Back Garden Tour 2022, Chapter 1

We begin this year's tour of the back garden in the driveway, where instead of sharing a container garden like I usually do, we get scaffolding and a siding project. The cedar shingles on the upper side of the house were original (1948) and in need of replacement. The job was too small for a professional to take on (we tried!), so Andrew did it himself. Pretty darn impressive I thought, especially because it involved moving two soil-filled stock tanks and that humongous agave.

Just like the front garden tour, these photos were all taken on the same day in mid-September. Rather than try to put together a "best of" collection with lots of perfectly lit photos, I'm going with "a day in the life" style of reporting. Let's head into the back garden...

Oh! But first, I am very happy with how this Agave americana, 'Mediopicta Alba' has worked in my Point Pot. I hope it gets some size to it—even though that means I might have to break the pot to get it out eventually.

The entrance to the back garden continues to become more and more jungly. Or if you're my 6ft 2in husband, it continues to become less friendly—he doesn't like plants touching him.

Shifting our eyes to the right and the back of the house.

Passiflora 'Snow Queen' growing on the trellis.

Agave 'Cornelius' in the table planter. Yes there's a little soil in the rectangular tube, and no I don't know what this metal piece really is. I bought it at Portland's Rebuilding Center.

The view expands a bit...

And a bit more...

Looking west, our patio in the distance—at a lower level, just under 2-ft lower than the upper garden.

The orange wall comes into view! Looking northwest now, the entrance to the garden is directly behind us...

Orange accents help to pull the orange wall out into the garden.

The shrub with the bursts of yellow is Podocarpus macrophyllus 'Miu' / Roman Candle™ Podocarpus from the Sunset Plant Collection, I brought it home in 2018. To it's left is a Nolina hibernica 'La Siberica'—yes they are too close together. We'll see how I handle that.

I replanted this area this spring, but I don't think I ever wrote about it—a mix of ferns and rhododendrons: Rhododendron pseudochrysanthum, Rhododendron williamsianum, Epimedium 'Spine Tingler', Pyrrosia lingua 'Eboshi', etc... all too close together but hey, that's how I roll.

Ficus tikoua

Turning to look east, across the small upper lawn towards the back of the house.

And looking southwest towards the shade pavilion. Instead of focusing on the pavilion and ground level I angled the camera up to catch just how big Clifford—the big leaf magnolia, Magnolia macrophylla—is these days. That's a lot of leaves I'll be picking up in just a few weeks.

Here's the normal shot at ground level.

And focused on the trio of dish-planters.

You pass by this palm, a Trachycarpus wagnerianus, on your way into the back garden. However, since the patio and everything else is opening up in front of you, you don't really notice the plants on the trunk until you're in the back garden and you turn back to appreciate them.

I featured this Fascicularia bicolor bloom much further along in my October Bloomday post (here), but back when I took the tour photos it was just getting started.

Stagorn ferns hanging nearby, in the Albizia julibrissin 'Summer Chocolate'—which by the way was trimmed back pretty significantly early this spring and thus has been a much better garden team member this summer.

I love watching the orange wall and how it's changing as the light changes with the seasons. I am so very glad I painted it!

So the orange wall is the neighbor's garage, the north boundary to our upper back garden. This is our garage, the south boundary. No I didn't intentionally plant shrubs on only one side. There was a Schefflera taiwaniana on the west side that died a couple of years ago and I never got around to replacing it, instead dropping bromeliads into the space for the summer.