Brad's Tropical Paradise

One of the reasons tropical gardens fail in the Phoenix, Arizona area is that water isn't consistently delivered to the plants. The Sonoran Desert is no place to plant anything but cactus if you plan on watering with a hose. But if you've visited gardens like mine, and hadn't seen the watering system, well, that's the point. My garden has tiny sprayer heads that are mostly hidden behind rocks. I took this photo from an angle so that you could see it better. From the front, not much shows. It's an ordinary low-pressure drip system, which has a 1/2-inch main line that runs all the way around the garden, and 1/4-inch spaghetti tubing. It's set to come on automatically with an expensive battery-operated timer. In fact, the whole system was built on the cheap. It's the day after Thanksgiving, 2014, and Phoenix is recording record highs. It doesn't usually get this hot in November, so I'm doing some extra watering. I have turned the system on manuall...

My backyard is a tiny place, with a garden. It's not a backyard for throwing footballs, or playing soccer. It's a place to sit quietly and enjoy the flowers. I have a lot of interesting plants, which I have carefully selected for visual interest. So when people are interested in seeing it, I am happy to show it off. But I don't want them stepping into the planting area. Walking in a garden is as rude as strolling across someone's dining room table, but most people don't know that. And I think I've made just about every design mistake possible, and watched with horror as people's big feet came crashing down on tiny plants beginning to grow, my watering system,  the Malibu lights and well, just about everything that could be accidentally kicked and knocked over. I've learned from this experience, and I'm always watching my visitors to see where my design has failed. So, in spite of my specifically asking my visitors not to walk in the garden, i...

One of the best plants for the Phoenix, Arizona area is Cape Honeysuckle. It has a wonderful tropical leaf, it loves the heat, looks great all summer, and best of all, it blooms when your winter visitors are around. If you have Cape Honeysuckle, you should be seeing some blooms, or the beginning buds by late November. Unfortunately, if you're a neat gardener, and especially if you do your trimming with power tools, you may be taking away any chance of blooms. So, put away the power hedge trimmer, and stop and take a look. The beginning flower bud doesn't look a whole lot different from an emerging leaf, but if you look closely, you will begin to recognize the difference. I use a bypass pruner, and sometimes I just pinch the leaf tips with my fingers. But I leave the emerging buds alone! Well, I try to. Emerging Cape Honeysuckle flower bud. Don't cut it off! So, if someone starts attacking your Cape Honeysuckle with a power hedge trimmer, make them stop. You wo...

One of my favorite plants here at The Tropical Paradise in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) is Elephant Ears. The photo is from about three years ago, and they grow well here. In fact, too well sometimes, as I have often had to cut them back and move them. But they hate cold. They're the first plants in my garden to show cold damage. It's mid-November and it got down into the forties (F) a couple of nights ago and I noticed some cold damage to a plant that I had planted in the front courtyard. It has already gotten droopy and the leaves have turned purplish. It will get to below freezing by late December and January, so that leaves will die back to the ground. Some years the Elephant Ears just show some mild damage, some years are cold enough to completely knock them to the ground. But the bulbs don't die, they come back year after year. This past year, in fact, so many of them multiplied that I filled a big Home Depot bucket with bulbs and gave them to a frien...

For a long time now I've been puzzled about a gap in my cannas and a *dead spot* in front of them. I added fresh potting soil, I checked that the area was getting water, I even planted a few small plants there. But nothing grew in. And then one day I saw my dog go charging through. Normally, Macintosh, the good little wiener dog, walks gingerly around the garden, but there is a dog on the other side of that wall, in that corner, that upsets her, and she goes charging over there. And it explains why the little canna shoots don't get a chance, and why things like my flowers, and lettuce, have failed there. They got smooshed. So, I did two things, I planted an elephant ear, and I put a small, heavy statue there temporarily. Of course, it's not enough to stop her if she does want to plow through, but she won't. She only goes where she sees an obvious path. It was a design flaw, and it was my fault. Hopefully this will fix it. With a little bit of time, and the prote...

