Fifteen days in the desert...

While my fellow Portlander's were experiencing the tail end of a wet beginning to October we took off for the desert Southwest, a two week excursion under the sun. Naturally Mother Nature changed her game plan as soon as we left P-town and we missed out on some gorgeous fall weather Pacific Northwest-style. I’m not complaining though as she treated us very well and unseasonably warm temperatures (think 97 degrees) and plenty of blue skies followed us along on our travels.

Here's a quick overview of our giant circle...

We flew into Phoenix, AZ, and immediately hit the road to Tucson where we spent a fun couple of days. Then it was back on the road for the scenic (for a desert plant lover like me) drive on to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where we spent a few days with my husband’s family. After leaving TorC the quick shot up I-25 to Albuquerque had me in never-before-traveled territory where I enjoyed spotting a few landscapes previously seen on the blog The Desert Edge (unfortunately scheduling didn't allow for me to hit David up for a tour of the Albuquerque horticultural hot-spots, maybe next time?). Then came the four states in four days segment of our trip where after leaving NM we spent a night in Durango, CO; Blanding UT; and then Flagstaff AZ. After a quick day in Prescott, AZ it was time to return to Phoenix and finish up the vacation visiting my brother and his family. Whew!

During the many hours we logged traveling I watched the vegetation and soil color change along the highways. We saw almost white sand (which passes for soil in those parts) to the reddest of clay. Yucca were a near constant presence (Y. elata, Y. glauca, and Y. baccata just to name a few) but after my last Agave sighting in Albuquerque I was positively Agave starved until I spotted this one growing off the road-side just outside Sedona, AZ. And finally I knew we were back in the Sonoran Desert when the dignified Saguaro began to appear along the road, quickly joined by multiple Teddy bear Cholla, and a couple of Yucca and Agave thrown in to make my heart beat faster. It's not an exaggeration to say my eyes hurt from all the spikes (or maybe the bright desert sun?) and I've got to admit it's nice to be home. As per usual with our vacation travels many gardens and nurseries were visited...I've got thousands of photos to sort through before I can share my travels and discoveries with you. In the mean time I've got a Pacific Northwest fall garden to clean up and enjoy (not necessarily in that order).

Support Your Independent Nursery Month…gets personal with plant lust!

For the last installment of this month long independent nursery celebration I wanted to post about something near and dear, my business*, plant lust. Supporting great independent nurseries is what we're is all about and without them we wouldn’t exist… plant lust connects gardeners to the nurseries that have the plants they’re lusting after.
Our mission for plant lust is two-fold; we provide gardeners with a simple but comprehensive plant guide, while also providing a platform for the nursery industry to showcase their plants. For small (and large) independent nurseries plant lust offers a free, interactive platform to get the word out about the plants they offer.
Gardeners can search our database for just about anything: specific plant names, plant types, garden conditions, leaf and flower color, and get detailed, rich results from multiple nurseries and multiple photos of each plant from gardeners around the world. And we’ve got many exciting developments in the works; including wish-lists where gardeners can track plants they are lusting after and place mail-orders with multiple nurseries from a single location. We hope to inspire the next generation of gardeners who may not even know yet how much they are going to love gardening. One of the best ways to insure continued success for independent nurseries is to increase the number people gardening! If you visited plant lust back when we first launched and thought it was just a NW regional thing, well it’s not, nurseries from all over the country are signing up to contribute. We’ve also had people email us with the name of their favorite nursery and say we should contact them about joining, so here’s your chance…what favorite independent nursery of yours should be on plant lust? Leave a comment with the nursery name and the person I should contact (if you know it) and I’ll try and get them on board. Our world is getting very small, in a good way. Your favorite nursery can become the much loved source of unusual plants for someone tucked away in small town USA without their own independent nursery to support.

And thank you again to Pam, at Digging, for the call to blog in support our independent nurseries!

(*yikes!...I got so excited writing about plant lust that I forgot to include the names of the brains behind the idea Megan Hansen, and the one who actually populates the site with all the nursery data Patricia Cunningham! Sorry ladies!)

It’s time for some more sidewalk spying!

