Black Lace Sambucca with Vessel

We have a frontage down by the road which is 110 feet wide. A bank, actually, since it slopes down from a split rail fence.for about 20 feet. It was planted almost entirely with ice plant--spectacular when it bloomed for three weeks out of the year, not so much the other 11 months. (I published a blip of it in full bloom on 4/14/13). It did not survive the heavy winter frost. We waited for months to see if it would come back but it was clearly dead and depressing, so we finally had it taken out.

Dana, who runs regularly around the neighborhood, has been making a list of plants she likes, that are deer and drought resistant and like full sun. She took a total of four pictures of the bank, printed them, and put them together to make a panorama of the full expanse. Then she used different colored Post-It notes to indicate the plants she wanted, the size and spacing they would need when full grown, and the colors of their foliage and flowers. Very clever.

This morning we went to Emerisa Gardens--a wonderful wholesale nursery with a retail side which is open in the spring and summer. It is owned and operated by women, and very knowledgeable women they are. We loaded up with Formium, Sedge, Cistus, Spanish Lavender and Spirea, Roses , "Liquid Fence" a deer repellant* and lots of planting advice.. We went on to California Flora, a funky, shady, place where we found Ceanothus and Manzanita. This is a whole new vocabulary of plants for us, coming as we have from a cold cool and dark shady place. The main pests in Berkeley were snails, dogs and squirrels.

There was barely room for us in the car as we drove home with our bounty, pleased that we got almost all the dozens of plants we needed.

*It smells horrible until it dries. Then only the deer can smell it and it works, not by making the plants taste bad, but by interfering with their sense of smell. They can't smell predators so it is not a safe place for them. Supposedly it works….