was interesting how the snow turned the leaves into chevrons.

It drew more than just me. A hummingbird was feeding at it earlier.

NWFGS Quickie

One of the main reasons I go to the Northwest Flower and Garden Show, and one of the reasons I garden, is for the plants. I love plants. They don't talk back, or judge me, they just live (or die). Sometimes at the show, there's a garden or two that is plant-centric, like last year's showstopper garden by Riz Reyes (read about that garden here). That wasn't the case this year. So often the show gardens concentrate on hardscape, on the whole Outdoor Living thing that is so popular here on the West Coast. This was unfortunately true of many of this year's gardens. None of the plants featured were really cutting edge.

But there were a few interesting and intriguing plants and plant combos that I couldn't help noticing, including a few that paired the common with the more uncommon.

Astelia and black mondo grass

Red Anigozanthus (Kangaroo paw), which is not hardy here.

Sarracenias and red pansies

'Red Dragon' Persicaria and red-veined fern

Yucca 'Color Guard' and Tulip 'Monte Carlo'

Agave (parryi?) and Tulip 'Monte Carlo'

Yucca, Agave and red primroses

Enormous glass Sarracenia and real ones in the background (also a tiny already wilting Gunnera under the solar light and a Fatsia behind the log)

Various Narcissi, ferns and more Sarracenias

Why do you go to garden shows at this time of year? Is it to see the plants? To shop? To get inspired for another year of gardening? Maybe it's because you just love the madding crowd.

A Few Bright Spots to Warm You Up

Brrrr. It's cold right now. We're in the grip of another Deep Freeze, which around here means temperatures that go down below freezing, usually into the low to mid 20s, and don't get above freezing during the day. The last time this happened was back in early December, just when the construction on the front garden started.

Although the greenhouse is almost complete, it still doesn't have power, which I will need to run a heater. We're waiting on the electrician to come and connect the new circuit up to the house and put a power outlet in. So my overwintering plants are still inside the house crowding the living room and dining room. Most of them are doing ok, I think. All the Begonia boliviensis have died right back to the soil, which I've read is what usually happens. I hope they are still alive and are going to leap back to life when they start getting more light and water. My Bougainvillea has lost all its leaves and flower bracts, and is basically a rather dead-looking branchy twiggy thing. A couple of other fancy-leaf Begonias have died back to the soil too. I don't know if they're dead, we'll see.

My Begonia luxurians has slowly and steadily lost leaves over the course of the winter, but recently has started putting out new ones.

Begonia luxurians new growth

Begonia luxurians new growth

However, my Bromeliads LOVE being inside the house, and seem to be absolutely thriving in our low-light winter grayness. When I first bought them on sale last fall, I didn't realize they didn't like full sun, and stupidly put them outside in a western exposure, on our front porch. They burned. So I moved them onto the back porch, which is covered and faces east. They survived there till close to first frost, when I brought them in and put them inside facing the west, but not right up against the window. Since then they've produced some beautiful new leaves.

Thriving Bromeliad

The flower on my recently purchased Bromeliad just keeps getting better and better. I love the contrast between the pink and the blue.

My Agaves and other succulents are doing well in my only south-facing window. I rarely water them, having done so only once since late October when I brought them inside. I've watered the banana more often, and it is still producing new leaves, but not at quite the same rapid pace it did when I first brought it in.

From the bottom: Agave 'Baccarat,' Dyckia 'Precious Metal,' Aloe glauca, Agave 'Blue Glow,' Manfreda 'Macho Mocha'

Agave 'Blue Glow' is doing ok but will need a little tidying up when it's time to put her back outside

Agave attenuata 'Kara Stripe' is also hanging on to dreams of summer (like me), but her lower leaves will need trimming

Unknown Agave (I assumed it was tender and brought it in)

Manfreda 'Macho Mocha' is looking like a mere shadow of her true self (yes, she's a she despite her name)

The lovely dark freckles have faded considerably indoors

But. Did you happen to see what I saw in the pot with the Manfreda?

A pup! She must be happy. I know I am.

Once the greenhouse is up and running and I get some sense of how warm the heater will actually keep it, I might move some of the plants that prefer more light out there. I really wish it had power already, so I could see how warm it gets out there during our freeze. I'm kind of assuming this week of freezing temps will be the last of the winter, and the long, slow warmup to spring will begin. Maybe I shouldn't make any assumptions, given how crazy the winter weather has been, not only in North America, but all over the world.

