Sunday, September 26, 2010

Infinite regress, almost, in both directions. It must be interesting to live in the middle of a city block on Capitol Hill


I finished the design for this house (that would be the one you can't see) today; the front is a mixture of shade plants including a Camellia, Daphne odora, Mahonia fortunei, a Hydrangea and an assortment of perennials and bulbs. The back garden is dedicated to edibles. The owners have already installed a couple of raised beds for vegetables. I included the berry bushes they wanted. The back faces south and is relatively unshaded, so I added a few less common plants. Aronia melanocarpa, the native dark fruited Aronia, has been in the news lately for the produgious amounts of antioxidants it produces. We'll put is where it's a bit shaded; it bears a reasonable amount of fruit the second year after planting so that's nice. I also included a Chinese Datge, Zizyphus jujuba, because it's a very nice small tree and the fruits are interestingly attractive and tasty. I include also a Fig, Ficus carica, because fresh figs are wonderful and the heat that develops in this south facing space will both ripen figs and maybe allow for a set of flower buds to live through the winter thereby producing an extra generation of fruit every year. I threw in a banana, Musa 'Basjoo' because it's cool though this hardy variety won't produce edible fruit. The native Passionflower, Passiflora incarnata, has wonderful flowers and, if you wait till they're ripe, tasty seeds. Finally, there's a grape for fruit and screening along the west side of their back deck.

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