Silly but.... the manzanita is blooming! by SIGNYM

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Silly but.... the manzanita is blooming!

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, January 27, 2013 19:53
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Saturday, January 26, 2013 9:55 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Last October I started xeriscaping part of my backyard. Took the long trek to Las Pilitas nursery and bought hollyleaf cherry, scrub oak, manzanita, cleveland sage,

california buckwheathttp://

snowberry, rhus trilobata

pink flowering currrant

....

went online to High Country Gardens and ordered a bunch of smaller plants...

checked thru the garden every week with my sis.

Yep, this one's growing, that one's growing, that one cratered (bad shipping). The manzanita... well at least it's still alive. No new shoots, not even green tips, just hanging out. Kept reminding myself that the usual rule for perennials is three years... "First they sleep, then they creep, then they leap..."

But I checked two days ago and wouldn't ya know, the darn things are blossoming!

Not only that, but daughter reported a hummingbird there... "Not like the one that WE saw" she said (we saw a bright red-headed hummingbird earlier) "but a really green one".

Also, gotta say... the sages smell pretty, even out of bloom. One sage smells like sage and pine, the other smells like sage and honey.

I can hardly wait for summer!

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Sunday, January 27, 2013 8:48 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

AWWRIGHT!

Not silly at ALL, to me at least. We have tons of manzanita (and madrone) all over Marin County, and I love it. In Winter a lot of our hummers move up to The Mountain and survive on the "manzanita bells", and the manzanita berries are beloved by the birds.

This is what ours look like:

They're everywhere and massive. A whole section of the North Face, very rocky and open to the sun, is nothing but rocks and manzanita. It stands out gloriously in the middle of the redwood, bay, and other forests. And I absolutely ADORE the "skin" of manzanita and madrone, its colors are so beautiful and the skin is so smooth, almost alive-feeling.

LOVE sage too, the smells are marvelous. We have "rabbit brush", which is similar to sagebrush but grows faster and smells different. We used to LOVE to snag a piece as we hiked to sniff or bring home to someone who hadn't come with.

I envy you your garden...given that mine is almost completely non-native hanging plants, they're all either dormant or dead annuals right now, and it'll be a while before they are "alive" enough again to enjoy. Tho' surprisingly, a couple of the miniature roses bloomed all through Winter!

Enjoy, and thanx for the photos; be prepared to get LOTS of hummers, they absolutely adore manzanita out here at least!

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Sunday, January 27, 2013 7:53 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

You lucky California ducks, you don't really have much of a winter. In Portland we measure spring by when our daphnes bloom and we can smell them from up on the porch. This happens anywhere from mid Feb. to early Mar. Every place is different and has its own rhythm of life.

Signe, I'm glad you and your family are enjoying the garden and seeing beautiful things. Humming birds are lovely. I had a humming bird feeder outside my bedroom window in the summer of 2011, my mother didn't put it out there this last summer, I'm going to ask her to put it up again this year though because I love hearing them tweet at each other, they've got such high pitched tweets, my mother can't hear them but I can, and I like hearing their wings too. They're so cute and little and lovely.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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