I’ve been collecting pictures taken “from the sidewalk” planning to put together a short post of inspiration, and I realized I’ve never shared this garden! It’s near our home in NE Portland but I discovered it when we were still house hunting (that would have been over 6 years ago). Naturally it’s the spiky Yucca rostrata that caught my eye. I wish I had pictures from years ago so I could compare and see how they’ve grown, my memory is that the tallest one was just barely starting to trunk back then, is that possible? I was also intrigued by their use of gravel and visited this garden several times when trying to decide what gravel to use in our front garden. I love the look of the small black stone but knew it would highlight all of the debris from the neighbor’s tree that blows into our yard. Moving on...I would be one very happy girl if I could replace our hell-strip Japanese Snowbells with these large Trachycarpus fortunei! The same strip also has a Callistemon… And this! Anyone know what it is? Perhaps a Hakea lissosperma? Up against the house there was what looks to be another of my lusted after plants, a Restio. I love me some big Musa basjoo! And here are a couple more large Trachycarpus, this time not in a parking strip but hugging the side of the house. I wonder if they were planted there to benefit from radiant heat from the brick chimney? For whatever reason it’s nice to see I’m not the only one who plants things too close to the house!

Yucca, tough as dandelions!

During our dry summers it is not uncommon to see this… …in front yards all over Portland. The lawn goes dormant but the weeds do not. Little patches of green interrupt the sea of gold. Something seemed different about these weeds. Different, and yet familiar at the same time. I paused to look closer. It’s a couple of yuccas! No doubt mowed over a million times, cut back and beaten down. Not a yucca planted with love. Yet since the owner of this parking strip had stopped mowing their dormant lawn the yuccas were making a sort of break for it. Grow little yuccas! Maybe you will be noticed and appreciated for the beautiful plants you are! Your owner will dig a little lawn free circle around you and allow you to spread, then someday your tall, elegant, white blooms will make them happy they discovered and appreciated you! Or maybe they’ll just mow you down once again…

What do the Lava Lands, Hole in the Ground, and Ft Rock all have in common?

We were there! Besides the Newberry Caldera and Paulina Peak these great place names were also on our must see list for last summer’s trek to Central Oregon. Don’t ask about Crack in the Ground though…we had to turn around when the road became too rough for our little car. Within the Lava Lands is Lava Butte, “a 500-foot-high cinder cone south of Bend along Highway 97. A road spirals to the top providing a grand vista of volcanic country. Here, gas-charged molten rock sprayed volcanic foam (cinders) into the air. These fell back into a pile to form Lava Butte. As the eruption proceeded, the amount of gas (mostly water vapor) contained in the molten rock decreased and lava poured out the south side of Lava Butte and flowed 6 miles downhill. The lava spilled into the nearby Deschutes River forming lava dams in some places and shoving the river westward out of its channel in others.” (Excerpt from: U.S. Forest Service Deschutes National Forest Website). One of the educational signs noted that this area was used from 1964-66 for the testing of men and equipment bound for the moon. It was austere and beautiful. And of course there was more Manzanita for me to admire. But all I did was admire… Off to Hole in the Ground. Which really is a big hole in the ground! More impressive in person, or I imagine from the sky. That’s Andrew about to descend to the bottom of the hole. I stayed behind, the ground was quite uneven with lots of loose material, and frankly I’m a klutz. I had no desire to ruin our weekend with a sprained ankle, or worse. Besides that gave me a chance to explore the plants! I believe this one is Purshia tridentate, or Bitterbrush… Meanwhile Andrew reached the bottom, can you see that little spec on the trail? That’s him! More importantly he made it back to the top. Next up is Ft Rock, in Christmas Valley. It’s a spectacular volcanic formation (actually called a tuff ring) that rises out of the valley floor. And here’s an interesting fact…see those sandals in the center of the sign? Just what might be the world’s oldest shoes! Dozens of these sagebrush bark sandals were found in a cave, at Ft Rock, below a layer of volcanic ash that was determined to have come from the eruption of the Mt. Mazama volcano (now Crater Lake) 7,500 years ago! Cool huh? This concludes our summer visit to Central Oregon, but since we didn’t make it to Crack in the Ground we’ll no doubt be back out in this beautiful landscape again sometime soon!