When I shared my week of posts titled Eight months of Mondays in the garden a couple of commenters noticed just how good the Nolina hibernica 'La Siberica' looked throughout all the winter madness. That's it on the right, photo from January 17th.![]()
Faithful commenter Chavli said "In the first two collections of today's post, there is a plant that stands out for me on the right hand side. I don't know it by name, I'll describe it as grassy pineapple (with apologies...), but it seems unfazed by the catastrophic weather around it. Definitely the winner in my book." tz garden added "the grassy pineapple really looks good ALL THE TIME."
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And here it is on July 17th. I took this photo right before I left for the Fling, just to track what I was seeing, a sort of record of how bad it was looking.
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This photo dates to July 9th when I first realized the lower leaves were turning brown. I usually do a spring trim of the lower leaves, and I did, back in late May I think. Why were more browning up?
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A pulled back shot, another from the 17th, that's more trunk than I've ever seen before.
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Once home (this photo from July 24th), there was no denying the new growth was also turning brown. Not good. Not good at all.
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So what happened? Was it our extreme winter? Plants can look great after a winter storm, the damage taking months to reveal itself. Or was it something else? This plant dates back to roughly 2010 in my garden. While things have gotten a little shadier around it nothing changed drastically this summer, it's been happy for years. ![]()
The above photo from happier times, when the new growth was green.
It definitely did, until all of a sudden it didn't. To give it a moment of glory, here's what it looked like when I did the annual garden tour post last October...
There was a part of me that always feared what would happen when my plant grew as large as this one in the McMenamins Kennedy School gardens (in the back on the left). I guess that's not going to be a problem.
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So, onward. What is a garden if not constant change? I'm very sad to lose my oldest, largest Nolina hibernica 'La Siberica', but also scheming on what to do with a fairly large (by my garden standards) chunk of real estate...
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