lavender in bloom!

It's that time of year, the height of the lavender bloom at Matanzas Creek Winery (their phone message says the harvest has begun and will proceed gradually through July, so the time to go is now!)
I wrote about the lavender when I first visited 2 years ago.
Yesterday, we took a small picnic & some wine-- (that's my painting on the delicious bottle of Eric Kent Chardonnay!) early evening when the shadows were long, and it was glorious.

Lavender Fields!

Wow. Living where we do, you can almost start to take lavender for granted. It grows so well-- and thrives on so little care-- that you see it all around, and we have a handful of varieties in our own yard. It's also quite popular for landscape painters to paint, and I knew of Matanzas Creek Winery as the place they went to paint fields of it. But I had never been there myself.
I've been subbing for a summer painting class the last few days, and they had recently spent the day here--- the lavender is at the height of bloom, about to be harvested. So I dropped by on my way home. And so, I say again, wow. Nothing really prepares you for these fields of color 'in the real'-- and their scent, the buzz of the bees, the late afternoon sun.
You can read about the gardens here. You see there are two colors of lavender: the lighter is Provence, used for culinary purposes, and the darker is Grosso, the stronger one, used for bath products and oils. (they make and sell a lot of the products there). Any future visitors who come to see us in late spring/early summer-- are going to be taken here. You have been warned.


Here you can see the lavender has begun to be harvested (these shorn green mounds)-- a process that is done by hand and takes a number of weeks.


Here's a little painting by Paula Smith (love the contrasting orange umbrella!)

...less than beautiful moments...

There have been a lot of pretty rose shots here recently... it's a morning ritual of mine (perhaps shared by gardeners everywhere)-- to stroll around the garden in the morning, coffee in hand, looking for the latest thing to put out its first blossom of the season. And of course now, having this blog, it's a stroll with camera in hand. (It's been really fun to watch spring ripple across the country through garden blogs-- check out Garden Voices on GardenWeb for a selection of daily highlights.)
But a little while back there was a trend towards showing some of your less than perfect garden moments, and this photo will serve to represent many such corners of the garden I might have chosen. There are moments of pure bliss--lots of them!!-- in the garden right now. But pockets of loss and disappointment too; we lost 5 vines to the frost, (hardenbergias & pink jasmines)--valued for covering those ugly fences, and views of neighbor's blue-tarped trailers. Also: three big mallow bushes (which may have come back, but got moved along, in favor of something hopefully more resilient). At LEAST 2 good-sized lavender bushes-- and four more straggle on 'under observation.' 2 red 'Hop' bushes. My favorite rose bush. Those foxgloves I liked so much. And now, it seems, 2 trees, Chinese Pistache, and Crimson Cloud Hawthorn-- to either: fireblight, or verticilium wilt. And a tree is a more painful loss. .. those Hawthorns are in bloom all over the area right now, and they are old-fashioned-looking (can a tree be old-fashioned?) beauties.

It's all part of the process, I know-- we're still pretty new gardeners, learning from trial and error and research and advice-- and a dead plant is an opportunity for a NEW plant, right? Still it seems only fair to share a little bit of the pain along with the beauty, no?

April Bloom Day

Truly this must be one of the most beautiful times of year-- so much is changing every day. Here's a smattering of photos taken today, with some of what's blooming now (click here to see more from around the country). The conventional wisdom has it that this is the final frost date for our region-- which has seemed like a stretch in the past, yet there was frost this morning on the rooftops.

1) this shows wallflower (orange, in foreground) backed up by yellow bulbine, california poppies, borage, scabiosa, snow-in-summer (a great un-sung groundcover in my garden); distantly: ceanothus (blue, at right, blooming this year like never before) and chinensis mutabilis rose (with the pink, middle left).

2) Bearded irises. Love 'em.

3) Cerinthe, the 'IT' plant of a couple of years back-- still much beloved here. Backed up by a euphorbia.

4) Lady Banks rose--in her spectacular spring display. I hack this one way back each year; driving around the county you can see these going crazy (scrambling over buildings and up trees) in full glory this week.

5) My one really successful clump of Spanish lavender-- and what do you call those little red flowers, again?

Mums in the yard

Every year I buy a few bright new mums-- to stick in pots lining the front steps, and so on... and after the season, as they are perennials, and as Tony would say 'they want to LIVE', I try to find places to shoehorn them into spots in the garden. And because it is Northern California, & conditions are good, they all survive & thrive & bloom again the next year.

Today I bought some lavender ones, for a change of pace. And an aster. Why do we have no asters?

this year's Lavender Fields

Here are a few pics from this year's visit to the fields at Matanzas Creek Winery.

The plants are at the peak of bloom, beginning to be harvested, as seen as cropped green mounds in some photos.

Alive with bees!

The dragonfly was over by the water garden area-- all the plantings are lovely, not just the lavender!
Previous years' photos seen here and here.