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people do in their garden, or in any design, is failing to attend to the negative spaces, and failing to unify. A negative space, as a design term, just means the visual *holes* created between any important element. Unfortunately, our eyes do tend to look at these spaces as much as the positive spaces, and if it's just dirt, well, it looks kind'a bad. A unifying element just means something that seems to hold everything together. Yes, it's great to have a lot of different stuff going on (I love the look of diversity), but to keep it from just looking like a rubbish heap, it's a good idea to unify with a theme that plays throughout. That's the concept of design intention that I often refer to. Here in my garden I am using alyssum as a unifying theme. It's soft and subtle, but it's there. The trick to planing alyssum is to *punch it in* around existing plants. I like to see if I can get it to seem to be *peeking ...

It's November 13th here at The Tropical Paradise in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) and I just spent some time this morning planting a bouquet of flowers. Yeah, it doesn't look like much now, but these flowers grow fast, and will be beautiful all winter and through late spring. Every year I learn something new, but mostly I stay with the same design. You may have heard it described as *thrillers, fillers, and spillers*. That is, a tall flower, a medium one, and one that just sort of spreads around. My tall flowers (or thrillers) are the bulbs that come back every year, freesia and daffodils. My fillers this year are vincas (the ones with the pink flowers), dianthus (with the purple flowers), and cyclamen (red flowers). The spiller that I always use is white alyssum, which stays low. As usual, I'm doing the *red carpet* treatment for the plants. All of them get some moisture crystals and slow-release fertilizer. And then I water them in with Miracle-Gro. I ...

I have always loved beautiful gardens. I feel better around plants. During my more stressful years working at the bank, I would often just stop at a nursery on my way home and just wander around. Over the years I've found that pottering around in my garden is very therapeutic for me. And I love to experiment with different plants to see how they do here in the desert. My friends always considered me to be obsessed with plants, and when I left the bank, and got a lunchtime *roast* from my friends in the marketing department, one of the things I remember is my friends joking that I *lived by photosynthesis*. And then I got involved with the Arizona Palm and Cycad Association . It's a gardening group, but don't jump to the conclusion that it's a bunch of little old ladies with petunias. It's a group of mostly middle-aged guys, like me (and we'll call ourselves that until we're 100) who have an interest in collecting rare plants. The plants that I am mos...

It's November 9th here at The Tropical Paradise in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) and the weather is just glorious. I have been listening to an audiobook on my iPad and drinking my decaf coffee, which is a wonderful way to spend a Sunday morning. But all around me I can hear the sound of lawnmowers and edgers. Yesterday I saw a huge plume of dust kicked up in my neighbors yard. And I reminded at how happy I am with my artificial turf. I had it installed seven years ago, and it's the best thing I've ever done here. Obviously it never requires watering, or mowing, or trimming, and it looks great, even close up. I've had people visit me and walk on it who had to reach down and touch it to believe that it was plastic. When I first bought this house, many years ago, I did the whole complex *over-seeding* thing, which is awful. You have to buy a bag of seed, cover it up with some kind of stinky topping, and keep it soggy wet until the grass sprouts. It attrac...

It doesn't snow here in the Phoenix area, but it does get below freezing every winter. Yes, it only happens in the wee hours of the morning, and that's why most people don't realize it. But if you have a garden with tropical plants in it, like I do, it's worth thinking about. Since it gets so hot here in the desert, it often surprises people that it's the ability of a plant to withstand cold that is the real determining factor of its ability to live here. By the way, in case anyone asks you, it's called the plant's *hardiness*, although I doubt anyone will ask you. That's the lowest temperature that a plant can stand. You can get that information on the tag of any plant that you buy at at nursery, or you can Google *hardiness* for any given plant. The USDA determines hardiness zones, based on how cold it gets, which goes from 1 to 13. Lately I've seen additional zones squeezed in as a, b. etc., but mostly this is zone 9, where the coldest it us...

It's November 1st here at The Tropical Paradise and I noticed that my palm trees are flowering again this year. Usually they do this in the spring, but it's been exceptionally rainy and warm this season, so I guess they think it's spring again. The weather sure is nice this morning! Anyway, if you're seeing some mysterious-looking *pods* growing on your palm tree, relax. It's perfectly natural, and it's a sign of a robust and healthy tree. These are its flowers. I usually wait until the pod opens, like this, and then I snip it off at the base. Palm tree flowers are not ugly, but they're not particularly attractive, in my opinion. While I'm doing this, I'll also do some more trimming to the stubs left on the trunk. Oddly enough, these stubs continue to grow after the fronds are cut off.  I just take some sharp cutters and snip them off. I have left space to get to this tree between it and the wall, so I don't have to step into the garden, an...