I guess I'm an optimist.

Artsy Fartsy

In the winter when I can't garden because of rain or cold, I often do art projects where I make something either for inside the house or for the garden. A couple of years ago I experimented with concrete, Portland cement and hypertufa, and you can read about those projects here and here. And more here. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, although I did a couple of projects then that I never actually finished or posted about. But today I'm not posting about those, I'm going to show you something brand new that I made for my new front garden.

It went through a lot of permutations, so bear with me while I talk about the process. I hope you won't be too bored.

A lot of my inspiration came from Pinterest. Although I Pin way more ideas than I will ever use, I do use some of them, even if it's just to consider them and discard them.

When I first decided to put in a greenhouse I knew I wanted it to have some kind of decorated concrete slab by the doorway, sort of like a welcome mat. My first thought was to embed bottles in a rectangle of either gravel or concrete, kind of like this. But Chris was a bit leery of the bottles shifting over time if they were set in gravel, and they were too tall to embed in a huge chunk of concrete. There are lots of different techniques for cutting bottles that I've found on the web, but that many bottles would just be way too much work. I'd still like to do something with bottles in my garden, so perhaps I'll use them as garden edging, like this.

I'm fascinated by mosaics, as I've mentioned before. I tried putting together a small mosaic tabletop several years ago, but abandoned it after a while as just not my thing. But they keep calling to me. A few years ago I was inspired by a picture I saw on the blog danger garden in this post, about her trip to Potted, where she showed abstract colorful shapes embedded in rectangular stepping stones. I still want to make something similar, and I've been collecting all kinds of beads and marbles and various other items thinking I'll eventually use them for stepping stones.

After I abandoned the bottle idea for my "welcome mat" I hauled out the stash of beads and trinkets that I've been collecting for those stepping stones and tried to figure out what to do with them. Right around this time I found lots of Pins that showed spiral shapes reminiscent of a nautilus shell made out of marbles or stones. Like this. Or this. So for a week or so I toyed around with making spirals out of glass marbles and other bits and bobs.

But they just didn't work for me. Awkward, ugly, not quite elaborate enough.

Then I saw this and a light bulb went on. I set right to work on a similar pattern, and came up with this.

More colorful than stones, but it will fit right in with the colorful plans I have for the front garden. I started working from the center outward. Some of these pieces are actually beads -- the large center piece and the larger flat pink and blue ones, as well as the marbled blue ones off to the left.

I quickly realized this could be IT. I painstakingly transferred the beads onto sticky contact paper to keep the pattern together when I wanted to move it, and then because I needed two of them for each side of the "welcome mat" I put together a mirror image of it. I eventually took out that extra little bit at the lower left, and turned it into a sort of comma shape, or maybe a planet and its satellite. Then I stored them till they would be needed.

Pizza boxes underneath the sticky paper worked well for transporting them

Chris was also leery of setting the mosaic in concrete full of aggregate, so he came up with the idea of putting a layer of fast-setting concrete down first and then a half-inch or so of mortar mix, which is much smoother. Laying that concrete pad was one of the last things his crew did, and then I very nervously set to work transferring the mosaic into the mortar.

I used a ruler to measure how far from the edges to start, and then laid them out starting with the center and working outward in layers.

They look so much smaller than they did inside the house.

I had to push the pieces into the mortar mix so they are just slightly submerged.

The whole thing got covered with a couple of folding craft tables and then a big piece of plastic, to keep the rain off.

Here it is after it's been drying for about 3 or 4 hours.

One thing I really like abut the image that I Pinned is the way plants are encroaching on it at the edges. I'd like to eventually plant some sedums and maybe grasses and a few other dry-loving perennials right in the gravel around it, as well as into the gravel in lots of other spots around the greenhouse and the Folly, so that it loses that sterile wasteland look that it has right now. I don't want it to be cottage garden messy, just not quite so bare.

I'm also starting to wish I had done two more for the other two lower corners of the concrete pad. Maybe I'll try painting a design onto the concrete with a stencil. Or should I leave well enough alone? What do you think?

I still have plenty of colorful bits to play with if I ever get around to making those stepping stones that I saw on danger garden.