Opa!

I love the look of bricks and terra cotta but when they get too old they don't seem to clean well so what do you do?

Break them up & expose their rich color!

Here I used bricks to make a little semicircle to contain ice grass. Cute.

Oakland Garden Tour Highlight reel part 2

I enjoy looking at people's garden "work stations"

In the first station below there's no shortage of pots, labels and dirt.

In the second, I love the elbow room and it looks ready for you to cut flowers, water, paint on some root starter, and pot a plant all with a very pretty backdrop color.

Portland flowers

Don't know what these are called (yet) but they're lovely!

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Cutting edge science of flowers

I always find it delightful to check out the wall art in the school in which I volunteer. The other day I saw this. Kinda-super-cute, huh? You have to love the little bug.

Oakland Garden Tour Highlight reel part 1

Every year in Oakland, there's a wonderful event called the Bay-Friendly Garden Tour (here's another bloggers highlights) whereupon folks grab their hats, lather up on sunscreen (if they're me) and go in the the backyards of complete strangers to admire their gardens. Over 40 gardens open up & owners are on hand kindly offering lemonade, seeds, clippings, and most importantly, garden conversation. There were too many amazing sights to cram them all into one post so the gardens I saw are going to be broken up into multiples.

In this post, I'm going to talk about the whimsical designs I admired at our first stop. The two connected backyards reminded me of the Jade Seahorse in Utila, Honduras, designed by a former Los Angeles Teacher, Neil & his wife Julia. The Seahorse is covered from top to bottom with bold colors and irreverent designs. Sigh.

Back to beautiful Oakland . . . Look at the use of colorful rocks!

The red glass rocks above look buckshot. Nice.

I drooled when I saw this beautiful blue spiral. More to come on this amazing tour later.

Columbines: too pretty to eat?

I recently learned from my friend Serena that Columbines, a pretty perennial which attract hummingbirds, are also edible! I have no idea why someone would eat these beauties. Hopefully they are delicious.

I'm relatively new to gardening & this plant was one that I was sure I'd killed since all of it's leaves withered, but they reappeared a few months ago and just a few weeks ago blooms have appeared.

Horray! I probably won't be eating my columbines..their too pretty!

Does your city have a tool lending library?

And if not why not?

For many of us there's a time in our lives when we didn't give a fig about a rototiller or a chainsaw. Before I had access to my own garden, my brain only processed my local tool lending library peripherally.

But when you want a $30-$300 piece of equipment for a day or three and don't want to pay $30-$300, the local tool lending library is just what you need. Some of these locations have more useful equipment than others. In Orem, Utah, for example, they lend out earplugs. Gross! But the great thing about libraries is they often respond to community needs so maybe with some pestering, Orem can get a chainsaw or something else a little more useful than orange vests.

States with tool lending libraries (See more details):

California
Georgia
Iowa
Kansas
Louisiana
Maryland
Michigan
Missouri
Montana
New York
Ohio
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Tennessee
Utah
Vermont
Washington

Axe pictured below courtesy of Oakland Public Library