Flower Friday : : Leucodendron

Although we've had a couple of good rainstorms, it is freezing (literally) at night. I am so happy that, after 45 years of parking on the street in Berkeley, we now have a garage,  and don't have to begin these days with numb hands from scraping ice off the windshield with a credit card. I actually snapped a credit card in half that way once, but that coincided with a trip to Canada and the rental car came with an ice scraper. It went back without one, but the credit card still worked better.

We went to The Urban Tree Farm yesterday in search of bare root persimmon and fig trees. I have always thought both trees are beautiful in their own right, but have recently learned to appreciate 'Fuyu' persimmons.(The flat crunchy ones...delicious and pretty in salads.) Alas, they were sold out of both, but we got sidetracked and bought a 'Sango Kaku,' Coral Bark Japanese Maple. It's bare branches turn dark red in the winter. It requires afternoon dappled shade and well drained soil and we picked out a place that we felt would have both.

We actually didn't think much about the 'well drained soil' part since our entire property is on a hill. Except for the place the chose for the Sango Kaku. We know that digging a hole in our 'soil' is easier said than done. It is actually 50% rock and 40% clay with only 10% something that passes for soil. Undaunted, OilMan began to dig. When he reached about 18 inches, he hit the layer of clay with at least an inch of water on top of it, not draining at all because it is in the one level strip of the property that has afternoon shade. The water drains down through the layer of rock and comes to a halt when it reaches  the layer of clay.

OilMan is now engineering a solution...I think he thought his engineering days were over when he retired, but he's using his skills more than ever now that he is a gentleman farmer.

We have a lot of leucodendrons, a form of protea, in our garden, since they apparently aren't too fussy about where they will grow. One suddenly died last year and we wondered why since it was growing on a steep hill which drains all too well, but it turned out the roots were completely eaten by gophers. When he's not wearing his Gardener's hat, or his Engineer's hat, OilMan is wearing his Great White Hunter hat.

Never a dull moment out there.