121014 - Pineapple Salvai

One of Phil's friends gave us this pineapple salvia, which we'll plant with the purple Mexican salvia in the spring.

100711 - Terraces

Yesterday, I took a few hundred photographs of the terraces before cleaning up the beds and seeding cosmos for late summer through winter.

090622 - Sweet Peas

Here are several photographs of sweet peas I took yesterday evening after watering the gardens.

It has been a nice June so far, a little windy in the evenings, but warm and sunny most days.

Most of these sweet peas came from one packet of winter sweet peas, my favorites the white ones with purple tips.

08 September - White-and-Pink Lupine

Phil and I planted this lupine in early summer and were happy when it bloomed out of season.

It is the only one without purple flowers this year. Our red one promptly died when I relocated it from a shady spot at the top, right of the gardens down to the side garden.

This lupine's flower stalk reached almost two feet before going to seed. I plan on harvesting the seeds and growing more lupines this color next spring.

080626 - Magenta Dahlia

We relocated this magenta dinner-plate dahlia late last fall, after it and a yellow dinner-plate dahlia had grown into each other.

This dahlia is the first to bloom this year. Yes, its flowers are as large as a dinner plate.

The Mexican salvia rapidly went into bloom the last few weeks, while the lupines, foxglove, hollyhocks and white Pacific Giant delphinium have been stunning for several months now.

080428 - Gardens

I took several photographs of the gardens today to show how much they've changed in just a month or so.

In the winter, when it rains every day, I find it hard to believe the muddy beds will give way to such beauty.

07 Summer - Upper Terraces

These are two photographs from early summer, 2007, when the poppies to the right of the staircase were putting on a show.

The sky-blue sweet peas climbing the fence at the top of the hill were amazing, too.

06 Later Winter - Mexican Salvia

In San Francisco, I've discovered nothing attracts hummingbirds more than Mexican salvia.

People tell me Anna's hummingbirds like hollyhocks, jasmine, lemon blossoms, etc., but they will take up permanent residence in your gardens if you have Mexican salvia.

Two small patches were here when we moved into this house. Both have thrived with nothing more than regular watering and occasional fertilizing. (I use an orchid fertilizer 20 10 20 - one scoop per gallon - throughout the gardens.)

I've just mastered features on my camera that enable me to photograph the hummingbirds, who bathe on nasturtium leaves hanging over the waterfall, dive-bomb interlopers, and zoom around Phil and me in the gardens.

Mexican salvia is very easy to grow. A deleafed stick, long thought dead and used as a marker for a newly planted ranunculus, was discovered growing leaves and roots after a few weeks.

Stay tuned for photographs of the hummingbirds.

07 Late Winter - Top of the Hill Built At Last

Here is how the top of the hill looked after we finished building the terraces to the right of the staircase and across the top of the backyard. You can see they were constructed with boards, rebar and fence posts.

We spent a very long day hauling buckets of dirt up the hill to create the trail I'm standing on to take the photograph, and to create the little space in the distance, which is a nice place to sit and relax in the garden and gaze out at the Pacific Ocean on a non-foggy San Francisco day.

To make sure all the dirt didn't settle during our winter rainy season, we jumped up and down on it for quite some time - long enough, in fact, for a curious neighbor to ask what we were up to.

In this photograph, you can see pink ladies (amaryllis) and Mexican salvia, both of which were flourishing in the backyard long before we moved into the house.

To create the trail in the foreground, we had to dig up and move several pink lady bulbs, which were larger than your hands clasped together in prayer. The bulbs didn't like being disturbed, so we had very few flowers in the summer, 2007.